Innholdsfortegnelse for September 24, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends by Ash Carter and Sam Kashner. Henry Holt, 336 pp., $30.00 For practitioners of what used to be called the lively arts, Life Isn’t Everything, an oral biography of Mike Nichols, is manna from heaven, its brilliantly orchestrated polyphony bringing him, his work, and his world to vivid life. Its subject is one of the rare individuals who transcend their professions and indeed their output to become archetypal figures of their time, acquiring the resonance of characters from a novel—in Nichols’s case, one perhaps by Balzac: Lucien de Rubempré or Eugène de Rastignac, those young men who set out from positions of great weakness to conquer their worlds. Rubempré, of course, fails and kills himself, which Nichols…

Once a week in the spring of 1994 I would bicycle over to a brownstone on West 16th Street to see a man named Sam Chwat in his ground-floor office. He called himself a speech coach, and a large part of his business was to train actors who had been cast as Prospero, say, or Creon, so that they did not sound as if they came from the Bronx or Akron, Ohio. But I was not an actor seeking help with a role. I was seeing Sam for something else, something a bit apart from the other speech-related services he offered. A friend who had sought him out for help with public speaking had recommended him to a lawyer who was representing me in a lawsuit. Ten years earlier I…

Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 149 pp., $25.00 “Yes I said yes I will Yes.” In high school, my earthy, fearless friend Lisa—who was two grades ahead of me and already initiated into the world of men and sexuality—had these words stenciled on her bedroom wall. As I learned from her, they constitute the most famous affirmation by a woman in English literature: the rapturous last words of Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses, the modernist masterpiece in which James Joyce defied conventional grammar and syntax in an attempt to represent the human mind in all its chaos, freeing fiction into a new world of possibility. Among the novel’s innovations was that final chapter: its intimacy with a female character’s most private thoughts, feelings, and fantasies, much…

Viale Ernesto Pirovano in the northern Italian city of Bergamo connects the center of town to the cemetery, with its imposing neo-Egyptian portal and the peak of Monte Misma as backdrop. It is a pleasant but unremarkable cypress-lined boulevard that passes the Kia dealership and the local headquarters of the Italian Federation of Blood Donors. This was the route down which an abnormal military convoy made its way on the night of March 18: thirtysix trucks carrying body bags and coffins for cremation across northern and central Italy, since all local facilities had been stretched beyond capacity by Covid-19. The harrowing scene was repeated throughout Lombardy. In her short book Virus Sovrano, Donatella di Cesare, a philosopher at Rome’s Sapienza University, describes footage of the convoy as “images that seem…

The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Europa, 322 pp., $26.00 Elena Ferrante’s novels, whatever else they’re about, are always describing the distance between two points: working-class Naples and the putatively better neighborhoods and cities and social worlds in which her narrators now move. It’s not simply that Ferrante has written about Naples, but that over the course of her work—now eight novels—she has so often sent her characters back and forth along the route between the impoverished old neighborhood and the new life that we know the landmarks well: the raucous and violent family of birth, the childhood wish for a way out, the scholarships, the flight, the studied assumption of middle-class manners. Here is a sampling of lines from Ferrante’s…

A History of Art History by Christopher S. Wood. Princeton University Press, 461 pp., $35.00 The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art by Éric Michaud, translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle. MIT Press, 270 pp., $35.00 In recent months dozens of artworks have been defaced, damaged, or pushed into the drink during the protests initially set off by the murder of George Floyd. Directed at first toward monuments to the Confederacy, the rage expanded to encompass a swath of imperialist or genocidal Europeans, from Christopher Columbus to Junipero Serra. The response of local authorities has frequently been pragmatic and accommodating. The response of the Trump administration has been a bellicose (and perhaps unconstitutional) executive order and aggressive intimidation of those who would “impede the purpose or…

The grammar of American presidential elections is, for obvious reasons, Christian. The other party’s candidate is mired in sin and error; ours will bring redemption and salvation. But not this time. Joe Biden is a devout Catholic, yet the shape of his speech accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination at its virtual convention was based on the cosmogony of one of Christianity’s great early rivals, Manichaeanism. The Manichaeans believed that the world had been taken over by an evil demiurge, the Prince of Darkness; while he was in the ascendant, humans had lost their reason and became “like unto a man bitten by a wild dog or serpent.” The great battle of existence is between these forces of darkness and those of light, which must reconquer the universe. In the twenty-five…

1. The rediscovery of long-forgotten women who were major participants in the creation of modern architecture—a restitution effort that arose with second-wave feminism in the 1970s—has had significant consequences. Not least of them has been an ongoing revision of the architectural canon, with unjustly overlooked female pioneers added to the once exclusively male pantheon of modernist master builders. Arguably the most fascinating and elusive of these path-breaking women is the Anglo-Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray, who has come into much sharper focus during the past decade thanks in large part to a network of outstanding female scholars in the United States and Europe. Interest in Gray was spurred by an excellent retrospective in 2013 at the Pompidou Center in Paris that then traveled to the Irish Museum of…

In 1981 members of a revolutionary group called the Black Liberation Army robbed a Brink’s armored van at the Nanuet Mall in Rockland County, just outside New York City. In the robbery and a subsequent shootout with police, a guard and two police officers were killed. Assisting this Black Nationalist “expropriation” operation were four white Communists, members of a faction of the Weather Underground called the May 19 Communist Organization. They acted as getaway drivers, and three of the four were unarmed, yet they were convicted of murder and sentenced to decades in prison. One of these white participants, Kathy Boudin, told a skeptical Elizabeth Kolbert, who interviewed her in prison for a 2001 profile in The New Yorker, that she didn’t know anything about the target of the robbery,…

The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the Destruction of Roman Italy by Michael Kulikowski. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 382 pp., $35.00 Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel. Princeton University Press, 670 pp., $35.00 King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne by Janet L. Nelson. University of California Press, 668 pp., $34.95 Ever since the Renaissance, the fall of the Roman Empire has remained the cherished nightmare of the West. Here are three books calculated to chase this nightmare away. The first, Michael Kulikowski’s The Tragedy of Empire, sets out to tell what actually happened. The second, Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome, argues that this fall was, in the long run, the best thing that could have happened to Europe.…

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L. Trump. Simon and Schuster, 225 pp., $28.00 In 1996, at a boozy lunch in Manhattan, a Connecticut lawyer was told about the Trump Organization’s “punishment room” by an Atlantic City lawyer who said that he had represented Donald Trump’s casino interests. According to the story, the truth of which is unconfirmed, employees there devised ways to punish Trump’s enemies, including the journalists who wrote critically of him. One supposed method was to send the IRS a fake Form 1099, showing that the target had been paid a considerable sum for contract work. The aim was to trigger a bill or an audit when the IRS discovered the putative payee had not reported the…

The Betrayal of the Duchess: The Scandal That Unmade the Bourbon Monarchy and Made France Modern by Maurice Samuels. Basic Books, 398 pp., $32.00 Two very different stories can be told about the Jews in modern France. The first is one of liberation and opportunity. It begins with the granting of full civil rights to French Jews during the revolution of 1789, after centuries in which the small number who had the right to live in the country suffered from enormous legal discrimination. It continues with the opening up of French society to them in the nineteenth century, the community’s rapid growth, and the rise to prominence of Jews such as the sociologist Émile Durkheim, the actor Rachel Félix, the politician Adolphe Crémieux (who served as minister of justice), and…

Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839 by Thomas Irvine. University of Chicago Press, 263 pp., $55.00 On September 14, 1793, a British envoy, George Macartney, appeared for the first time before the Qianlong Emperor, who ruled China from 1735 to 1796. The audience took place in a ceremonial yurt at the mountain summer palace of the Qing emperors at Chengde (or Jehol), close to their Manchu homeland north of the Great Wall, and Qianlong’s arrival was heralded by gongs and Chinese musicians. The mission failed to obtain its principal objectives—new trade concessions and permanent British diplomatic representation in China—but it could at least claim a moral triumph: Macartney insisted upon only kneeling rather than prostrating himself in the kowtow position, as was customary in the emperor’s presence.…

Fifty-Two Stories: 1883–1898 by Anton Chekhov, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Knopf, 508 pp., $35.00 “With love to lead the way/I found more skies of gray/Than any Russian play/Could guarantee,” Ira Gershwin wrote in the 1930 song “But Not for Me.” Of course he was thinking of Anton Chekhov. Almost a century later, it is still those gray plays that define Chekhov in the English-speaking world: a review of a recent London production of Uncle Vanya in The Independent managed to include the words “depressing,” “pessimism,” “misanthropy,” and “suffocating,” all in the first paragraph. Yet Chekhov insisted that his plays were comedies: The Seagull is subtitled “a comedy in four acts,” and while writing The Cherry Orchard he described it as “in places even a…

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic. Harvard University Press, 287 pp., $29.95 For enthusiasts of capitalism, democracy and the market are said to be handmaidens. Both depend on the rule of law. Both express aspects of liberty, prizing opportunity and mobility. During the era of classical liberalism, which began in the late eighteenth century, free commerce and political freedom advanced in tandem. Monarchies gave way to republican rule; open markets replaced royal monopolies and inherited privileges. For about a century the franchise gradually expanded, and markets became the primary mode of commerce. The brand of democratic capitalism that emerged in the West after World War II included not just those earlier hallmarks but such liberal values as tolerance, compromise, and enlarged civic…