Innholdsfortegnelse for October 22, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. His latest book is Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed. ROBYN CRESWELL is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale. He is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut. BRIAN DILLON’s Suppose a Sentence was published in September. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. MERVE EMRE is an Associate Professor of English at Oxford. Her next book, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, will be published next summer. CAROLINE FRASER’s most recent book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Her first book, God’s…

Nam June Paik an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, October 17, 2019–February 9, 2020; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, June 1–October 4, 2020; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, scheduled to open in April 2021; and the Singapore National Gallery, scheduled to open in the fall of 2021. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Sook-Kyung Lee and Rudolf Frieling. London: Tate, 175 pp., £25.00 On a freezing night in February 1967, the cellist Charlotte Moorman and the artist-composer Nam June Paik performed Paik’s Opera Sextronique for the first time at the Film-Maker’s Cinematheque, beneath the Wurlitzer Building on West 41st Street in New York City. Undercover cops had lurked at rehearsals, eager for evidence of obscenity. Moorman and Paik delivered: Moorman was often naked (or nearly) during their collaborations. (Paik later…

Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear by Patrick Boucheron, translated from the French by Willard Wood. Other Press, 159 pp., $14.99 (paper) Machiavelli: His Life and Times by Alexander Lee. London: Picador, 762 pp., $47.95 “Is Machiavelli good, then, or is he evil?” asks the French scholar Patrick Boucheron in his discussion of The Prince, a book whose “whole program is to uncouple political action from conventional morality.” Is he advising political leaders to be treacherous, violent, and dishonest (as Diderot believed), or revealing to ordinary people the mechanisms behind their leaders’ dishonesty, violence, and treachery (as Rousseau believed)? “We would like to have an answer,” Boucheron writes, but the matter is better “set aside.” Machiavelli was simply saying “the truth about things.” Still, the question hangs…

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals by Saidiya Hartman. Norton, 441 pp., $17.95 (paper) The archive can be maddening. Historians encounter interesting people there whose lives appear in mere snippets, spurring curiosity that can never be entirely satiated. Scholars of American slavery are particularly familiar with this phenomenon. The people who could give the best account of day-to-day life before emancipation were the people most directly affected by the institution: the enslaved. Yet the nature of slavery was such that these individuals were, with few exceptions, silenced. The vast majority of them could not write and were thus unable to leave letters; their marriages, unrecognized by law, produced no licenses to be maintained as part of an official record. Owning no property,…

Jack by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 309 pp., $27.00 John Ames, the old preacher who has lived in the small town of Gilead, Iowa, all his life, where he is the Congregationalist minister, tells the story of Gilead, the first of a series of interconnected novels that Marilynne Robinson has been publishing since 2004. Toward the end of that meditative, troubled, searching book, the dying minister says that other peoples’ souls are, in the end, a mystery to him. Try as we might, “in every important way we are such secrets from each other … there is a separate language in each of us.” Each human being, he thinks, “is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations.” We have “resemblances,” which enable…

Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by Nicholas A. Basbanes. Knopf, 461 pp., $37.50 On December 17, 1877, Mark Twain delivered an after-dinner speech at a banquet of graybeards gathered in a Boston hotel to celebrate John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday and the twentieth anniversary of the founding of The Atlantic Monthly. Seated at the head table along with Whittier were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—a band of authors, one newspaper worshipfully noted, who bathed the place in an “almost holy air.” Twain was introduced by The Atlantic’s editor, William Dean Howells, and proceeded to entertain the assembled literati with a lengthy tale he thought pretty funny at the time. Three seedy characters calling themselves Emerson, Holmes, and Longfellow enter a lonely…

Tired of rural life, the king and queenreturn to the city,all the little princessesrattling in the back of the carsinging the song of being:I am, you are, he, she, it is—But there will beno conjugation in the car, oh no.Who can speak of the future? Nobody knows anything about the future,even the planets do not know.But the princesses will have to live in it.What a sad day the day has become.Outside the car, the cows and pastures are drifting away;they look calm, but calm is not the truth.Despair is the truth. This is whatmother and father know. All hope is lost.We must return to where it was lostif we want to find it again.…

PAMELA KARLAN The last time I saw Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a year ago—in October 2019, when I argued Bostock v. Clayton County before the Supreme Court. The case presented the question of whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in employment “because of … sex,” prohibits an employer from denying someone a job opportunity for being lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Ginsburg’s was the first question, and she began, “Ms. Karlan, how do you answer the argument that back in 1964, this could not have been in Congress’s mind?” Back in 1964, likely no one in Congress thought lesbian, gay, or bisexual people should be protected. But it was in no small part due to her efforts to combat sex-based stereotypes that the…

Which Country Has the World’s Best Health Care? by Ezekiel J. Emanuel. PublicAffairs, 453 pp., $30.00 “Bow your heads, folks, conservatism has hit America,” The New Republic lamented following the 1946 elections. “All the rest of the world is moving Left, America is moving Right.” Having dominated both houses of Congress throughout President Franklin Roosevelt’s three-plus terms in office (1933–1945), Democrats lost their majorities in a blowout. Some blamed it on the death of FDR, others on the emerging Soviet threat or the bumpy return to civilian life following World War II. The incoming Republican “Class of ’46” would leave a deep mark on history; its members, including California’s Richard Nixon and Wisconsin’s Joseph McCarthy, were determined to root out Reds in government and rein in the social programs of…

Richard III: The Self-Made King by Michael Hicks. Yale University Press, 416 pp., $35.00 Richard III was king of England for only twenty-six months (June 1483 to August 1485). Yet thanks in large part to Shakespeare’s vivid depiction of him as a charismatic villain, he is one of the best-known monarchs and most controversial figures in English history. His critics claim, rightly, that he was a bully, a thief, and a murderer who usurped the throne by killing the “Princes in the Tower” (the boy-king Edward V and his brother, Richard, Duke of York). By contrast, his defenders in the Richard III Society (founded in 1924 as the Fellowship of the White Boar) believe, also rightly, that his vices were exaggerated by Tudor propagandists and that he was a pious…

EARLY LIFE ISN’T EVERYTHING To the Editors: I appreciated Simon Callow’s insightful and engaging review of Life Isn’t Everything, the oral history and biographical portrait of my brother, Mike Nichols [NYR, September 24]. I was saddened, however, to see our mother, Brigitte, dismissed with the single word “nightmarish,” and I will attempt in this letter to relate some information that might allow a fuller and kinder understanding of her. She was an intelligent and sensitive woman whose death in 1985 was widely mourned, especially by the many young people in whose lives she took an active interest. Our mother suffered grievous losses in her early years: her mother, Hedwig Lachmann, died in 1918, a victim of the influenza pandemic, and her father, Gustav Landauer, was assassinated by right-wing militia men…