Innholdsfortegnelse for October 22, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

The Art of Thomas Bewick by Diana Donald, with contributions by Paul F. Donald. Reaktion, 327 pp., $65.00 “Thomas Bewick is an inventor, and the first wood-cutter in the world!” John James Audubon, the great recorder of America’s birds, saluted his equivalent in Britain in these terms in his journal at the end of a visit to Newcastle upon Tyne in 1827. In other words, Bewick was not simply an engraver of wooden blocks for printing, he was, in 1820s terms, one of the men of the day. This was, as Bewick himself wrote, an “age of mechanical improvement.”1 Two years earlier, not forty miles from Newcastle, George Stephenson had presented the world with the first public railway. Whether he was to be thanked likewise for the safety lamp that…

Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker. New Directions, 470 pp., $19.95 (paper) The Act of Killing a film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer The Look of Silence a film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer 1. Two extraordinary documentary films by Joshua Oppenheimer, shot in Indonesia over a period of ten years, begin with the same terse statement: In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Anybody opposed to the military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist: union members, landless farmers, intellectuals, and the ethnic Chinese. In less than a year, and with the direct aid of Western governments, over one million “communists” were murdered. The army used paramilitaries and gangsters to carry out the killings. These men have been in…

Sir Thomas Browne: A Life by Reid Barbour. Oxford University Press, 534 pp., $125.00 In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. Norton, 330 pp, $26.95 In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. Norton, 330 pp, $26.95 Thomas Browne edited by Kevin Killeen. Oxford University Press, 995 pp., $160.00 Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall by Sir Thomas Browne, edited and with an introduction by Stephen Greenblatt and Ramie Targoff. New York Review Books, 170 pp, $14.95 (paper) Thomas Browne (1605–1682) is by common consent the author of some of the finest prose in the English language. Nowhere is it finer than in Hydriotaphia, Urne Buriall, his…

Curiosity by Alberto Manguel. Yale University Press, 377 pp., $30.00 When he was sixteen Alberto Manguel met the nearly blind Jorge Luis Borges in the Pygmalion Anglo-German bookshop in Buenos Aires and, from 1964 to 1968, read aloud to him on a weekly basis. The encounter now seems to have been destined, for if there’s anyone alive today who is as widely read and bibliomaniacal as Borges was in his day, it’s the author of Curiosity, the latest in a series of Manguel’s meditations about reading, libraries, and the spectral spaces in the human psyche that literary works occupy. Books have defined Manguel’s life. Though he was born in Buenos Aires, he spent his first seven years in Israel, where his father served as the Argentinian ambassador, before returning to…

by Patti Smith. M Train Knopf, 253 pp., $25.00 Patti Smith has published a new book, M Train—a work whose charm has much to do with its lithe resistance to the constrictions of any particular genre—as her earlier Just Kids (2010), her memoir of her early partnership with Robert Mapplethorpe, continues to exercise a lively influence. Even before Showtime announced over the summer that it would be the basis for a TV miniseries, it was clear that Just Kids was sending down roots in the culture. For younger readers it serves as an irresistible window into the New York era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, what with a supporting cast including Janis Joplin, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Jimi Hendrix, and Allen Ginsberg, set against such backdrops as…

1. Armageddon It is not quite clear when Europeans woke up to the largest movement of refugees on their soil since the upheavals of World War II, but Sunday, August 16, may have been a decisive turning point. In a television interview that day, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, returning from her summer vacation, said that the European Union’s single greatest challenge was no longer the Greek debt crisis. It was the wave after wave of Syrians and others now trying to enter Europe’s eastern and southern borders. It is “the next major European project,” she said. It “will preoccupy Europe much, much more than. . . the stability of the euro.” In the capitals of Western Europe, Merkel’s words seemed to come as a surprise. And yet across a long…

In Jean Renoir’s Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), a bookseller rescues from the Seine an uncivilized free spirit named Boudu, who proceeds to call down chaos upon the bookseller’s tidy existence. Boudu, large, hairy, and inarticulate, is a clochard—a word, derived from cloche (bell), signifying a bum or hobo. There are various theories about its etymology: that it alludes to the bell announcing the end of marketplace hours, when scavengers were free to collect unsold produce; or to when beggars rang bells to accompany their pleas; or to when the post of bellringer at churches was given to the neediest member of the congregation. The writer Jean-Paul Clébert supposed that the cloche is the sky, and all who sleep under it are its children. A North African immigrant who became…

The Fabric of Space: Water, Modernity, and the Urban Imagination by Matthew Gandy. MIT Press, 351 pp., $30.00 Water 4.0: The Past, Present, and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource by David Sedlak. Yale University Press, 332 pp., $18.00 (paper) Greater São Paulo, a city of 21 million people, is experiencing its worst drought since the 1870s; the city’s water supply is in danger. Sewage, pesticide, and trash pollute São Paulo’s rivers and reservoirs. Rain falling on the vast paved surface of the metropolis drains quickly into its polluted rivers. Brazil’s ample natural resources include 13 percent of the global supply of freshwater for only 3 percent of the world’s population. Yet as of August 25 South America’s largest city had only enough water in its reservoirs to supply…

The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding by Eric Nelson. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 390 pp., $29.95 The powers of the executive branch are under fierce scrutiny. President Obama’s use of an executive order to modify the enforcement of immigration laws has been opposed by twenty-four states challenging the legality of his actions, federal judge Arthur Schwab has unilaterally issued a judgment striking down the executive order, while in the blogosphere Obama is being adversely compared to the autocratic Stuart monarch Charles I.* Over in Britain it has recently been revealed that the queen and Prince Charles, the heir to the throne, have been asked by ministers to approve or veto bills debated in the House of Commons, and that in 1999 the queen vetoed a bill concerning military…

Must We Divide History into Periods? by Jacques Le Goff, translated from the French by M. B. DeBevoise. Columbia University Press, 160 pp., $30.00 The Ugly Renaissance: Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty by Alexander Lee. Doubleday, 433 pp., $30.00 1. Shortly before his death last year, the eminent French medievalist Jacques Le Goff published a small book that may be considered his scholarly testament and that has now been translated into English by Malcolm DeBevoise with the title Must We Divide History into Periods? The answer Le Goff ultimately gives to his question is yes, claiming that periodization makes “the study of history both feasible and rewarding”; but the main point of his argument is to redefine the commonly accepted historical period known as the…

Folk memories endure, mothers’ and grandmothers’ sagas trumping documents in neglected archives. What will Syria’s youth, when they are old, tell their children? All will have stories of cowering in their flimsy houses while bombs fell, of the deadening existence of refugee camps, or of escapes through treacherous seas and perilous highways to uncertain lives in strange lands. My maternal grandmother left Mount Lebanon, then part of Syria, as a child in the late nineteenth century during a confrontation between the Christians of her village and their Ottoman rulers. Although her father was killed a few months before she was born, she told me many times how he faced Turkish troops on horseback as if she had witnessed it. I don’t know what really happened; but her stories, including of…

Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War by Brandon R. Brown. Oxford University Press, 258 pp., $29.95 In the summer of 1946, as soon as possible after the end of World War II, the Royal Society of London organized a celebration for the three hundredth birthday of Isaac Newton. Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642, laid the foundations of modern physics with his masterpiece, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, in 1686, and served as president of the Royal Society from 1703 until his death in 1727. The birthday party had been postponed because of the war. Surviving in the ruins of defeated Germany were many distinguished scientists, all of them loyal to their country and many of them tainted by active collaboration with the Nazi regime. The Royal Society…

Phishing for Phools: The Economics of Manipulation and Deception by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller. Princeton University Press, 272 pp., $24.95 Very few economists foresaw the great recession of 2008–2009. Why not? Economists have long assumed that human beings are “rational,” but behavioral findings about human fallibility have put a lot of pressure on that assumption. People tend to be overconfident; they display unrealistic optimism; they often deal poorly with risks; they neglect the long term (“present bias”); and they dislike losses a lot more than they like equivalent gains (“loss aversion”). And until recent years, most economists have not had much to say about the problem of inequality, which seems to be getting worse. There is a strong argument that within the economics profession, these problems are…

The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee. Norton, 516 pp., $26.95; $15.95 (paper) Such is the power of the image of Mahatma Gandhi as a saint of iconolatry, emaciated, half-naked, bent over a walking stick as he leads India’s masses to freedom from imperial power without ever raising a gun or a hand or even his voice, that the impression of India’s freedom movement having been a pacifist, nonviolent one is almost ineradicable. It is of course far from the truth. There was always a violent strain in that history as well, less unified, more contested. Exactly a century ago Rabindranath Tagore wrote of the struggle between the two forms of revolution. In his 1915 novel The Home and the World, he has the noble and altruistic aristocrat Nikhil represent…