Innholdsfortegnelse for March 26, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

ANNE APPLEBAUM is a staff writer for The Atlantic. Her new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, will be published in July. FARA DABHOIWALA, the author of The Origins of Sex, teaches at Princeton and is writing a global history of free speech. MERVE EMRE is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College. Her latest book is The Ferrante Letters: An Exercise in Collective Criticism. HELEN EPSTEIN is Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard. She is the author of Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror and The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa. ELISA GABBERT is the author of three books of poetry. Her latest book…

Abroad again. Even the houses are dancing.In all the uncertainties of AmsterdamI reread old diaries to remember who I am:there’s Happy Donut—none of your usual morose donuts here!—and songs with the names of towns in themand wicked, wicked Caroline.Is any place better without a lover? At leastsome make you want to learn, not do: the rainbeating on the skylight like Paul Klee’s Timpanist, the soundof a Van Gogh painting, a nap outsidebeneath medieval walls—none of it a “force of nature.”Learning not doing is a form of forgetting.The Berkeley conference on trace elementshas explained this easily detectable weight loss to our complete satisfaction;on the ocean you can learn the rest of the stars, all the way to the horizon.This guy in Zagreb knows forty languages but he’s crazy.…

Once as a kid, I was so bored at my parents’ office that I made a deck of cards. How bored are dogs? Pretty bored, I think. I wonder what would bore a tortoise. I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring. It’s almost like there should be different words for “boring because simple” and “boring because complex.” You can call this banality versus tedium, or “bad boring” versus “good boring.” Kubrick movies are often great while also boring. Whether something is boring or not has nothing to do with how good it is. You could also call “boring because complex” interesting-boring (boring in an interesting way) or slow-interesting (interesting, but at a pace that sometimes resembles boredom). To state the obvious, all good poetry is slow-interesting. I often…

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. Princeton University Press, 312 pp., $27.95 We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America by Jennifer M. Silva. Oxford University Press, 206 pp., $24.95 The United States is in the throes of a colossal health crisis. In 2015 life expectancy began falling for the first time since the height of the AIDS crisis in 1993. The causes—mainly suicides, alcohol-related deaths, and drug overdoses—claim roughly 190,000 lives each year. The casualties are concentrated in the rusted-out factory towns and depressed rural areas left behind by globalization, automation, and downsizing, but as the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton demonstrate in their new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, they are also…

Creating the Universe: Depictions of the Cosmos in Himalayan Buddhism by Eric Huntington. University of Washington Press, 283 pp., $65.00 Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, April 27–August 18, 2019; and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, January 17–April 19, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition by John Henry Rice and Jeffrey S. Durham. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 244 pp., $45.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Once there was a woman who lived inside a rock. She had a husband, a desiccated, barren yogi, who also inhabited the rock and spent his days and nights in meditation, striving for liberation from earthly existence; he never touched his wife, whom he had created out of his own imagination. The…

Beethoven’s Conversation Books, Volume 1: Nos. 1 to 8 (February 1818 to March 1820) translated from the German and edited by Theodore Albrecht. Boydell, 384 pp., $80.00 Beethoven’s Conversation Books, Volume 2: Nos. 9 to 16 (March 1820 to September 1820) translated from the German and edited by Theodore Albrecht. Boydell, 411 pp., $80.00 “Live only in your art, for you are so limited in your senses. This is nevertheless the only existence for you.” When Beethoven wrote this diary entry in 1816, he had been growing increasingly deaf for about eighteen years. This means that roughly from the time of his early string quartets and piano sonatas, through the major works of his middle years and into the opening stages of his last period, he had been struggling with…

In early January, as Democratic voters began to focus more intently on the approaching primary season, New York magazine published a profile of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.1 The writer, David Freedlander, spoke with her about the divisions within the Democratic Party, and asked what sort of role she envisioned for herself in a possible Joe Biden presidency. “Oh, God,” Ocasio-Cortez replied (“with a groan,” Freedlander noted). “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.” This was in some respects an impolitic, even impolite, thing for the first-term politician to say. AOC, a democratic socialist, had endorsed Bernie Sanders the previous October, so it was no secret where her loyalties lay. Still, Biden was at that point the clear front-runner…

PENIEL E. J OSEPH THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. “The Sword and the Shield is a landmark. It is what happens when one of America’s greatest historians of African America shines the same light on two of African America’s greatest historical figures.” —IBRAM X. KENDI, author of How to Be an Antiracist “The Sword and the Shield is a masterwork of bold historical revisionism that will change how we think of the dynamic relationship between Harlem’s Hero Malcolm X, and America’s Apostle Martin Luther King, Jr…. Joseph brilliantly illuminates the defining personalities at the heart of the black freedom struggle.” —MICHAEL ERIC DYSON, author of Jay-Z: Made in America basicbooks.com…

Five Hundred Years of Women’s Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection an exhibition at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, February 28–June 15, 2019; and the Grolier Club, New York City, December 11, 2019–February 8, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Naomi L. Nelson, Lauren Reno, and Lisa Unger Baskin. Grolier Club/David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 159 pp., $60.00 One of the most celebrated attractions at Philadelphia’s 1876 Centennial International Exhibition was the installation of Great Plains and Rocky Mountain wildlife in the Kansas-Colorado Building. Stereoscopic souvenir cards show a faux mountainside crammed like a Victorian what-not shelf with deer, goats, polecats, and raptors. A cougar is suspended mid-leap over the mouth of a cave, where a lady…

Intimate Ties: Two Novellas by Robert Musil, translated from the German and with an afterword by Peter Wortsman. Archipelago, 207 pp., $16.00 (paper) Agathe, or, The Forgotten Sister by Robert Musil, translated from the German and with an introduction by Joel Agee. New York Review Books, 362 pp., $17.95 (paper) If you like difficult amusements and find yourself with a month or two to spare, I would urge you to try (if you haven’t yet read it) The Man Without Qualities by the Austrian writer Robert Musil (1880–1942). Yes, it’s unfinished (“inherently endless,” as Max Brod said of Kafka’s Amerika), and in its published and translated form takes up the thick end of 1,800 pages, by the end of which its knots have started fraying into experimental variants and the…

Voices from the Chinese Century: Public Intellectual Debate from Contemporary China edited by Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel. Columbia University Press, 388 pp., $90.00; $30.00 (paper) Rethinking China’s Rise: A Liberal Critique by Xu Jilin, translated from the Chinese and edited by David Ownby. Cambridge University Press, 218 pp., $99.99 Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals by Sebastian Veg. Columbia University Press, 352 pp., $65.00 Ever since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Chinese people have sought to give voice to how they would like their country to be run. In 1956, Mao Zedong announced a brief flourishing of free speech called the “Hundred Flowers Campaign,” referring to a vibrant era in antiquity that gave rise to Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, and other ideas that…

It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump Into Office by Dale Beran. All Points, 279 pp., $28.99 Sometime in the autumn of 2006, a friend sent me screenshots of a chat-room in Habbo Hotel, a social network for teenagers. Someone had flooded the space with avatars of identical black men with Afros in suits and ties. In one picture, the men were blocking the entrance to a swimming pool, stopping other users from coming in. In another they’d arranged themselves in the shape of a swastika. My friend, an activist, thought this was sinister, particularly since it was happening in a space aimed at young people. Habbo Hotel looked pretty slick for the Internet of 2006, with public spaces like nightclubs and coffeeshops…

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: Herself Alone by Charles Moore. Knopf, 1,006 pp., $40.00 When Sir Geoffrey Howe got up to deliver his resignation statement in the House of Commons on Tuesday, November 13, 1990, the room felt expectant—in the words of Charles Moore in Margaret Thatcher: Herself Alone, “like a theatre audience before a new show.” Howe had been a senior member of Prime Minister Thatcher’s cabinet since the beginning of her term in office, most recently as British foreign secretary. But he had had enough. A few days earlier, he had told Thatcher he would quit, news that surprised but did not initially distress her. Howe was considered loyal but boring by Thatcher’s inner circle, a safe pair of hands; the Labour politician Denis Healey once said an…

“I want words meat-hooked from the living steer”—Robert Lowell Recumbent on the king bed where you gaffedmixed figures—literary lion (or sphinx)as odalisque!—you handed me a draftof your new poem, on Circe and Ulysses(her avatar was downstairs mixing drinks),and fixed me with your understanding glare,a curious big cat’s, mane of gray haira wild halo framing the black-rimmed glasses you’ll wear in the New York taxi, dubiousto be sure but thinking perhaps to close,by any bloody hook or crook, your hero’scircle (taxi: task and tax, done and paid),thinking to lie down in the bed you’d made,thinking no man is Odysseus.…

Feel Freeby Nick Laird. Norton, 77 pp., $15.95 (paper) O Positive by Joe Dunthorne. London: Faber and Faber, 54 pp., £10.99 (paper) When I ask myself what makes poetry from the UK sometimes especially satisfying—a high-performance machine running on all cylinders—the answer has to do with the greater variety and texture of the vocabulary, the economy of its soundscapes, the material pleasure in the language. But it’s more than that. Pleasure in the language, yes, but not just its musicality. Rather, there is a heightened awareness of what Pound called “the dance of the intellect among words” and what Auden called a poem’s “verbal contraption”: rhetorical gambits, angles of attack, the games that metaphors and counterfactuals permit. Perhaps this variety arises from a culture in which verbal exchange signals so…