Innholdsfortegnelse for March 12, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

PAULA BOHINCE is the author of three books of poems, most recently Swallows and Waves. She is the 2020 John Montague International Poetry Fellow at University College Cork. CHRISTIAN CARYL is an editor at the Opinions section of The Washington Post and the author of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the Twenty-First Century. JAMES FENTON is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 until 1999, he was Oxford Professor of Poetry; in 2015 he was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize. He is the author of School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts and, most recently, Yellow Tulips: Poems, 1968–2011. TIM FLANNERY’s Europe: A Natural History was published last year. RUTH FRANKLIN’s most recent book, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, won the 2016 National…

Maoism: A Global History by Julia Lovell. Knopf, 610 pp., $37.50 China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong by Jude Blanchette. Oxford University Press, 206 pp., $27.95 On a blistering Saturday last summer, I made my way to Shanghai’s western waterfront, where an extravagant new cultural corridor has been rising in recent years. My first stop was the cavernous Long Museum West Bund, which was opened in 2014 by Liu Yiqian, one of China’s most ambitious billionaire art collectors. Featured on the ground floor of the hulking concrete structure was a lively exhibition of mixed-media work by the African-American artist Mark Bradford, titled “Los Angeles.” But my attention was drawn to another show, in the museum’s underground galleries, whose poster featured an unfamiliar,…

Ten hours of continuousness, the audiopromises, looped by a strangerwho’s enhanced the thunder, embedded tricklesfrom pine needles as from syringes, assembled clouds, vast and digital,to perform his soundtrack, so that a million amygdalaecan relax together, the frazzled city centersresetting to Homo sapiens smoothness and the far-flung, isolated bedroomsbegin filling with rain in the REM stage, and the deltawaves resemble the ones at seaafter catastrophe, a civilization’s treasures floatingunencumbered: an Apollonian vase’s athletesubmerged, the landscapesand self-portraits jostling like rafts over falls, the chiaroscuro and sfumato, impastopassages tumbling through foam. This is the brainon benzos and earphones, frictionlessand plugged in, miraculously, to the sea floor’s fiber optics, those tubes sometimestouched in the gloomy gelatin bya sucker, then withdrawn, of one who cradlesitself to sleep in all of its arms.…

HITLER’S FIRST HUNDRED DAYS When Germans Embraced the Third Reich “Hitler’s First Hundred Days, a thoroughly researched and elegantly written book, is a must for understanding how a majority of Germans adapted to the new regime, even cheered it, merely a few months after Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship. A stark reminder of the blandishments of power.”—SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER, author of Nazi Germany and the Jews “Not all 100 days are the same. This riveting and troubling portrait of political and social depredation by a master historian of the Third Reich underscores liberal democratic frailty in the face of fierce determined attack. As such, it implicitly offers readers a clarion call to take incipient and assertive authoritarianism seriously lest they create an ugly new normal.”—IRA KATZNELSON, author of Fear Itself: The…

The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 7, 2019–January 5, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Pierre Terjanian. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 340 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) The Renaissance of Etching an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 23, 2019–January 20, 2020; and the Albertina Museum, Vienna, February 12–May 10, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition by Catherine Jenkins, Nadine M. Orenstein, Freyda Spira, and others. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 308 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) For the German artists of the Renaissance, armor and weaponry held an extraordinary allure. One thinks of the great care lavished on armor in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Knight,…

Inland by Téa Obreht. Random House, 374 pp., $27.00 A reviewer should know better than to give away the ending of a book, but what about the beginning? In Téa Obreht’s Western-themed novel, Inland, the beginning appears to be a monologue delivered from one comrade-in-adventures to another—and in a sense, it is. The person who is speaking and his pal have just been in a scrape with some riders at a fording place. “True to form—blind though you are, and with that shot still irretrievable in your thigh—you made to stand and meet them,” the speaker says. Soon we learn that the speaker is an outlaw of Balkan and Muslim origins (a first in Westerns, I believe) called Lurie Mattie, a name he acquired in Arkansas. Not until about a…

1. Adjunct, a novel by Geoff Cebula, is a love letter to academia, a self-help book, a learned disquisition on an obscure genre of Italian film, and a surprisingly affecting satire-cum-horror-comedy. In other words, exactly the kind of strange, unlucrative, interdisciplinary work that university presses, if they take any risks at all, should exist to print. Given the parlous state of academic publishing—with Stanford University Press nearly shutting down and all but a few presses ordered to turn profits or else—it should perhaps come as no surprise that one of the best recent books on the contemporary university was instead self-published on Amazon. Cebula, a scholar of Slavic literature who finished his Ph.D. in 2016 and then taught in a variety of contingent positions, learned his lesson. Adjunct became the…

Since Elizabeth Warren’s formal announcement of her candidacy on February 19, 2019, the narrative about her has had little to do with her actual qualifications. From initially low poll numbers, she rode a brief upswing in October to the top of some national polls, immediately drawing a backlash, in part over concerns that her Medicare for All plan was too far to the left. After the debate on January 14, 2020, when Bernie Sanders denied having told her, at a private meeting in 2018, that he did not believe a woman could be elected, it was clear that the issue of “electability” swamped all else. To anybody paying attention, however, that issue has been central since the beginning. In Warren’s rhetoric, in the media, and in voters’ reactions to her,…

The Kairos Novels: The Wrinkle in Time and Polly O’Keefe Quartetsby Madeleine L’Engle, edited by Leonard S. Marcus. Library of America, 2 volumes, 1,899 pp., $80.00 Penguins and Golden Calves:Icons and Idols in Antarctica and Other Unexpected Placesby Madeleine L’Engle, with a foreword by Charlotte Jones Voiklis. Convergent, 252 pp., $15.00 (paper) The Rock That Is Higher:Story as Truthby Madeleine L’Engle, with a foreword by Sarah Bessey. Convergent, 311 pp., $15.00 (paper) Madeleine L’Engle, a fixture in the lives of generations of American children and teenagers as the author of the classic novel A Wrinkle in Time, looked back on the 1950s as her “decade of failure.” After finding critical success in the 1940s with fiction for both young readers and adults, she had a run of persistent bad luck. One…

Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Theatre, Politics, Life by Joseph Farrell. Slingsby: Methuen, 474 pp., £25.00 A biography of Dario Fo and his wife, Franca Rame, is inevitably a history of Italy in their lifetimes and particularly in the decades from 1950 to 1990, when their careers as playwrights, actors, and political activists were at their peak. Play by play, show by show, Fo engaged in fierce polemics with more or less every aspect of Italian society. His work, as Joseph Farrell observes in Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Theatre, Politics, Life, contains none of the intimacy, intellectual cogitation, or existential angst that one finds in so many artists of the twentieth century. Nor can his excellent biographer find much of it in the life. All Fo’s energies were invested…

WHEN DID RECONSTRUCTION END? To the Editors: I read with interest James Oakes’s review “An Unfinished Revolution” [NYR, December 5, 2019]. I noticed a minor factual error that appears so often in the literature that I thought it worth correcting. Oakes writes, “Upon taking office, Hayes ordered the removal of the last federal troops from the Southern states.” President Hayes did not order the removal of federal troops from Southern states. Rather he ordered the troops occupying the statehouses in South Carolina to return to their barracks. Troops remained in Southern states for years after Hayes took office. For example, the online dataset “Mapping Occupation: Force, Freedom and the Army in Reconstruction” (mappingoccupation.org) lists 150 army troops stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, in March 1879, two years after Hayes took…