Innholdsfortegnelse for May 28, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

“Functions as an examination of both how Uber’s algorithms are changing the way companies operate and exert control over their workers and how those workers are experiencing these changes.”—Slate “Written with clarity and style, this is a mix of people’s compelling, even tragic stories and an innovative contribution to what we know about work, highlighting a poorly understood phenomenon.”—Allison J. Pugh, author of The Tumbleweed Society: Working and Caring in an Age of Insecurity “As we turn to imagine what kind of economy and society we want after COVID-19, the work of Juliet Schor and her students will be indispensable.”—Raj Patel, author of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things “This hard-hitting book takes readers into the working world of ambulance crews. Josh Seim offers an exciting new…

On the motorway brothers say I must stop singing—my voicesticks pins in their heads. We leave particles of ourselves at the Severn Bridge, near Waleswhere a tree once made a hole in Arthur’s shin. Stitches and tripsto the beach to eat grains of sand and ham for lunch. “Welcome to Wales” is the sign, and by now even the fightinghas stopped. The car takes her crown to the twisting roads,I feel my anti-sickness bracelet. Brother announces the driver in the car behind us will kill us,other brother predicts ways in which, father offers tools he will use. We stop on a hill where the tree roots are lifting the tarmac. Fatherwalks down to the car and finds out we are fine. In the beyond country of hump-back bridges and rivers…

Franz Boas: The Emergence of the Anthropologist by Rosemary Levy Zumwalt. University of Nebraska Press, 417 pp., $34.95 Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century by Charles King. Doubleday, 431 pp., $30.00 From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology by Mark Anderson. Stanford University Press, 262 pp., $90.00; $28.00 (paper) Franz Boas fought his first duel in 1877, when he was nineteen. He was freshly arrived at the University of Heidelberg, where saber fencing over slights, known as Mensur, was ingrained in undergraduate culture. And the slight in question was, indeed, slight: Boas shared the rental payments on his piano with a classmate, who banged away for hours at a time. The students downstairs…

Doxology by Nell Zink. Ecco, 402 pp., $27.99; $17.99 (paper) Nicotine by Nell Zink. Ecco, 288 pp., $15.99 (paper) Private Novelist by Nell Zink. Ecco, 317 pp., $15.99 (paper) Mislaid by Nell Zink. Ecco, 242 pp., $14.99 (paper) The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink. Dorothy, 193 pp., $16.00 (paper) There’s a funny sequence halfway through Nell Zink’s second novel, Mislaid, in which one of the main characters, a frustrated playwright, tries without much luck to get her career off the ground. “She subscribed to Writer’s Market and queried five agents about her play The Wicked Lord,” Zink writes: They all said the most interestingcharacter dies too near the start.She reacted by writing a play intwo days and a night about a utopianlesbian commune defendingitself from real estate interests.The villain saved his…

In 1943 some of the friends of Arthur Machen—the last name rhymes with “bracken”—organized a formal dinner to honor the Welsh writer on his eightieth birthday. While many distinguished figures in the arts attended, three of the older guests particularly stood out: Max Beerbohm, W.W. Jacobs, and Algernon Blackwood. Though obviously very different writers, this trio shared one signal distinction: each, along with the man they had come to celebrate, had written a masterpiece of supernatural fiction. Beerbohm’s best-known work is “Enoch Soames,” in which a seedy 1890s poet—author of Fungoids and Negations—sells his soul to the devil. Jacobs, though primarily a humorist, produced the unforgettable and much anthologized three-wishes story “The Monkey’s Paw.” As for Blackwood, he wrote what H. P. Lovecraft called the supreme tale of cosmic horror,…

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH teaches philosophy at NYU. His latest book is The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. ANNE CARSON was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her latest publication is Norma Jeane Baker of Troy. DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. His latest book is Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed. STEVE COLL is Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. MICHAEL DIRDA is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic for The Washington Post and the author of several…

Machines in the Head: Selected Stories by Anna Kavan, edited and with a foreword by Victoria Walker. New York Review Books, 170 pp., $15.95 (paper) “I can’t keep on all my life writing in the same way,” the extraordinary novelist who called herself Anna Kavan wrote in 1966 to Peter Owen, the publisher whose commitment to her work in her later years helped rescue her from oblivion. Yet from the imprisoning walls and sadomasochistic rituals of her finest novel, Ice (1967), to the range of stories selected by Victoria Walker for Machines in the Head, it is clear that the restlessly experimental Kavan was never willing to keep writing in the same way. It’s tempting, but misleading, to read the playfully sinister “Starting a Career,” a slight work published for…

George IV: Art and Spectacle an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, November 15, 2019–May 3, 2020; and the Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, October 16, 2020–April 5, 2021. (The Queen’s Gallery in London is temporarily closed.) Catalog of the exhibition edited by Kate Heard and Kathryn Jones. London: Royal Collection Trust, 294 pp., ?49.95 George IV: King in Waiting by Stella Tillyard. London: Allen Lane, 120 pp., ?12.99 “There never was an individual less regretted by his fellow creatures than this deceased King. What eye has wept for him? What heart has heaved one throb of unmercenary sorrow?” Thus The Times of London in 1830 upon the death of King George IV. There have been more wicked kingsin English history, but none so unredeemedby any signal…

ARCHAEOLOGY, CHINA STUDIES The Chu Silk Manuscripts from Zidanku, Changsha (Hunan Province) Volume 1: Discovery and Transmission Li Ling; translated and edited by Lothar von Falkenhausen This first volume presents the archaeological context and history of transmission of the only pre-Imperial Chinese Silk Manuscripts found to date. It established a new basis for future research. Pub Dec 2019. 7.5 x 10.0 in. 252 pp. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press 978-988-237-097-5 C/$100 ARCHITECTURE What the Signs Say Language, Gentrification, and Place-making in Brooklyn Shonna Trinch and Edward Snajdr Although we may not think we notice them, storefronts and their signage are meaningful, and the impact they have on people is significant. What the Signs Say argues that the public language of storefronts is a key component to the creation…

CALADIUM PUBLISHING COMPANY 145C Selner Lane, Doylestown, PA 18902; (215) 340-7564; info@caladiumpublishing.com; www.caladiumpublishing.com GOD: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY as told to a philosopher by Jerry L. Martin “Martin has delivered us the most path-breaking material for future philosophical and theological reflection I have come across in a long time.” —Reading Religion 9780996725316 • Hardback, $19.95 376 Pages 9780996725323 • eBook, $4.95 Available at Amazon and www.indiebound.org Author’s website: www.godanautobiography.com K. BLANTON BRENNER APPALOOSA SKY by K. Blanton Brenner Appaloosa Sky is Lonesome Dove meets Sex and the City meets Nancy Drew. It’s an ode to tough women who raise horses and holy hell. 9781734336818 • Paper, $13.99 384 Pages • Literary Fiction Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Barbara’s Bookstores, and Kindle WARRING STATES PROJECT THE EMERGENCE OF CHINA From Confucius to…

Being at Large Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts SANTIAGO ZABALA Paper $29.95 200pp The People’s Health Health Intervention and Delivery in Mao’s China, 1949–1983 ZHOU XUN Paper $37.95 384pp Techno-Fixers Origins and Implications of Technological Faith SEAN F. JOHNSTON Cloth $29.95, 344pp Clean Body A Modern History PETER WARD Cloth $34.95 336pp Objectively Engaged Journalism An Ethic STEPHEN J.A. WARD Cloth 34.95 288pp Wash, Wear, and Care Clothing and Laundry in Long-Term Residential Care PAT ARMSTRONG AND SUZANNE DAY Paper $29.95 216pp SARS in Context Memory, History, and Policy EDITED BY JACALYN DUFFIN AND ARTHUR SWEETMAN Paper $29.95 224pp We Resist Defending the Common Good in Hostile Times EDITED BY CYNTHIA LEVINE-RASKY AND LISA KOWALCHUK Paper $29.95 328pp Expelling the Plague The Health Office and the Implementation of…

“I cannot keep my dreams straight.” By this complaint Kafkameant, keep them going in a straight line from front to finish.His dreams were inclined to swerve back on themselves, forexample his dream of Hölderlin. Kafka dreamed that Hölderlincaught fire. “Finally you somehow caught fire.” Kafka beganto beat out the fire with an old coat. Now the swerve begins.“Instead it was I who was on fire.” Here the swerve collideswith itself. “And it was I who beat the fire with a coat.” Finallythe swerve subsides in a hopelessness that is reasoned yet alsoneurotic. “But the beating didn’t help and only confirmed myold fear that such things can’t extinguish a fire.” Myself I findpalindromes bleak—how they march forward as if to unfurlsome wisdom then there we are cowering again at the back…

The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir by Samantha Power. Dey Street, 580 pp., $29.99 From April 1992 until the summer of 1995, the newly independent republic of Bosnia endured the darkest violence to disfigure Europe since World War II. Bosnian Serb militias attacked the republic’s Muslim and Croat populations, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Their siege of the capital, Sarajevo, claimed more than five thousand civilian lives. The administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton took no decisive military action; they argued that there was no way to stop Serbian aggression without incurring an unacceptable number of American casualties. Colin Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush, opposed committing US forces to war for what he called “unclear purposes.” William Perry,…

The Shore by Chris Nealon. Wave, 91 pp., $16.00 (paper) In the Lateness of the World by Carolyn Forche. Penguin Press, 77 pp., $24.00 In the last chapter of his 2011 book The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century, the poet and critic Chris Nealon describes a problem for writers working around the turn of the twenty-first century: “How to name the experience of an extreme, felt ‘lateness’ in capitalism,” how to write about a present that seems “both very ‘late’ but also undescribable by way of figures of lateness.” The difficulty—for poets as well as journalists, historians, economists—is “how to imagine the unimaginable,” an end to capitalism without violent revolution. Trying to change the system from inside the system, a system that in some ways…

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