Innholdsfortegnelse for February 27, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

T. H. BREEN is the author of The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America, published last September. MICHAEL GORRA’s books include Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, which will be published later this year. He teaches at Smith. ROBERT G. KAISER is a former Managing Editor and Associate Editor at The Washington Post, for which he reported from Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and Washington. His most recent book is Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t. ANDREW KATZENSTEIN is on the editorial staff of The New York Review. NICHOLAS LEMANN is a Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and a staff writer at The New…

Two women are bound at the waist, tied to each other. One is a slim, white woman, in antebellum underskirt and corset. A Scarlett O’Hara type. She is having the air squeezed out of her by a larger, bare-breasted black woman, who wears a kerchief around her head. To an American audience, I imagine, this black woman could easily read as “Mammy.” To a viewer from the wider diaspora—to a black Briton, say—she is perhaps less likely to invoke the stereotypical placidity of “Mammy,” hewing closer to the fury of her mythological opposite, the legendary Nanny of the Maroons: escaped slave, leader of peoples. Her hand is held up forcefully, indicating the direction in which she is determined to go, but the rope between her and the white woman is…

The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel by Marie NDiaye, translated from the French by Jordan Stump. Knopf, 290 pp., $26.95 Marie NDiaye is so intelligent, so composed, so good, that any description of her work feels like an understatement. “Stop reading this review, just read her books!” you want to say. For several weeks now I’ve been carrying around NDiaye’s novels, telling friends to pick up her work. “She’s the smartest writer working today!” I say. Or else: “She’s going to win the Nobel Prize!” Reading her books, you see a voracious, condensed history of much of twentieth-century literature. Here is an “I” reminiscent of what is often called autofiction, cool and probing; here is an interest in every tick of a woman’s mind that recalls the miniatures of French writers…

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson. Simon and Schuster, 544 pp., $30.00; $18.00 (paper) The Powers That Be by David Halberstam. University of Illinois Press, 771 pp., $25.95 (paper) Justice in Plain Sight: How a Small-Town Newspaper and Its Unlikely Lawyer Opened America’s Courtrooms by Dan Bernstein. University of Nebraska Press, 256 pp., $29.95 The Life of Kings: The Baltimore Sun and the Golden Age of the American Newspaper edited by Frederic B. Hill and Stephens Broening. Rowman and Littlefield, 299 pp., $42.00; $24.00 (paper) The Return of the Moguls: How Jeff Bezos and John Henry Are Remaking Newspapers for the Twenty-First Century by Dan Kennedy. ForeEdge, 281 pp., $29.95 Why Journalism Still Matters by Michael Schudson. Polity, 213 pp., $69.95;…

In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon. Archipelago, 171 pp., $16.00 (paper) Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Jeffrey Sacks. Archipelago, 197 pp., $18.00 (paper) Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic and with an introduction by Ibrahim Muhawi and with a foreword by Sinan Antoon. University of California Press, 182 pp., $29.95 (paper) Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation by Khaled Mattawa. Syracuse University Press, 196 pp., $24.95…

What kind of spectacle is the impeachment trial before the Senate of Donald J. Trump? In its opening days, the audience was given two wildly different but equally bathetic prompts as to how we should see it. We were invited by two central figures to understand it, on the one hand, as a proceeding of exquisite gravity and, on the other, as a bad TV show. For its presiding officer, Chief Justice John Roberts, the trial ought to be imagined as an earnest weighing up of truth and lies by a most august assembly. Near the end of the first long day’s session, he admonished Trump’s prosecutors and defenders “to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body.” To give them a sense of the standards that used…

MANGO PUBLISHING GROUP info@mango.bz; (305) 428-2299 WRITING OURSELVES WHOLE Using the Power of Your Own Creativity to Recover and Heal from Sexual Trauma by Jen Cross A rape occurs every 98 seconds. This book provides a unique tool for survivors and others in the healing process. Transformative writing. 9781633536197 • Paper 9781633536203 • eBook, $16.95 265 Pages • Self-Help/Abuse/ Self-Esteem Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble Author’s website: www.writingourselveswhole.org FRIESENPRESS www.friesenpress.com; (888) 378-6793 ARCADE OF MEMORY by Howard Giskin “Howard Giskin’s bountiful collection Arcade of Memory gathers essays, poems, and short stories around timeless themes…. Arcade of Memory is an in-depth literary collection in which beautiful places and thoughtful personalities, past and present, are engaged.”—Mari Carlson, 5/5 Stars, Foreword Clarion Review 9781525546372 • Paper, $19.99 240 Pages • Poetry…

A fox-terrier and a spaniel were fighting over a steakbone. Merciful heavens, they went for each other with teeth, claws, shoves, barks and kicks. “Get away from my bone!” “This bone belongs to me!” “Mongrel!” “Flotsam!” “I’ll throttle you with your own tail!” “I’ll throw you to the cats!” “Oaf!” “Fleaface!” “Lickspittle!” “Perpetrator!” It was a fearful spectacle, for both dogs were bleeding out of a dozen wounds. Considering this opportunity, a young hawk, inexperienced in the sad ways of the world, came down from a tree in order to pick up the bone for himself. The dogs stopped fighting at once. “Who’s this?” rasped the spaniel. “A foreigner!” the fox-terrier howled. “Brother dogs, unite!” And both dogs flung themselves on the bird. The hawk was lucky he escaped alive…

The evening trains went hooting bythe factories and the fields of wheat.Harmonicas would lilt and sighsongs such as Путь далек лежит in the year of nineteen-forty-five,in that year of first cigarettes,when farms without a soul alivegave hope—like red sunsets. The evening trains made their way fastto Prague and to new dizziness.The weekend gone, I jumped a carriage and left, the landscape rolling past.Along the line of that expressyouth fell away—a head of cabbage. (translated from the Czech by Justin Quinn)…

The question arises at this point, why are there so many black sheep in journalism? Why so many “fakes”? Why is the epidemic of “yellow journalism” so prevalent? This phrase is applied to newspapers which delight in sensations, crime, scandal, smut, funny pictures, caricatures and malicious or frivolous gossip about persons and things of no public concern. This was Horace White, one of American journalism’s most esteemed elder statesmen, writing in 1904. He continued: When I entered journalism, the press of the country, with only one exception that I can now recall, was clean, dignified and sober minded. It had various aims in life, aims political, literary, scientific, social, religious, reformatory and mixed, which were deemed by the conductors of the papers advantageous to the commonweal. To make money by…