Innholdsfortegnelse for April 23, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

RAE ARMANTROUT ’s newest book of poems, Conjure, will be published in September. DAVID A. BELL is Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton. His book Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolutions will be published in the spring. JAKE BERNSTEIN is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. A movie of The Laundromat, his most recent book, was released last year. JASON FARAGO is an art critic for The New York Times and the editor of the anthology Out of Practice: Ten Issues of “Even,” 2015–2018. In 2017 he was awarded the inaugural Rabkin Prize for art criticism. MARTIN FILLER ’s latest book is Makers of Modern Architec  ture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on architecture…

In mid-March, as infection rates in his home state grew, Devin Nunes, Republican congressman from California, tweeted to his almost million followers a Breitbart article titled “Democrats Pushed Impeachment While Coronavirus Spread.” Nunes has exploited President Trump’s impeachment at every opportunity, often for his personal benefit. In February, shortly after Trump’s acquittal by the US Senate, he sent an e-mail addressed to his “top supporters.” It read: “GET THE EXCLU-SIVE IMPEACHMENT SCOREBOARD T-SHIRT!” When recipients clicked the accompanying graphic of a white T-shirt stamped “IMPEACHMENT: DONALD TRUMP 01, DEEP STATE 00,” they landed on a page offering the shirt for any amount between $25 and $2,800. Since this purchase was a federal contribution to the Nunes campaign, donors were instructed to state their employment status. A prominent red-framed box with…

East Goes Westby Younghill Kang, with a foreword by Alexander Chee and afterword by Sunyoung Lee.Penguin, 389 pp., $18.00 (paper) What if the finest, funniest, craziest, sanest, most cheerfully depressing Korean-American novel was also one of the first? To a modern reader, the most dated thing about Younghill Kang’s East Goes West, published by Scribner’s in 1937, is its tired title. (Either that or its subtitle, “The Making of an Oriental Yankee.”) Practically everything else about this brash modernist comic novel still feels electric. East Goes West has a ghostly history: at times vaguely canonical, yet without discernible influence, it has been out of print for decades at a stretch, and surfaces every quarter-century or so as a sort of literary Brigadoon. (Last year’s Penguin Classics edition is its third…

The Shadow Kingby Maaza Mengiste. Norton, 428 pp., $26.95 In a black-and-white photo taken in December 1935, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia stands at ease in a smart khaki military uniform and pith helmet, with a cape draped over his shoulders. Pensive men brandishing rifles remain a respectful distance behind him in dry, rough terrain. Selassie looks as if he could be posing at the end of a hunt. But he has one foot perched nonchalantly on an unexploded bomb, not a lion or leopard. Hours earlier, Italian warplanes had bombed Dessie, his new headquarters 250 miles north of the capital, Addis Ababa. Once the air raid was over, leaving more than a dozen dead and many wounded, Selassie ordered his men to bring a cache of ordnance that had…

Darwin’s Most Wonderful Plants: A Tour of His Botanical Legacyby Ken Thompson.University of Chicago Press, 255 pp., $25.00 On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Edenby Elizabeth Hennessy.Yale University Press, 310 pp., $30.00 Evolution Before Darwin: Theories of the Transmutation of Species in Edinburgh, 1804–1834by Bill Jenkins.Edinburgh University Press, 222 pp., $110.00 Charles Darwin is ever with us. A month seldom passes without new books about the man, his life, his work, and his influence—books by scholars for scholars, by scholars for ordinary readers, and by the many unwashed rest of us nonfiction authors who presume to enter the fray, convinced that there’s one more new way to tell the story of who Darwin was, what he actually said or wrote, why he…

Barnum: An American Lifeby Robert Wilson.Simon and Schuster, 341 pp., $28.00 Since his heyday in the mid-nineteenth century, P.T. Barnum’s name has been shorthand for ebullient humbuggery, maximalist entertainment, inexhaustible self-promotion, rags-to-riches industriousness—for fun. After The Greatest Showman (2017), a highly fictionalized musical that defied studio expectations to gross a Barnumesque $435 million, fades to black, the screen fills with a sober epigram: “The noblest art is that of making others happy.” Barnum wrote this at the end of his life, during a period in which he referred to himself as “The Children’s Friend.” He groomed himself to look like Santa Claus. Yet the images that animate his biographies—of which Robert Wilson’s Barnum is at least the fifteenth, not counting Barnum’s own serially revised and overlapping memoirs—are united by an…

Forgotten Journeyby Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan, with a foreword by Carmen Boullosa.City Lights, 125 pp., $14.95 (paper) The Promiseby Silvina Ocampo, translated from the Spanish by Suzanne Jill Levine and Jessica Powell, with a foreword by Ernesto Montequín.City Lights, 103 pp., $14.95 (paper) Literary debuts are generally terrifying for the debutant. The Argentinian writer Silvina Ocampo, however—publishing her first short-story collection at thirty-four, in 1937, after beginning to doubt her earlier training as a painter—had the kinds of connections that tend to soften the landing. Close friends with Jorge Luis Borges, a few years her senior and already a rising star, Ocampo had also studied painting under Giorgio de Chirico and Fernand Léger and had a well-placed older sister, Victoria Ocampo,…

On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Dealby Naomi Klein. Simon and Schuster, 309 pp., $27.00; $18.00 (paper) This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth by Jedediah Purdy.Princeton University Press, 164 pp., $19.95 A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Dealby Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, with a foreword by Naomi Klein.Verso, 194 pp., $19.95 (paper) Roughly six million people across the planet participated in the Global Climate Strike last September, inspired by the sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg and organized by a rising social movement of young people who ask why they should go to school every day when adults seem hell-bent on destroying their future. The demonstration, which spanned 163 countries and all seven…

Vernon Subutex 1by Virginie Despentes, translated from the French by Frank Wynne.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 340 pp., $16.00 (paper) Paris at night in 1994, shaky footage on fast-forward. The camera rushes up the cobblestone side streets onto the wide boulevard of the Champs-Élysées. It turns to enter a Virgin Megastore, clatters down the stairs toward the literature section, skims over the art books and shoppers. The lens steadies as it settles on a young woman in a bright red employee vest. The video slows. She stands alone in front of the paperback display, hair hanging over her face, arms tightly crossed, shoulders hunched. The man behind the camera, Thierry Ardisson, approaches, and the woman rocks back on her heels, nods a greeting. Ardisson is the host of Paris Dernière, a…

Weatherby Jenny Offill.Knopf, 208 pp., $23.95 In August 1968 The New Yorker published Donald Barthelme’s short story “Eugénie Grandet,” a two-page absurdist parody of Balzac’s 1833 novel about a wealthy provincial miser’s only child and her tragic efforts to defy him. A bit like Borges in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Barthelme takes a hefty canonical text and runs it through his particle accelerator of an imagination. All that remains of Balzac’s intricate psychological drama is a series of faux-naïf fragments. One of them is a quotation from The Thesaurus of Book Digests summarizing the novel’s plot; another the single sentence, “A great many people are interested in the question: Who will obtain Eugénie Grandet’s hand?”; another the word “butter” repeated 113 times. By condensing Balzac’s opus to a…

MR. CARLA BLANK To the Editors: Only in the United States is my partner, the distinguished choreographer, author, teacher, and director Carla Blank, referred to as my “white wife.” Not only was the designation used in Darryl Pinckney’s review of Thomas Chatterton Williams’s Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race [NYR, March 26] but also in The New York Times review of the same book. Mr. Williams was a guest at a party that I threw in Paris for black American and Haitian expatriates in 2015. Who is Carla Blank? Some recent activities: Her book Storming the Old Boys’ Cita  del champions two women architects, Louise Blanchard Bethune (1856–1913) and Mother Joseph of the Sacred Heart (1823–1902), who both continued their careers until close to their deaths. Bethune was the…