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

On March 16 President Emmanuel Macron, the youngest head of state in French history since Napoleon, appeared on prime-time television to address the nation. He declared a state of national emergency and said, six times, that France was “at war” against the coronavirus. Beginning at noon the following day, people could leave their homes only for urgent needs—to buy food, for medical appointments, to go to work if they couldn’t work remotely—and only with a permission slip. Just days before, France had closed its schools, restaurants, and cafés. Its external borders and the borders of the other twenty-five countries in Europe’s Schengen Zone of visa-free travel also snapped shut. Flights between Paris and the United States dropped to barely more than one a day. For eight weeks, the streets of…

In “The Jesting of Arlington Stringham,” a story by Saki (H.H. Munro), the eponymous politician in a debate on the Foreign Office in the House of Commons remarks that “the people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally.” The United States is experiencing the same excess. More outrage is being perpetrated and felt than can be contained within the existing frame of institutions and discourses. The image of things bubbling over, of energies and emotions that can no longer be enclosed, has become physically manifest on the streets, as those who had been privately confined for so many weeks spilled out into the public realm. But what there is too much of is not just present injustice. There is a super abundance of the unresolved past.…

Invisible Americans: The Tragic Cost of Child Poverty by Jeff Madrick. Knopf, 231 pp., $25.00 A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, edited by Greg Duncan and Suzanne Le Menestrel. National Academies Press, 596 pp., $70.00 (paper); free PDF available at nap.edu/25246 It’s been three decades since the Annie E. Casey Foundation published its first Kids Count report, an annual collection of statistics on child well-being attractively packaged and broken up by state to maximize local coverage. (The most recent edition tells West Virginians that they lead the nation in teens who are not in school or working and New Mexicans that a quarter of their children live in high-poverty neighborhoods.) After the presidency of Ronald Reagan had filled the…

Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History by Richard J. Evans. Oxford University Press, 785 pp., $39.95 Meet Me in Buenos Aires: A Memoir by Marlene Hobsbawm, with an introduction by Claire Tomalin. London: Muswell, 168 pp., £12.99 When Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012 at the age of ninety-five, he was probably the best-known historian in the English-speaking world. His books have been translated into every major language (and numerous minor ones), and many of them have remained continuously in print since their first appearance. Though his work centered on the history of labor, he wrote with equal fluency about the crisis of the seventeenth century and the bandits of Eritrea, the standard of living during the industrial revolution and Billie Holiday’s blues. For range and accessibility, there was no one…

Topics of Conversation by Miranda Popkey. Knopf, 215 pp., $24.00 Die, My Love by Ariana Harwicz, translated from the Spanish by Sarah Moses and Carolina Orloff. Edinburgh: Charco, 123 pp., $13.95 (paper) Sometime in the 1980s Catholic primary school teachers in Ireland abandoned the concept of sin, considering it too harsh for the six-year-olds they were training for the confessional. They reached instead for the phrase “a failure to love,” a devastating switch that moved children from the pleasures of transgression (who doesn’t like a good sin?) to the wilderness of abandonment. It was like accusing them of causing their own loneliness. There is, perhaps, a game to be played with novels along these lines, dividing fictional characters into those who sin and those who are merely wrongheaded and sad.…

Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal by Alexandra Natapoff. Basic Books, 334 pp., $30.00 Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration by Rachel Elise Barkow. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 291 pp., $35.00 The mass protests spurred by George Floyd’s killing have been more sustained and widespread than any this country has seen before in response to police abuse. When the initial ones prompted even more police violence—officers driving cars into peaceful demonstrators or beating them with truncheons, using chemical agents and flash grenades to clear crowds for a presidential photo op, pepper-spraying young and old alike—the aggression, much of it captured on video, only inspired more people to join the protests. When it became clear that local police,…

Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. —Vladimir Nabokov Let me tell you a story about a boy. He was born on May 22, 1914, in Birmingham, Alabama. His mother, Ida Blount, was a waitress.…

Deacon King Kong by James McBride. Riverhead, 370 pp., $28.00 In a 1980 interview, James Baldwin lamented the plight of Harlem: “Nothing is taken care of in Harlem. The City has no responsibility for the ghetto… So houses are boarded up … bulldozers move in, move the niggers out.” Baldwin subscribed to the notion that hard drugs had been introduced cynically into inner-city neighborhoods decades earlier to speed up that displacement and as a means of social control: “I can’t prove it, so time will prove it. It is between the Mafia and the government. It is an open secret; anything will do to keep the niggers asleep.” Such a view was not uncommon in the 1960s, when heroin use devastated black ghettos. An alleged conspiracy to induce lethargy among…

Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights by Gretchen Sorin. Liveright, 332 pp., $28.95 Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America by Candacy Taylor. Abrams, 360 pp., $35.00 In 1963, after Sam Cooke was turned away from a hotel in Shreveport, Louisiana, because he was black, he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come.” He was right. The next year, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which dismantled a cornerstone of the racial caste system known as “Jim Crow” by banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations. Change seemed to be coming in other areas of American law as well. Congress followed with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and during the 1960s the Supreme Court waged a…

In September 1963, in Llansteffan, Wales, a stained-glass artist named John Petts was listening to the radio when he heard the news that four black girls had been murdered in a bombing just after Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The news deeply moved Petts, who was white and British. “Naturally, as a father, I was horrified by the death of the children,” said Petts, in a recording archived by London’s Imperial War Museum. “As a craftsman in a meticulous craft, I was horrified by the smashing of all those [stained-glass] windows. And I thought to myself, my word, what can we do about this?” Petts decided to employ his skills as an artist in an act of solidarity. “An idea doesn’t exist unless you…

The Gringa by Andrew Altschul. Melville House, 421 pp., $27.99 A gringo, in US English, is generally understood to be a white person from the United States. “We were hooted and shouted at as we passed through, and called ‘Gringoes,’” is the first recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary, from John James Audubon’s Western Journal of an 1849 trip to the gold fields of California. Both the OED and Merriam-Webster’s agree that the word is pejorative or contemptuous. In Spanish, gringo is a way of saying “foreigner,” applicable to whichever group is locally most numerous. In Uruguay, a gringo might be an Italian or a Russian. La Gringa, by the playwright Carmen Rivera, which has run for decades at Repertorio Español in Manhattan, tells the story of a Puerto…

Nobody: A Hymn to the Sea by Alice Oswald. Norton, 70 pp., $25.95 Falling Awake by Alice Oswald. Norton, 81 pp., $25.95; $15.95 (paper) Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad by Alice Oswald, with an afterword by Eavan Boland. Norton, 90 pp., $15.95 (paper) Weeds and Wild Flowers by Alice Oswald, with etchings by Jessica Greenman. Faber, 72 pp., £16.99 Spacecraft VoyagerI: New and Selected Poems by Alice Oswald. Graywolf, 145 pp., $15.00 (paper) That there would be no English literary tradition without Greek and Latin is almost axiomatic. The Earl of Surrey invented blank verse by translating Virgil; Milton trained to be Milton by translating Latin poets, then translating his own verse into Latin; when Auden wanted to adapt Marianne Moore’s syllabics to his own sense of line, he…

Is This How You See Me? by Jaime Hernandez. Fantagraphics, 90 pp., $19.99 Tonta by Jaime Hernandez. Fantagraphics, 100 pp., $19.99 Since the comic book Love and Rockets debuted in 1981, Jaime Hernandez has created hundreds of stories about a Chicanx, queer, punk, middle-class Southern California world revolving around Maggie Chascarillo and her off-and-on lover, Hopey Glass. They are, Hernandez has said, his Mexican-American Betty and Veronica, inspired by the Archie Comics he read in his youth, and by the young women he observed in the late 1970s and early 1980s at punk shows in Los Angeles and his nearby hometown of Oxnard. Their sexuality, like that of the other characters in Love and Rockets, is fluid and, like their ethnicity, rarely the subject of any story. Hernandez has portrayed…

Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom by Katherine Eban. Ecco, 488 pp., $28.99 In 2007 Harry Lever, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, began receiving complaints from patients who were taking generic drugs. They had developed dangerous symptoms—including low platelet counts, excess fluids, cholesterol spikes, and irregular heartbeat and shortness of breath—that their medications were supposed to control or prevent. When Lever switched patients to alternate generics he trusted or to brand-name drugs, the symptoms usually subsided. The generics Lever first prescribed had cleared the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as all drugs sold in the US must. He had taken their reliability on faith, yet he came increasingly to think that something must be wrong. He found that all the culprit drugs had either…