Innholdsfortegnelse for August 20, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin’s Russia by Joshua Yaffa. Tim Duggan, 356 pp., $28.00 In the early 1970s, during the Soviet Union’s long era of stagnation under Leonid Brezhnev, the frustrated writer Sergei Dovlatov moved from St. Petersburg to Tallinn, where he got a job at the newspaper Soviet Estonia. His darkly comic realist fiction was unpublishable even in Estonia, but at least he could make a living as a writer. In 1979 Dovlatov emigrated to New York, where he wrote The Compromise (1981), a chronicle of the “hard road from the reported facts to the truth” he had encountered at the paper. It consists of twelve numbered “compromises,” each of which opens with a snippet of a newspaper article: anodyne and wholesome, propagandistic in the…

Lives of Houses edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee. Princeton University Press, 297 pp., $24.95 I’ve never seen it mentioned in a book or magazine about home design, but among the greatest contributions to that literature is Zora Neale Hurston’s term “will to adorn.” She coined it in her 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” to describe a habit of embellishment she deemed central to African-American expressiveness. Hurston spots the trend in black vernacular locutions in which one word becomes two—“sitting-chairs,” “hotboiling,” “chop-axe.” Likewise, when one decorative pocket hanging on the wall might do, there are several. Perhaps this “idea of ornament does not attempt to meet conventional standards,” she writes, “but it satisfies the soul of its creator.” To prove her point, she describes her visit to the…

BoJack Horseman an animated Netflix series created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and art-directed by Lisa Hanawalt One of the pleasures of extravagant length for someone making an artwork—a novel, a movie, a TV series—is how difficult it might be to predict how the work is going to end or what its meaning might become. Extravagant length converts composition into a hopeful but risky process of improvisation. Around 1917, the Russian literary critic and revolutionary Victor Shklovsky wrote an essay on Don Quixote, and in particular on the genesis of its mythic hero. Shklovsky argued that Cervantes had begun his novel as a series of episodes with a gimmick: a character who couldn’t distinguish between reality and fiction. It was only by following this screwball joke for episode after episode that he…

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. Grove, 430 pp., $27.00 In 1896, six years before creating Peter Pan, the Scottish writer J.M. Barrie published a memoir of his mother called, as she was, Margaret Ogilvy. Its prevailing tone is set in the opening chapter. “When you looked into my mother’s eyes,” Barrie writes, “you knew, as if He had told you, why God sent her into the world—it was to open the minds of all who looked to beautiful thoughts.” The way Barrie tells it, his mother began each day “by the fireside with the New Testament in her hands.” The rest of it she spent cheerfully performing domestic tasks, and enjoying the works of George Eliot and Thomas Carlyle. In his encyclopedic Scotland’s Books: The Penguin History of Scottish Literature,…

The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton. Simon and Schuster, 577 pp., $32.50 Back in January, when it emerged that former national security adviser John Bolton was publishing a book critical of the Trump administration and was willing to testify against President Trump in his Senate impeachment trial if subpoenaed, I speculated in a New York Times oped that a combination of patriotism, professional principle, payback, and personal ambition must have motivated him to turn against the president.1 Having now read Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened, slogging through almost five hundred pages of bumptious recitation, fatuous braggadocio, and lame attempts at wit, I can confirm that those were his reasons, though I’d change the order. The virtuous ones—patriotism and professional principle—were clearly subordinate to…

The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Anglo-Caribbean World by Miles Ogborn. University of Chicago Press, 309 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper) Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War by Vincent Brown. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 320 pp., $35.00 Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire by Tom Zoellner. Harvard University Press, 363 pp., $29.95 In June thousands of people, provoked by the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping America, took to the streets in the United Kingdom to demonstrate against racism in their own country. One target of their anger was statues honoring British men of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries who prospered by enslaving and oppressing others, among them one in Bristol of Edward Colston that was pulled down and…

The Trump administration has declared war on the International Criminal Court—the world’s only permanent court whose mandate is to pursue cases of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. President Trump issued an executive order on June 11 that authorizes severe sanctions on ICC employees, as well as the court itself, if it goes forward with planned investigations of alleged war crimes by the US or its allies. (Though not named in the order, Israel is the sole US ally now under ICC scrutiny that fits its terms.) Sanctions—visa restrictions, asset freezes, and bans on financial transactions with the sanctioned person—are, according to federal law, emergency measures taken against “unusual and extraordinary” foreign threats. They are typically used against terrorists and drug cartels, and in cases of human rights abuses…

Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency by Mark Lynas. London: 4Thestate, 372 pp., $27.99 So now we have some sense of what it’s like: a full-on global-scale crisis, one that disrupts everything. Normal life—shopping for food, holding a wedding, going to work, seeing your parents—shifts dramatically. The world feels different, wiThevery assumption about safety and predictability upended. Will you have a job? Will you die? Will you ever ride a subway again, or take a plane? It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen. The upheaval that has been caused by Covid-19 is also very much a harbinger of global warming. Because humans have fundamentally altered the physical workings of planet Earth, this is going to be a century of crises, many of them more dangerous than what we’re living…

When the Supreme Court’s 2019–2020 term opened last October, with LGBTQ discrimination, gun rights, abortion, immigration, and state funding of religious schools on the docket, it promised to be both controversial and deeply partisan. The Court then added cases on whether President Trump could block Congress and a grand jury from obtaining his personal financial records, and whether employers who objected to contraception on religious grounds could refuse to provide their employees with insurance that paid for it. This was Justice Brett Kava naugh’s second term on the Court, and it afforded a real test of how his replacement of the more moderate Anthony Kennedy would alter the Court’s character. Republicans, who had long made picking “reliable” conservative justices a priority, were eager to reap their rewards. But in the…

Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair by Danielle Sered. New Press, 305 pp., $26.99 Nearly two decades ago, the activist and scholar Angela Davis observed that prison abolitionists were “dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish.” Today this is no longer the case—the prison abolition movement has gone mainstream. The recent killings by police officers of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade—among many others—have sparked a national reckoning about the entire US justice system that has reached news outlets, city governments, and boardrooms. In Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, the school district has terminated its contract with the police department. A majority of the city council, which controls the budget, voted in…

When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy by Eva Meijer. NYU Press, 291 pp., $99.00; $35.00 (paper) Animal Languages by Eva Meijer, translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson. MIT Press, 276 pp., $27.95 Animal Internet: Nature and the Digital Revolution by Alexander Pschera, translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer and with a foreword by Martin Wikelski. New Vessel, 207 pp., $14.95 (paper) Nightingales in Berlin: Searching for the Perfect Sound by David Rothenberg. University of Chicago Press, 179 pp., $26.00 Bryony Lavery’s 2018 play Slime revolves around seven young interns at the Third Annual Slime Crisis Conference, which takes place at an unspecified time in a not-too-distant future. It is a multispecies gathering, convened in response to a toxic slime that is taking over the world’s oceans. The…