Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

Bernie Sanders suspended his presidential campaign on April 8. It’s easy to forget, preoccupied as we all are now with the coronavirus and protests across the nation against police violence, what a precipitous fall this was. For a brief period after his smashing victory in the Nevada caucus on February 22, it was almost universally assumed that he would be the Democratic nominee. “Bernie Twitter” was ecstatic. Folks I know in the moderate wing of the party were beginning to make peace with the idea and preparing to support the independent Vermont senator’s bid for the White House. Then on February 29, exactly one week after Nevada, Joe Biden crushed Sanders in South Carolina. Three days later, in the March 3 Super Tuesday primaries, Biden won ten out of fourteen…

The Resistance in Western Europe, 1940–1945 by Olivier Wieviorka, translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd, with a foreword by Robert O. Paxton. Columbia University Press, 488 pp., $38.00 Sudden Courage: Youth in France Confront the Germans, 1940–1945 by Ronald C. Rosbottom. Custom House, 320 pp., $27.99; $18.99 (paper) Defying Hitler: The Germans Who Resisted Nazi Rule by Gordon Thomas and Greg Lewis. Caliber, 542 pp., $30.00; $20.00 (paper) Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence, September 1944–January 1945 by Freya and Helmuth James von Moltke, edited by Helmuth Caspar von Moltke, Dorothea von Moltke, and Johannes von Moltke, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch and with an afterword by Rachel Seiffert. New York Review Books, 392 pp., $18.95 (paper) Waging resistance against the Third Reich during World War II…

1. At the Supreme Court, precedent is the topic of the day. The reason isn’t obscure. With the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy two years ago, the prospect of the Court overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision is imminent in a way it has not been since 1992, when Kennedy jointly wrote an opinion with Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and David Souter that preserved the core of Roe while subtly transforming it. That opinion, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, depended explicitly on stare decisis, the common-law doctrine of precedent that exercises such pull in the realm of US constitutional law. The aspirationally aphoristic first sentence of the opinion read, “Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt.” Today, doubt about the Roe precedent is on the prowl, and…

Criminal Dissent: Prosecutions Under the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 by Wendell Bird. Harvard University Press, 546 pp., $55.00 No one likes to be criticized, especially thin-skinned government officials such as our current president, who lashes out against opposition and dismisses dissent as the sinister product of the socalled deep state. But the freedom to question, even to rebuke, an elected official or otherwise to speak one’s mind is protected by the First Amendment, which seems fairly sturdy. That wasn’t always the case: not long after the US Constitution was ratified and the Bill of Rights adopted, Congress passed the four infamous laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. They explicitly muzzled criticism of government policies and officials, and sadly demonstrate that not a few founding…

Adverse Events: Race, Inequality, and the Testing of New Pharmaceuticals by Jill A. Fisher. NYU Press, 319 pp., $89.00; $30.00 (paper) When will we get a vaccine? That’s the question Americans have been asking since the novel coronavirus shut down much of the country in March. Dr. Anthony Fauci says it could happen this year. Others think it will take a lot longer. The HPV vaccine took fifteen years to develop. The chickenpox vaccine took twenty-eight. No widely effective vaccine has ever been developed for many life-threatening viruses, including cytomegalovirus and HIV. One potential way to speed up the development of a vaccine for Covid-19 is a “challenge study,” in which researchers give healthy subjects a prospective vaccine and then infect them with the coronavirus. In conventional trials researchers typically…

Cunningham a documentary film directed by Alla Kovgan Dancing with Merce Cunningham by Marianne Preger-Simon, with a foreword by Stuart Hodes and an afterword by Alastair Macaulay. University Press of Florida, 203 pp., $19.95 (paper) Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) by John Cage, edited by Joe Biel and Richard Kraft, with an afterword by David W. Rose. Siglio, 199 pp., $24.00 (paper) Love, Icebox: Letters from John Cage to Merce Cunningham with a foreword, commentary, and afterword by Laura Kuhn. John Cage Trust, 157 pp., $24.95 (paper) Merce Cunningham: After the Arbitrary by Carrie Noland. University of Chicago Press, 260 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper) During the mid-1950s and early 1960s, Merce Cunningham, the most inventive and influential American choreographer of the second half…

The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture by Susan Stewart. University of Chicago Press, 378 pp., $35.00 In an early section of the Poetics, Aristotle notes the curious fact that humans take pleasure in looking at images of things they would find painful to contemplate as actual objects or scenes. The philosopher is working toward an account of tragedy that explains why people go to the theater to watch kings tear out their eyes and mothers murder their children. Before he gets to the plays, Aristotle considers the satisfaction we get from examining pictures “of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies” (he seems to be thinking of anatomy books). Why do we like looking at things like that? It is because of the delight we take…

Actress by Anne Enright. Norton, 264 pp., $26.95 No Authority: Writings from the Laureateship by Anne Enright. University College Dublin Press, 109 pp., $25.00 Fifty years from now, future historians attempting to understand the Me Too movement will pore over the legal documents from the Weinstein case; call up video of Christine Blasey Ford’s statements at the Kavanaugh hearing; ponder pictures of women in pussy hats and of tennis balls stuck to the feet of walkers; analyze the press coverage of high-profile cases of rape, assault, and sexual exploitation in the film and theater industries, as well as publishing, academia, government, and many other professions; and sift through the mass of online evidence around it all—the hundreds of low-profile stories of men abusing their positions of power over women, and…

The College Dropout Scandal by David Kirp. Oxford University Press, 175 pp., $24.95 The Impoverishment of the American College Student by James V. Koch. Brookings Institution, 271 pp., $24.99 (paper) Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy by Tressie McMillan Cottom. New Press, 228 pp., $18.99 (paper) The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us by Paul Tough. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 390 pp., $28.00; $16.99 (paper) Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost by Caitlin Zaloom. Princeton University Press, 255 pp., $29.95 Every fall I begin my freshman seminar on higher education by asking students to guess how many colleges in the United States admit fewer than 20 percent of their applicants. Estimates range from several hundred to a thousand.…

The Torture Letters: Reckoning with Police Violence by Laurence Ralph. University of Chicago Press, 242 pp., $75.00; $19.00 (paper) Chicago has a police torture problem. The exact size of this problem is not known and perhaps never will be. What is known for sure is that between 1972 and 1991 at least 125 black Chicagoans were tortured by police officers in the Area 2 precinct building on the city’s predominantly black South Side. Depending on the day and the officers involved, the victims were beaten, shackled to steaming hot radiators, electrocuted, and raped with sex toys. They were tortured into confessing, and sometimes tortured more afterward; these confessions were used to send them to prison, and in some cases to death row. The horrors of Area 2 have received the…

Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas by Jeffrey Ostler. Yale University Press, 533 pp., $37.50 At the close of the introduction to Surviving Genocide, his intense and well-researched overview of American Indian land losses, population declines, and personal miseries from the years leading to the republic’s birth through the wholesale tribal removals of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, the University of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler doubts whether the federal government will ever “establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to honestly assess the United States’ impact on Native nations and propose meaningful remedies, including land return, for deep historical injustices.” Yet the most productive way to plow through his catalog of the unrelenting horrors and tragedies visited upon American Indians from the Atlantic coast…