Innholdsfortegnelse for November 19, 2020 i The New York Review of Books

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. MARK DANNER is the Class of 1961 Endowed Chair at the University of California at Berkeley and the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and the Humanities at Bard. He is the author of The Massacre at El Mozote, Stripping Bare the Body, and, most recently, Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War. ANDREW DELBANCO is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia and the President of the Teagle Foundation. His most recent book is The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War. BARBARA DEMICK is the author of Eat the…

Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, February 9–September 19, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition by Sarah Hermanson Meister, with contributions from Julie Ault, Kimberly Juanita Brown, River Encalada Bullock, and ten others. MoMA, 176 pp., $55.00 In 1966 the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective devoted to Dorothea Lange—its first-ever solo exhibition of work by a female photographer. Lange’s photographs have now become part of our collective memory of the Great Depression. Migrant Mother (1936)—a portrait taken in a pea pickers’ camp in California of a woman holding her baby and surrounded by her children—is perhaps one of the most reprinted images in history. But beyond her better-known photographs of the Depression and the Dust Bowl migrations, Lange produced…

Red Pill by Hari Kunzru. Knopf, 284 pp., $27.95 Not long ago, Hari Kunzru was asked in an interview, “What is the worst-case scenario for the future?” He answered with brutal lucidity: The US becomes an autocracy, and devolves into a weak and fractious patchwork of jurisdictions run by more or less rapacious oligarchs who conduct a losing war with China, first cold then hot. Human rights become a quaint idea. The environment collapses, and the resulting massive migrations of people lead to vicious authoritarian regimes taking control in richer countries. Genocidal wars are fought over water. The Tibetan plateau is a global flashpoint. New pathogens emerge out of the melting permafrost, killing millions. Life becomes hellish for all but the very wealthy. For the masses, the future looks like…

The Nose and Other Stories by Nikolai Gogol, translated from the Russian by Susanne Fusso. Columbia University Press, 338 pp., $40.00; $17.95 (paper) Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), Russia’s greatest comic writer, thoroughly baffled his contemporaries. Strange, peculiar, wacky, weird, bizarre, and other words indicating enigmatic oddity recur in descriptions of him. “What an intelligent, queer, and sick creature!” remarked Turgenev; another major prose writer, Sergey Aksakov, referred to the “unintelligible strangeness of his spirit.” When Gogol died, the poet Pyotr Vyazemsky sighed, “Your life was an enigma, so is today your death.” Gogol has remained, in the words of another contemporary, among the world’s most “undeciphered [nerazgadannykh] people.” “To say that Nikolai Gogol is one of the most controversial figures in Russian literature,” Victor Erlich began his classic study of the…

MERCURY-HEARTLINK www.katehorsley.com MAGNIFICENT SORROW A Memoir of Two Lives by Kate Horsley Magnificent Sorrow: creative nonficiton about the connection between two women: Suzette Ryerson, who lived from 1890–1921, and the author, whose son died in 2000. 978-1-949652-06-23 • Paper, $14.00 300 Pages • Biography/Memoir Available on Amazon and Organic Books. LYNNE RIENNER PUBLISHERS, INC. US POLICY TOWARD AFRICA Eight Decades of Realpolitik by Herman J. Cohen A former Africa advisor for U.S. presidents, Herman Cohen reviews eight decades of US–Africa policy, grounded in his 38 years of Foreign Service experience. 978-1626378704 • Paper, $35.00 280 Pages • History/Diplomacy Available on Amazon. Author’s Website: cohenonafrica.com CYNTHIA KUMANCHIK www.cynthiakumanchik.com AUTOMATON NATION by Cynthia Kumanchik Automaton Nation is perfect for fans of Twilight and The Hunger Games, where the stakes are high, love…

MAX WEBER’S AGON To the Editors: We appreciate Peter E. Gordon’s thoughtful review of Charisma and Disenchantment, our edition of Max Weber’s “vocation lectures” [NYR, June 11], but of course we’re not writing simply to say thank you. For all the care and precision his essay displays, Professor Gordon is too quick to level the charge that X has missed Y, stating, for example, that in our introduction, we don’t “capture” an important irony that seems awfully close to a point we take pains to stress. We present Weber’s modern scholar as a paradoxical figure who becomes a source of value when she acknowledges the fact of the relativity of all value, and, accordingly, consigns herself to a limited role in values education. This is what we mean where we…

This Is What America Looks Like: My Journey from Refugee to Congresswoman by Ilhan Omar with Rebecca Paley. Dey St., 275 pp., $27.99 After the election of 2018, the US Congress became the most racially and ethnically diverse it had ever been. The freshman class contained a record number of incoming women (thirty-six), including the four young progressives who came to be called “the Squad”: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. The current Congress boasts the largest Black caucus in congressional history—fifty-five members in the House and Senate, including Lucy McBath, a Black woman and gun-control advocate from Georgia whose son was shot and killed by a white man for playing music too loudly—and the first two Native…

AFRICAN-AMERICAN STUDIES Madam C. J. Walker’s Gospel of Giving Black Women’s Philanthropy During Jim Crow Tyrone McKinley Freeman; Foreword by A’Lelia Bundles America’s first self-made female millionaire and her life of activist philanthropy aimed at empowering African-Americans and challenging the injustices inflicted by Jim Crow. Pub October 1, 2020. 6 x 9 in. 304 pp. University of Illinois Press 978-0-252-08535-2 Paper, $24.95 From Slave Cabins to the White House Homemade Citizenship in African American Culture Koritha Mitchell “Mitchell sheds light on Black homemaking in the midst of anti-Blackness and oppression.” —Ms. Pub August 31, 2020. 6 x 9 in. 296 pp. University of Illinois Press 978-0-252-04332-1 Cloth, $34.95 Laughing to Keep from Dying African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century Danielle Fuentes Morgan Morgan analyzes how African American artists highlight…

Jerry Brown I’m sitting at my ranch in western Colusa County, an hour’s drive northwest of Sacramento. When my grandmother grew up here, 140 years ago, there were dozens of vibrant homesteads, successful farms, enough kids to fill the local schoolhouse. There was even a proper cemetery. The Leesville–Ladoga stagecoach came through each day, headed to the mines or to the several hotels beside the mineral springs that dotted the area. On this land now—except for myself and my wife and one other family—only cattle graze. The people and their livelihoods left long ago. It is Trump country. A man I know from town stopped by the other day. He wanted to bring us some rice and recipe ideas. When I asked him how he was doing with the virus…

This song is dedicated, this song goes out, is for. I wrote it in a dream, the second-oldest song in the world. It’s about hours without wages, blue hours, and the lyrics are loosely based; the lyrics recall. They’re anonymous and attributed like rain. I want everybody out there to sing along, even the stones. I want all the lovely people laboring in the dark. Wind in the poplars, overheard speech, traffic noise, receding sirens, people picking glass from the recycling, the whistle and report of illegal fireworks, the report of gunshots, laughter through a wall, the laughter of children—these are my people, swaying imperceptibly. You know all the words because there aren’t any, but there is an addressee, you are the implied recipient of the words in the song…

In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), Jonathan Lear writes of the intellectual trauma of the Crow Indians. Forced to move in the mid-nineteenth century from a nomadic to a settled existence, they catastrophically lost not only their immemorial world but also “the conceptual resources” to understand their past and present. The problem for a Crow Indian, Lear writes, wasn’t just that “my way of life has come to an end.” It was that “I no longer have the concepts with which to understand myself or the world…. I have no idea what is going on.” It is no exaggeration to say that many in the Anglo-American intelligentsia today resemble the Crow Indians, after being successively blindsided by far-right insurgencies, an uncontainable pandemic, and political revolts…

Amherst College Press Frost Library 61 Quadrangle Dr Amherst, MA 01002 Acpress.amherst.edu Brandeis University Press 415 South Street MS 046 Waltham, MA 02453-2728 www.brandeis.edu/press Leiden University Press Rapenburg 73 Leiden 2311 GJ Netherlands (+31) 71-527-1451 www.lup.nl Louisiana State University Press 338 Johnston Hall Baton Rouge, LA 70803 (800) 848-6224 www.lsupress.org Modern Language Association 85 Broad Street Suite 500 New York, NY 10004 www.mla.org Northwestern University Press 629 Noyes St. Evanston, IL 60208 (800)621-2736 nupress.northwestern.edu Southern Illinois University Press 1915 University Press Drive MC 6806 Carbondale, IL 62901 (800)621-2736 www.siupress.com Teachers College Press 1234 Amsterdam Ave New York, NY 10027 (800)575-6566 www.tcpress.com University of British Columbia Press 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z2 www.ubcpress.ca University of Calgary Press 2500 University Drive NW Calgary, Alberta Canada T2N 1N4 press.ucalgary.ca University…

JERRY BROWN was Governor of California from 1975–1983 and 2011–2019. CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. DEBORAH EISENBERG’s latest collection of short stories is Your Duck Is My Duck. BEN FOUNTAIN’s most recent book is Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution. He is also the author of a novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. IAN FRAZIER is the author of eleven books, including Great Plains, Family, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia. HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. is the Alfonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at…