Innholdsfortegnelse for February 13, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

Félix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, June 30–September 29, 2019; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 29, 2019–January 26, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition by Dita Amory, Ann Dumas, Patrick McGuinness, Belinda Thomson, Philippe Büttner, Katia Poletti, and Christian Rümelin. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 182 pp., $45.00 (distributed in the US by Artbook/D.A.P.) Félix Vallotton was talked about as a highly individual, even anomalous, figure already in the 1890s, when he was in his late twenties and early thirties—and when his work was actually most aligned with that of his contemporaries—and the sense that he is an unclassifiable artist has remained to this day. He is probably best known for being part of a group of artists…

In October 1922 Conservative members of Parliament voted to fight the next election as a separate party, calling time on their coalition with the Liberals, with whom they had governed Britain since 1915. David Lloyd George resigned immediately as prime minister, never to hold office again. Over the next twenty-four months, there were three general elections, four governments, and four prime ministers. So the recent turbulence of British politics, with its three elections and three prime ministers since May 2015, wasn’t unprecedented. In October 1924 the Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin swept away the first-ever Labour government in a landslide, and in December 2019 the Conservatives under Boris Johnson likewise routed the Labour Party. Baldwin was educated at Harrow and Cambridge and was at one time president of the Classical Association;…

1. The assassination of Qassim Suleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards’ expeditionary unit, the Quds Force, on January 3 has left almost everyone, at home and abroad, confused about President Trump’s policy toward Iran. On December 27, rocket fire at an Iraqi base near Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, killed a US contractor. There had been a rash of such attacks at bases across the country. Shortly afterward, the administration announced that Kataeb Hezbollah (KH), one of the largely Shia militias that form part of Iraq’s military infrastructure, was responsible for the attack. No evidence for this assessment has been publicly disclosed, although it is not inherently implausible. US aircraft subsequently bombed five KH installations, killing twenty-five fighters in what a Pentagon spokesman called “precision defensive strikes.” Predictably, Iraqis objected…

A paradox of American presidential elections—especially during the primaries—is that unless a war is looming or underway, voters pay little attention to the arena in which a president has the greatest power to affect their lives. On taxes, education, health care, and all the other domestic issues for which candidates put forward detailed plans, what a president wants will have to be exhaustively negotiated with Congress. On foreign policy, his or her freedom of action is vastly greater. Foreign policy, too, unlike domestic issues, frequently entails surprises—the collapse of the Soviet Union, say—that demand a swift response in unexpected conditions. In their own interest, then, voters ought to want to know what a candidate’s instincts about foreign policy are—what she or he makes of recent history, of global trends, of…

Signature Wounds: The Untold Story of the Military’s Mental Health Crisis by David Kieran. New York University Press, 403 pp., $35.00 Almost every major war brings the introduction of a terrifying new weapon. During the US Civil War, Union and Confederate troops employed a revolutionary bullet—known as the Minié ball after its creator, the French army captain Claude-Étienne Minié—that spun from the gun barrel, dramatically increasing its velocity, accuracy, and lethality. World War I saw submarines, poison gas, and nonstop artillery barrages. World War II introduced indiscriminate air as saults, kamikaze attacks, and, of course, the atomic bomb. The Vietnam War brought the helicopter gunship, napalm, and chemical defoliants. With these weapons came an ever-expanding vocabulary to depict their hellish consequences, from shell shock to radiation poisoning to Agent Orange…

The World of the Crusades: An Illustrated History by Christopher Tyerman. Yale University Press, 517 pp., $35.00 Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands by Dan Jones. Viking, 425 pp., $30.00 The Accursed Tower: The Fall of Acre and the End of the Crusades by Roger Crowley. Basic Books, 254 pp., $28.00 There are certain historical subjects—Mary Queen of Scots, Napoleon, the American Civil War, and the downfall of Hitler among them—that have attracted such a mass of writing and rewriting that they have acquired a gravitational pull and, rather than discouraging other historians from producing more books on these wellworn subjects, attract yet more retellings. The Crusades is another one. The story started to be told, shaped, and reshaped almost as soon as it had…

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 282 pp., $27.00 What is a museum guard to do, I thought to myself; what, really, is a museum guard? On the one hand you are a member of a security force charged with protecting priceless materials from the crazed or kids or the slow erosive force of camera flashes; on the other hand you are a dweller among supposed triumphs of the spirit and if your position has any prestige it derives precisely from the belief that such triumphs could legitimately move a man to tears. If people were in fact moved, convincing themselves they discovered whatever they projected into the hackneyed poem, or better yet, if people felt the pressure to perform absorption in the face of what…

An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden by Mary Schmidt Campbell. Oxford University Press, 443 pp., $34.95 The Romare Bearden Reader edited by Robert G. O’Meally. Duke University Press, 413 pp., $29.95 (paper) Every year, Congressman John Lewis has made a pilgrimage to honor the anniversary of the campaign to march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery. The journey began on Sunday, March 7, 1965, when Lewis, then twenty-five years old and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was severely beaten and nearly killed by state troopers as he led six hundred peaceful protesters in a march that started at a church in Selma and was forcibly intercepted by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named after the Confederate general and grand…