Innholdsfortegnelse for November 5, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

MATTHEW AUCOIN is a composer, conductor, and 2018 Mac Arthur Fellow. His new opera, Eurydice, will come to the Metropolitan Opera in November 2021. FRANCISCO CANTÚ is the author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. MAGGIE DOHERTY is the author of The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s. She teaches writing at Harvard. ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches European history at Prince ton. His most recent book is Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe. COLIN GRANT’s books include Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa and, most recently, Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation. NELLIE HERMANN is the author of the novels The Cure for Grief and The…

Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures by Pierre Boulez, edited and translated from the French by Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman, and Arnold Whittall. University of Chicago Press, 662 pp., $40.00 In 2014, when I was an apprentice conductor with the Chicago Symphony, I first conducted that ensemble in public with an enormous projection of Pierre Boulez looming over me. Boulez, the revered and widely influential French composer and conductor, was nearly ninety at the time. He had originally been slated to lead two weeks of programs in Chicago, but his declining health prevented him from traveling; as a result, his conducting duties were apportioned among three young conductors, myself included. The orchestra’s administration compensated for the disappointment of Boulez’s physical absence through video interviews with the maestro about the…

Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay, edited and with an introduction by Gary Edward Holcomb and William J. Maxwell. Penguin, 165 pp., $16.00 (paper) The peripatetic writer Claude McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889 but made in Harlem. As he wrote in his memoir, A Long Way from Home (1937), nothing came close to its “hot syncopated fascination.” His time there was heady and fortuitous. It was a period, recalled Langston Hughes, “when the Negro was in vogue,” and a number of competitors battled for the souls of black folk. They included wealthy, exoticseeking white voyeurs and Afrophilic benefactors; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which aimed to marshal the arts into the service of civil rights; the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Marcus Garvey’s pan-Africanist…

Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin by Megan Rosenbloom. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 275 pp., $26.00 In June 2014 the Houghton Library at Harvard University announced that its copy of Des destinées de l’âme, a meditation on the soul by the French novelist and poet Arsène Houssaye dating from the mid-1880s, had been subjected to mass spectrometry testing and was “without a doubt bound in human skin.” The book had been presented to the library in 1934 and was one of three in Harvard’s libraries that had recently been tested. The other two turned out to be sheepskin. “While the unusual and grotesque provenance have made the book a popular object of curiosity, particularly to undergraduates,” the Houghton’s press release…

Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation by Andrew Marantz. Viking, 380 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper) Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church by Megan Phelps-Roper. Picador, 289 pp., $27.00; $18.00 (paper) We all could have ignored the Westboro Baptist Church, theoretically, but the opportunity to be party to a morality play seemed unusual and interesting, back then. It was a sunny day in 2014, just before the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, and protesters from the church had come all the way from Topeka, Kansas, to demonstrate on a street corner near my office in Manhattan. They had stopped there to protest my then employer, Gawker, as part of a swing through New York City designed to antagonize the media…

The Book of Anna (Karenina’s Novel) by Carmen Boullosa, translated from the Spanish by Samantha Schnee. Coffee House, 182 pp., $17.95 (paper) In 1899 Anton Chekhov wrote to Maxim Gorky, an up-and-coming writer whose stories had caught his and Tolstoy’s attention: The day before yesterday I was at L. N. Tolstoy’s; he praised you very highly and said that you were “a remarkable writer.” He likes your “The Fair” and “In the Steppe,” and does not like “Malva.” He said: “You can invent anything you like, but you can’t invent psychology, and in Gorky one comes across just psychological inventions: he describes what he has never felt.” In another letter, Chekhov advised Gorky against his tendency to write like “a spectator in the theater who expresses his delight with so…

Marie Antoinette’s World: Intrigue, Infidelity, and Adultery in Versailles by Will Bashor. Rowman and Littlefield, 297 pp., $24.95 Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen by John Hardman. Yale University Press, 363 pp., $30.00 Lock her up! In this case, they not only locked her up but also cut off her head. It is not often that a queen is arrested, tried, and publicly executed. Henry VIII had two of his wives beheaded, one after a trial, the other by bill of attainder, but their executions took place in the privacy of the Tower of London. Marie-Antoinette’s problem was not her husband, Louis XVI, who was tried and executed for treason in January 1793. At the time of her own trial nine months later, she found herself the former queen…

Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory by Brian P. Copenhaver. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 682 pp., $55.00 Learned men in the Renaissance loved oratory as deeply as politicians did in the nineteenth century, and they practiced it with skill and dedication. They wrote speeches to open church councils, to advertise university courses, and to praise everything from ancient disciplines they hoped to revive to great teachers who had just died. Working from scraps of evidence, they composed the lost speeches of historical figures, such as the emperor Heliogabalus’s oration to the prostitutes of Rome. They wrote satirical eulogies of flies and dogs, gout and debt, beer and drunkenness. In the most famous of these, The Praise of Folly, Erasmus brought a…

Battling Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug by Leandra Ruth Zarnow. Harvard University Press, 441 pp., $35.00 Bella Bella a play by Harvey Fierstein, directed by Kimberly Senior, at City Center, New York City, October 22–December 1, 2019 Sometime after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump, Liz Abzug, daughter of the politician Bella Abzug, got in touch with Harvey Fierstein. Fierstein, a legend of downtown theater with a joyful, gravelly voice, made his name with Torch Song Trilogy, a 1982 sequence of plays he wrote and starred in, about a gay Jewish drag queen living in New York City in the 1970s and early 1980s. The trilogy earned him two Tony awards, one for best play and one for best actor. In the years that…

A storm breathes—down our necks,yes, but also oxygenatedby its warm air intake. As it knocks about the Bahamas, ours is bated;fresh water “flies off the shelves,”and the coast by decree evacuated, for we will not recuse ourselves,not even at the peninsular end,where the land mass calves. Meanwhile, who can gainsay this friend,the rosy armadillo, that surfaces?And this katydid big as my hand, greener than cotyledons; surplusesof dragonflies with hematiteball-bearings for eyes, and tortoises that one must run out to in the night,in the lightning, to save when they’vedropped, as from an Aeschylean height, mid-crossing? As likely to wavea flag of surrender as to appreciatemy dash into the road, the autoclave- like contraption hissed in its breastplate.I delivered it to the long grassjust as the ground issued an intimate low Florida…

WEIGHING RESTORATIVE JUSTICE To the Editors: Reading Michelle Kuo’s review of Danielle Sered’s Until We Reckon [NYR, August 20], I could not help wondering if the “restorative justice” practice it discussed could potentially result in further victimization for crime victims. For example, if a case was designated as eligible for this type of prison alternative and the defendant agreed to participate, would not the crime victim also feel pressured to participate? If the victim declined and requested that the prosecution proceed as usual, the defendant could rightly feel that they were now being prosecuted not by the relative abstraction of the state but that they were being prosecuted very specifically by his or her victim. But for the victim’s preference for traditional prosecution, the defendant would avoid prison altogether, thereby…

ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New York Review. DAVID W. BLIGHT is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale. His biography of Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom, received the Pulitzer Prize for History. CAROLINE FRASER’s most recent book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. VIVIAN GORNICK is the author, most recently, of Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader. MICHAEL GORRA’s latest book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, was published in August. He teaches at Smith. MICHAEL GREENBERG is the author of Hurry Down Sunshine and Beg, Borrow, and Steal: A Writer’s Life. LINDA GREENHOUSE teaches at Yale Law School and is a New York Times contributing columnist. A new edition of her book The U.S.…

On September 23, less than two weeks before he tested positive for Covid, Donald Trump made explicit what has long been implicit: he will not accept defeat in the presidential election. Asked whether he would “commit here today for a peaceful transferal of power after the November election,” Trump replied, “Get rid of the [mail-in] ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.” Earlier that day Trump explained why he wants to appoint a successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court before the election: “This scam that the Democrats are pulling—it’s a scam—the scam will be before the United States Supreme Court.” The plan could hardly have been laid out more clearly. If he loses, he will rely on…

The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care by Anne Boyer. Picador, 308 pp., $26.00; $17.99 (paper) There are, according to the sociologist Arthur Frank, three kinds of illness narratives: the restitution narrative, the chaos narrative, and the quest narrative. The restitution narrative, he wrote in his influential book The Wounded Storyteller (1995), is the one favored by Western capitalism: it is the story told in the TV commercial urging its recumbent viewer to buy cold medicine or the hospital brochure printed in calming colors; its plot is the ill person healed by the marvels of modern medicine, declaring, “Yesterday I was healthy, today I’m sick, but tomorrow I’ll be healthy again.” The chaos narrative, told from within the period of illness, “imagines life…