Innholdsfortegnelse for April 9, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

Traces of J.B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. University of Virginia Press, 311 pp., $39.50 The pioneering American cultural geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909–1996) learned to analyze landscapes not at Harvard, where he lectured, or in New Mexico, where he lived and ranched, but in the war-shattered countryside of Germany’s Hurtgen Forest during the Allied push eastward after the D-Day landings in 1944. German resistance had halted the American advance in the forest, and Jackson, attached to the Ninth Infantry Division as a combat intelligence officer, spent a cold and uncomfortable winter there. With time on his hands, he set about creating a most unusual library. During the day he moved between ruined buildings, searching the wreckage for regional guidebooks, picture…

Intelligence for Dummies: Essays and Other Collected Writings by Glenn O’Brien. ZE Books, 336 pp., $35.00 Glenn O’Brien was the leading boulevardier of my particular sub-generational pocket, the one that thrived in lower Manhattan from the last days of the hippie era until sometime around the end of the 1990s. He was an exemplary if atypical citizen of its culture, and something of a figurehead as it evolved from local, fringe, and “underground” to international high fashion. He lived and worked on the leading edge of style at all times, and was invariably at the right club at the right hour on the right night, but his resume suggests someone from an earlier era. As if he had flourished during the Regency or the fin de siecle, he was a…

We Stand Divided: The Rift Between American Jews and Israel by Daniel Gordis. Ecco, 293 pp., $26.99 Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance by Amy Kaplan. Harvard University Press, 352 pp., $29.95 At the start of the last decade, Peter Beinart issued in these pages an anguished call to save liberal Zionism in the United States.* Young American Jews committed to human rights and averse to military power were growing alienated from Israel, which rules over millions of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank while populating the territory with Jewish settlements. As Beinart put it, “For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their…

Declarations of intent to run for the US presidency have a special kind of cartography. Everything is oriented toward Washington, as it was toward Jerusalem in the old maps. But the optics should place the candidate at a spiritual distance from the capital: in a boyhood home in Kansas (Dwight Eisenhower), in a snowstorm in Minnesota (Amy Klobuchar), or in one’s own tower in New York City (Donald Trump). Yet on April 30, 2015, an improbable candidate for the Democratic nomination made his announcement from an open patch of ground just a few dozen yards from the Capitol building, whose imposing classical portico partly framed the TV footage of his press conference. The patch is actually known as the Senate Swamp or, as the official press gallery website has it,…

The Fallen by Carlos Manuel Alvarez, translated from the Spanish by Frank Wynne. Graywolf, 143 pp., $16.00 (paper) Turcos en la niebla [The Disoriented Ones] by Enrique Del Risco. Madrid: Alianza, 451 pp., $29.99 (paper) I read the books Armando gave me, the book of stories about Che Guevara that tells how Che refused the gift of a bicycle for his daughter, because bicycles belong to the State, to the People, not to any particular individual. I asked Armando why, if bicycles were for everyone and not for individuals, they made bicycles for individuals to ride? Why didn’t they make a gigantic bicycle that we could all get on and pedal together, millions of pedals moving at the same time, all riding in the same direction? —Carlos Manuel Alvarez, The…

There is a box in my apartment labeled “Old Not Good Photos.” This is an understatement. Most of the photos are two-and-a-half-inch squares, showing little blurred black-and-white images, taken from too far away of people whose features you can barely make out, standing or sitting alone or in groups, against backgrounds of gray uninterestingness. They are like the barely flickering dreams that dissipate as we awaken, rather than the self-important ones that follow us into the day and seem to be crying out for interpretation. However, as psychoanalysis has taught us, it is the least prepossessing dreams, disguised as such to put us off the scent, that sometimes bear the most important messages from inner life. So too, some of the drab little photographs, if stared at long enough, begin…

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. PublicAffairs, 691 pp., $38.00 In the 1970s, when Shoshana Zuboff was a graduate student in Harvard’s psychology department, she met the behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. Skinner, who had perhaps the largest forehead you’ll ever see on an adult, is best remembered for putting pigeons in boxes (so-called Skinner boxes) and inducing them to peck at buttons for rewards. Less well remembered is the fact that he constructed a larger box, with a glass window, for his infant daughter, though this was revealing of his broader ambitions. Zuboff writes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that her conversations with Skinner “left me with an indelible sense of fascination with a…

Watchmen a television series created by Damon Lindelof Eyes stare from the screen; we zoom out from stained-glass windows shaped like eyes. A superhero tilts her head to one side; we see a bronze bust tilted at the same angle, a purple mask over its eyes. The trunk of a car shuts; the trunk of a car opens. We zoom in on a detail of a white horse from an old painting of the genocide of Native Americans; a gentleman rides a white horse through a green countryside to his manor. These are some of the striking visual moments in Damon Lindelof’s 2019 HBO series, Watchmen. The show is based on—really a sequel to—the 1986–1987 comic book series by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, a gritty, virtuosic metafictional critique of…

The Greek Experience of India: From Alexander to the Indo-Greeks by Richard Stoneman. Princeton University Press, 525 pp., $39.95 “They Came, They Saw, but India Conquered,” wrote the historian A.K. Narain in 1957, characterizing the effects of the Greek penetration into “India” (the ancient name included what is today Pakistan and sometimes easternmost Afghanistan). He referred not only to Alexander the Great’s invasion of the Indus Valley in 327 BC—the first large-scale encounter between Greek and Indic civilizations—but also to the era that followed, when Hellenic rump kingdoms ruled by strongmen rose and fell in northwest India and Bactria, its neighbor to the west. The presence in the region of these Hellenic states, and their occasional forays further east, created a zone of Greco-Indian contact, influence, and exchange, as well…