Innholdsfortegnelse for December 17, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern by Francine Prose. Yale University Press, 211 pp., $25.00 The Guggenheim family name is attached to three major cultural institutions. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, on Upper Fifth Avenue in New York, is best known for the 1959 Frank Lloyd Wright building—its greatest single work of art—that houses the collection of what its founder called “non-objective painting.” The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, established in 1925 in honor of a nephew of Solomon’s who died at seventeen, awards fellowships to writers, artists, and scientists. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, housed since 1951 in a single-story palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice, is an idiosyncratic culling of some of the masterworks of modern art, from Brancusi’s Bird in Space to major paintings of Jackson…

Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help by Larissa MacFarquhar. Penguin, 320 pp., $27.95 In Strangers Drowning, Larissa Mac-Farquhar focuses on extreme behavior of a particular kind, that of what one might call moral outliers. These are people who are motivated to act in extraordinary ways to alleviate the suffering of others with whom they otherwise have no ties. It’s a normal human response to be disturbed by the very fact of suffering. Our strongest feelings of empathy may be aroused by those closest to us, but we are not entirely unmoved by the stories of misery that greet us everyday in the newspaper: “Winter Poses New Danger for Migrants,” “Migrant Suffocations in Truck Near Hungary Reveal Tactics of Smugglers.” But for most…

Loving Day by Mat Johnson. Spiegel and Grau, 287 pp., $26.00 The importing of human beings into the US from Africa to be sold as slaves was outlawed in 1808, after which the slave markets of the southern states traded in black people born in America. The rules of New World slavery decreed that a person’s status was derived from that of the mother, not the father. A slave owner’s children by an enslaved woman were, firstly, assets. Neither Frederick Douglass nor Booker T. Washington considered himself mixedrace, because of the one-drop rule that determined how much black blood made a person black. They loathed the thought of their slave-owning white fathers. Douglass never saw his mother’s face in the daylight, because she was always going to or coming back…

Ever since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, Turkish citizens have been living with the bitter consequences of their government’s involvement in the conflict. Along with the US, Turkey’s policy has been to get rid of the Assad regime, but this has not worked. Bashar al-Assad has been strongly defended by his Iranian and Russian backers, and he has cannily given up territory abutting Turkey to Syrian Kurds from the Democratic Union Party, called the PYD. As described by Jonathan Steele in a recent article in these pages, the Syrian Kurds have successfully resisted ISIS in the area on the Turkish border known as Rojava and inspired fellow Kurds on the other side of the border to assert their claims to self-determination.* Kurds are estimated to make up…

The historian John Hope Franklin, who died in 2009, would have turned one hundred this year. I have thought of him often in recent months as we have seen a conservative Republican governor call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds, as the Democratic Party has renamed the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in order to distance itself from two slave-owning forebears, as Yale University debates removing the name Calhoun from one of its undergraduate colleges. Many Americans in 2015 seem to be undertaking an unprecedentedly clear-eyed look at the nation’s past, at the legacy of slavery and race that has made us anything but a colorblind society. There could be no more fitting tribute to Franklin’s one hundredth birthday than this collective stock-taking, for…

1. Strategists will tell you that it is a mistake to fight the battle your enemies want you to fight. You should impose your strategy on them, not let them impose theirs on you. These lessons apply to the struggle with the leaders of ISIS. We have applied pressure upon them in Syria; they have replied with atrocious attacks in Ankara, Beirut, and now Paris. They are trying to provoke an apocalyptic confrontation with the Crusader infidels. We should deny them this opportunity. ISIS wants to convince the world of the West’s indifference to the suffering of Muslims; so we should demonstrate the opposite. ISIS wants to drag Syria ever further into the inferno; so ending the Syrian war should become the first priority of the Obama administration’s final year…

MAS: The Modern Architecture Symposia, 1962–1966: A Critical Edition edited by Rosemarie Haag Bletter and Joan Ockman, with Nancy Eklund Later. The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 339 pp., $80.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Hitler at Home by Despina Stratigakos. Yale University Press, 373 pp., $40.00 Speer: Hitler’s Architect by Martin Kitchen. Yale University Press, 442 pp., $37.50 1. Among the odder conceits of the Romantic movement was the vogue for rendering new buildings as ruins. Inspired by Piranesi’s moody vedute of noble Roman monuments in picturesque decay, late-eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century architects such as John Soane had their latest works depicted as they might look millennia in the future—bare ruin’d choirs and whited sepulchres that spoke of vanished glory and emotional depth. This bizarre practice…

At the beginning of 2015 Ukraine faced a plethora of obstacles and enemies, first and foremost Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was determined to destabilize the country and use the might of the Russian army to crush it. He violated Russian law by using conscripts outside the borders of the country without their written authorization. Accounting for Russian soldiers who were killed and disposing of their bodies caused him a great deal of difficulty and embarrassment. But he succeeded in defeating the valiant Ukrainian soldiers defending Donetsk airport in January. This led to the agreement called Minsk II, signed on February 11, which was negotiated by Ukraine under military duress. Ukraine had to concede the territorial gains that the separatist enclaves had made since the Minsk I agreement, signed in…

Although few people are satisfied with the quality of mental health services in the US, it is still startling to find physicians and psychiatrists enthusiastically calling for a return to asylums. One might think that the grim history of confinement would have precluded such advocacy. Whether in popular imagination (think of The Snake Pit or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), historical literature (Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization), or legislation (exemplified by the Americans with Disabilities Act), the asylum seemed to represent yesterday’s nightmare. Nevertheless, last winter, The Journal of the American Medical Association ran an editorial titled in part “Bring Back the Asylum,”1 and a few weeks later, a New York Times Op-Ed piece endorsed it. In this same spirit, Massachusetts recently invested $300 million in a new mental…

Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America by T. J. Stiles. Knopf, 582 pp., $30.00 The nineteenth-century cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer, who was a general at twenty-three and dead at thirty-six, has probably been the subject of more books than any other American, Lincoln excepted. All until now move swiftly through the brilliant feats of arms of the Civil War career that made Custer a national hero to focus instead on his last hours. Every schoolboy used to know that Custer died in 1876 on a hill overlooking the Little Bighorn River in Montana with five companies of the 7th Cavalry dead to a man around him, killed by Sioux and Cheyenne Indians. Only a single cavalry horse was found alive on the field. Custer…

The Givenness of Things by Marilynne Robinson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 292 pp., $26.00 1. Marilynne Robinson, best known as a novelist (especially for her Pulitzer Prize–winning Gilead of 2004), is also a scholar. She received her doctorate from the University of Washington in 1977, with a dissertation on Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part Two. She now admits, wryly, that she would not gladly read that dissertation. She also said, when she turned seventy, that she had neglected Shakespeare for decades, but was boning up on him again. I don’t believe her. She clearly has been pondering the plays all her life. She thinks through Shakespeare. She does not try to draw meaning out of the plays, but brings her own intuitions to them for validation. Her novels have many indirect…

Macbeth a film directed by Justin Kurzel The weird sisters in Macbeth are never delicate in their cooking. Only in Roman Polanski’s film adaptation of 1971 do they take pains over the hell-broth, though the lingering shots might have something to do with their nakedness (the film was produced by Hugh Hefner) as opposed to their collective Julia Child tendencies. While the witches go about their business, the eye of newt and the toe of frog appear fresh from that morning’s market, while the wool of bat and tongue of dog are dropped into the brew with the kind of culinary panache that would, one suspects, make the hags quite welcome on the Food Channel. One ought to remember that in Shakespeare’s time, as Dr. Johnson reminds us, it was…

1. Despite fizzling out within months, Occupy Wall Street succeeded in changing the terms of political discussion in America. Inequality, the concentration of wealth, the one percent, the new Gilded Age—all became fixtures of national debate thanks in part to the protesters who camped out in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. Even the Republican presidential candidates have felt compelled to address the matter. News organizations, meanwhile, have produced regular reports on the fortunes of the wealthy, the struggles of the middle class, and the travails of those left behind. Even amid the outpouring of coverage of rising income inequality, however, the richest Americans have remained largely hidden from view. On all sides, billionaires are shaping policy, influencing opinion, promoting favorite causes, polishing their images—and carefully shielding themselves from scrutiny. Journalists…

It was the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield who described and condemned what he called “the Whig interpretation of history.” In a book with that title, the young Butterfield in 1931 declared that “the study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. . . .”1 He spread special scorn on those historians, including Lord Acton, who subject the past to contemporary moral judgments, who for instance are unable to see the Whig Charles James Fox as anything but a savior of British liberties. Not that Butterfield was personally unwilling to make moral judgments; he just did not think it was the business of historians. According to Butterfield, the whig historian studying Catholics and Protestants in the…

To the Editors: Tim Parks’s engaging review of The Complete Works of Primo Levi [NYR, November 5] is satisfying on a number of levels, but I was disheartened to see the piece bookended by the “suicide.” Parks’s phrase that Levi “threw himself down the stairwell to his death” is not, in any case, an accurate way to describe a tumble over a railing. But the larger issue is that thoughtful and important people close to Levi, who first thought it was a suicide, have reconsidered the event. These people include his cardiologist and friend David Mendel, his lifelong friend Nobel laureate Rita Levi Montalcini, and Fernando Camon. Levi was in a whirl of activities— he’d scheduled an interview for the following Monday, he was considering the presidency of the publishing…