Innholdsfortegnelse for October 8, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

King of the World The Life of Louis XIV Philip Mansel “Mansel’s genius lies in unpacking the complexities of Louis’ royal court. The contrast is chillingly made between a starving country and the deplorable but engrossing ostentation of Louis’ most enduring creation: the Palace of Versailles.” —Financial Times Cloth $35.00 Elsewhere A Journey into Our Age of Islands Alastair Bonnett “Bonnett has written a most readable and sympathetic account of the various guises islands can take around the world and rightly points out the ecological consequences of human building projects.” —Literary Review Cloth $25.00 Invisible China How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell “An important, clearly argued, and original work. Anyone interested in China’s economic and political future, and its impact on the world, will…

Will He Go?: Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020 by Lawrence Douglas. Twelve, 146 pp., $22.00 In October 1884, as a particularly ugly presidential race neared its end, Walt Whitman decided instead of voting to write a poem. “Election Day, November, 1884” argued that the most remarkable feature of the United States was not its stunning natural wonders—not the Mississippi River, nor the limitless prairies, “nor you, Yosemite” (however our current president wants to pronounce it). No, Whitman declared, the “powerfulest scene and show” was “America’s choosing day.” And not because of the men who were selected to govern: “The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing.” Elections matter because they are a central way in which we constitute ourselves as…

What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry, 1969–2017 by Wendell Berry. Library of America, 2 volumes, 1,674 pp., $75.00 Not quite thirty years ago, I heard Wendell Berry give a talk at an organic farming conference in Texas. He was funny! That’s what I remember. He stood behind the lectern, a tall, lean figure, and in his casual opening remarks he revealed that he was a lot slyer than he let on in print. He clearly knew how to get a laugh among farmers—always a tough crowd. But this was also an easy crowd, at least where Berry’s fundamental message was concerned. Like a lot of other people that day, I’d come to hear the Berry who was decidedly not funny, who, at most, permitted himself now…

JULIAN BELL is a painter based in Lewes, England. He is the author of What Is Painting? DAN CHIASSON’s fifth book of poetry, The Math Campers, was just published. He teaches at Wellesley. SARAH CHURCHWELL is a Professor of American Literature and Chair of Public Understanding of the Humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her book Behold America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream” was published last year. JAMES GLEICK is the author of The Information and, most recently, Time Travel: A History. VONA GROARKE’s seventh poetry collection, Double Negative, was published in 2019. JOSHUA HAMMER is a former Newsweek Bureau Chief and Correspondent-at-Large in Africa and the Middle East. His latest book, The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery,…

Half in, half out of my dream:deer wander in a bright auditorium.They are serene until they see me,when they bolt and scatter, looking for cover. I stand frozen on the half-court line.If I move, the deer go berserk.A doe just split her head openwhen she rammed the cinderblock wall; a fawn pulls all her fur apart, and gagson mouthfuls of hide she can’t spit.I see the hunger in their stenciled ribs,the furniture inside their skin. —And then I’m spared, alone in bed.I’m forty-six, a trespasserin my dream gym. The deer are children.I’m the maypole they dance around.…

1. LonghandOne part only of me moving.The rest of me keeping shtum. 2. EquipmentMy fingers taper to a point.The nib shows willing. 3. MethodNot one bit like keyboard keyswith their busy, busy, busy. 4. TechnologyOne shimmy of a sudden linesuddenly strikes through it all. 5. Add-onsThe lack of a word-count facility,of the feint of a change of font. 6. ArchiveEach new poem written off the back of the previous one. 7. Soundscape ASmall scratchings like a bird in a thicket. Robin, possibly. 8. Soundscape BMy arm across the paper, its slight taffeta shift. 9. PropositionThat ink warmed by my body moves the freer for it. 10. SinisterWhile my right hand is playing with these words,what do you suppose my left is doing?…

THE HABSBURGS To Rule the World “Probably the best book ever written on the Habsburgs in any language…. Lucid, comprehensive, and witty, it is not merely a pleasure to read but a complete education.”—TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT “It is impossible to imagine a more erudite and incisive history of this fascinating, flawed, and ultimately tragic dynasty.”—TIMES (UK) “The Habsburgs is gripping, colorful, and dramatic but also concise, scholarly, and magisterial. It is a chronicle of high politics and family intimacy involving religion, murder, incest, madness, suicide, assassination. History on an epic scale.”—SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE, author of The Romanovs basicbooks.com…

1. In March 2020, a letter supposedly written by F. Scott Fitzgerald while “quarantined in 1920 in the south of France during the Spanish influenza outbreak” was shared on social media and quickly went viral, appropriately enough. It opens with a description of the “limpid, dreary day, hung as in a basket from a single dull star,” before sighing that it’s poignant to avoid public spaces Even the bars, as I told Hemingway, but to that he punched me in the stomach, to which I asked if he had washed his hands. He hadn’t. He is much the denier that one. Why, he considers the virus to be just influenza. Suspiciously topical and deliberately maladroit, the letter was spoofing the pandemic discourse in the first months of 2020. Its author…

Yours, for Probably Always: Martha Gellhorn’s Letters of Love and War, 1930–1949 edited by Janet Somerville. Firefly, 528 pp., $40.00 If journalism is a rough draft of history, then war reportage is very rough indeed. In the hurly-burly of violent conflict, journalists have none of the historian’s Olympian overview of motives and consequences. The fog of war falls on correspondents as well as on generals—propaganda, prejudice, ignorance, and the need to tell engaging stories to faraway readers limit and distort their vision. Censorship and partisanship disguise the naked truth. War correspondents can seem, even to themselves, like parasites on misery. A corrosive cynicism drifts like mustard gas across the history of writing about war. Samuel Johnson set the tone in 1758: Among the calamities of war may be justly numbered…

In February, Tomiekia Johnson’s mother, father, sister, and daughter came to Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), a state prison in the small city of Chowchilla, for their monthly visit. Tomiekia had been reading the news about the spread of the coronavirus and told her family to prepare for catastrophe. “They were …unmoved,” she wrote to me in August. “They gave me the side eye. Now here we are.” On March 16, visits to the facility were paused. Tomiekia, who is fortyone, and her thirteen-year-old daughter had to make do with phone calls, punctuating their brief, monitored conversations with expressions of reassurance and affection: “You know I love you, right?” “Yeah, mama, I know.” In early April, a prison nurse tested positive, Tomiekia told me, which resulted in a brief quarantine…

DEMS MUST PLAY OFFENSE To the Editors: Joseph O’Neill produced two excellent essays on contemporary American politics: “No More Nice Dems” [NYR, December 19, 2019] and “Brand New Dems?” [NYR, May 28, 2020]. Both should be essential reading for those of us in the attentive liberal public, but even more so by every Democratic candidate as well as the advisers and organizers behind them. My concern, however, is that many may interpret his prescriptions in “Brand New Dems?” too literally—that the weaknesses of the Democratic Party O’Neill so cogently describes can be remedied exclusively through the efforts of a present-day Don Draper devising killer slogans on his office couch. Don’t get me wrong: the Democrats desperately need killer slogans, particularly those extending from a compelling new brand. But as a…