Innholdsfortegnelse for January 14, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH teaches philosophy at NYU. His latest books are As If: Idealization and Ideals and The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. LYNN EMANUEL’s most recent collection, The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected, won the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her forthcoming collection is Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing. GAVIN FRANCIS is a physician in Edinburgh. He has won several awards for his books, which include Empire Antarctica and Adventures in Human Being. His latest book, Intensive Care, about his experience during the Covid-19 pandemic, will be published in the UK in January. LOUISE GLÜCK’s most recent poetry collection is Faithful and Virtuous Night, which won the National Book Award. A new collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective, will be published…

Planting the World: Joseph Banks and His Collectors: An Adventurous History of Botany by Jordan Goodman. William Collins, 520 pp., $32.99 In 1772, aged twenty-nine, the English naturalist Joseph Banks gave up traveling abroad. He had sailed around the world with Captain James Cook on the Endeavour and had just returned from Iceland. That was enough. Apart from a short trip to the Netherlands in 1773, he stayed firmly on British soil for the rest of his life. It was not, however, the end of his involvement with global expeditions. In Planting the World, Jordan Goodman demonstrates Banks’s determination to send botanists across the seas whenever an opportunity offered—to Africa and China, South America and Australia. His aim was to increase knowledge and to build up an unrivaled private collection…

Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness by Anne Harrington. Norton, 366 pp., $27.95; $17.95 (paper) This Book Will Change Your Mind About Mental Health: A Journey into the Heartland of Psychiatry by Nathan Filer. London: Faber and Faber, 248 pp., £9.99 (paper) Twenty-five years ago, at the end of my two-month rotation in psychiatry, Edinburgh Medical School delivered the results of our student assessments by posting three lists of names on a departmental notice board. It was a nerve-racking experience for all of us, who would learn of having passed or failed in full view of our peers. A crowd gathered around the board, and one by one my classmates found their names on the pass list—or, even better, on the shorter list of those…

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller. Princeton University Press, 377 pp., $27.95; $19.95 (paper) One of the most beloved episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation is called “Darmok.” On stardate 45047.2, the crew of the USS Enterprise, led by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, encounters an advanced alien species called the Tamarians with whom it is unable to communicate. Though the Tamarians’ words and syntax can be grasped, what they’re saying seems to make no sense. “But are they truly incomprehensible?” Picard wonders. “In my experience, communication is a matter of patience, imagination.” And yet a barrier remains. The frustrated Tamarian leader, Dathon, keeps repeating the same peculiar phrase: “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” The Tamarians, it turns out, speak only in…

Memory by Bernadette Mayer. Siglio, 335 pp., $45.00 Piece of Cake by Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh. Station Hill, 323 pp., $24.00 (paper) Just after Frank O’Hara’s untimely death in 1966, John Ashbery made a case for the poet’s enduring significance. In spite of only modest success during his lifetime, O’Hara was “the first modern poet” to pose a vital question: “Can art do this?” O’Hara’s and Ashbery’s different ways of answering that question have changed what counts as poetry in the US, which may be why the New York School—the circle of poets and artists who worked and socialized in Manhattan in the 1950s and 1960s—remains a powerful category, in spite of the varied styles and stances toward poetry-making taken by the poets associated with it. Bernadette Mayer belongs…

THE GORSUCH DEFERENCE? To the Editors: Readers of Noah Feldman’s insightful article on the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s influence on the current Supreme Court [“The Battle Over Scalia’s Legacy,” NYR, December 17, 2020] might appreciate a factoid regarding Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opposition to the Chevron deference granting significant deference to agency interpretation of statutory authority. Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council (1984) protected a Reagan administration Environmental Protection Agency interpretation of the Clean Air Act granting polluters greater flexibility regarding compliance. The EPA administrator issuing that regulation was Anne Gorsuch, Justice Gorsuch’s mother. But for other circumstances, it could have been called the Gorsuch deference. Besides leading us to wonder how discussions of administrative law over Thanksgiving dinner went in the Gorsuch household, this history is a reminder that, like…

The Life of William Faulkner: The Past Is Never Dead, 1897–1934 by Carl Rollyson. University of Virginia Press, 476 pp., $34.95 The Life of William Faulkner: This Alarming Paradox, 1935–1962 by Carl Rollyson. University of Virginia Press, 622 pp., $34.95 The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorra. Liveright, 433 pp., $29.95 Last spring, after the world saw the video of the murder of George Floyd, few Americans could turn an oblivious eye to the racism and violence that are part of the brutal, inhuman legacy of slavery. Coincidentally, as protesters demanding justice packed the streets, William Faulkner rode into town, the subject of two major studies: Carl Rollyson’s massive, well-researched two-volume biography and Michael Gorra’s eloquent analysis of how the Civil War ricochets throughout his best-known novels.…

Mank a film written by Jack Fincher and directed by David Fincher The Brothers Mankiewicz: Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics by Sydney Ladensohn Stern. University Press of Mississippi, 468 pp., $35.00 Herman J. Mankiewicz, the Prohibition-era newspaperman, Algonquin Round Table bon vivant, Hollywood producer, and subject of David Fincher’s movie Mank, is largely remembered for two pieces of writing—a 1926 telegram urging his drinking buddy Ben Hecht to join him in Hollywood, where “millions” were “to be grabbed” and “your only competition is idiots,” and the first draft of the screenplay that became Orson Welles’s first movie, Citizen Kane (1941). Kane, the prismatic biography of a press lord transparently based on William Randolph Hearst, which has come to be popularly regarded as the greatest of Hollywood movies, is only one…

The day’s Scottish. Imperceptibleand far-seeing through coils of copra fog.Slow mastodons scurry to clear the roadahead, where brittle hazard lights dilutepaths I must go, or must not go, dependson the zero-hour radiationwhiteness. Its static rage behind closed doorscrackles close in my ears with a tinctureof aqua fortis. My fifteenth winter.First touched snow on a stratovolcano.Then, to a city’s torch song, assembleda wind-wall with ungloved hands, and winterafter winter I pass shuttered houses,as lost as a sparrow in a mead hall,flitting reconciled with lost, scarcely heardthough the lost contrails of childhood shine backthe sea. The sea-absolving light evenhere I glimpse in gorges mute with ice floesrefracts the ambient blare of street plows,now utterly gone. A furrowed miragesolders in their wake Haudensaunees’ bones,buried long too deep for memorial.The road’s double bereavement remains…

hello to the unimaginative and dim ways of my kin, helloto the bad lot we are, to the women mean and plucked, and to the men on the broken steps who beat down the roses with their hosings,to the nights that rose black as an inked plate, into which an acid bit stars— puckered, tight, hard, pale as a surgeon’s scars,hello to all that vast, unconditional bad luck, to the sensible, the stuffy, the ugly couture of the thrifty, to the limp of bad goods, of oldfurniture, the repeated wince of the creaky rocker, and to the grandmothers dying in its clutch, and hello to rage which like an axis can move the world.…

Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution by David A. Bell. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 335 pp., $30.00 In 1917, when Europe seemed to lie in ruins, Max Weber wrote an influential essay with the misleadingly dull title “Parliament and Government in a Reconstructed Germany.” In it he drew attention to the outbreak of “Caesarism” in nineteenth-century Europe, taking Otto von Bismarck as the prime example of a modern Caesar for Germany (and indeed for the entire continent). How brilliantly, according to Weber, the old Junker had reduced Parliament to a rubber stamp, what devastating use he had made of emergency legislation and popular appeals, how ruthlessly he had expanded the power of Germany and consolidated his own. You might think that Weber goes on…

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. Knopf, 305 pp., $26.95 Maggie O’Farrell’s moving historical novel Hamnet is a story of deep loss—the death of a child, struck down by an incomprehensibly virulent epidemic—and its impact upon a marriage that was already buckling under almost intolerable strain. The story’s surprise turn is that, though the grief-stricken wife succumbs for years to crippling depression and though the husband absconds and disappears into his work, the marriage miraculously survives, recovers, and becomes stronger. The wife and husband in question are Anne Hathaway (or Agnes, as she was named in her father’s will and as O’Farrell calls her) and William Shakespeare. The novel begins in the provincial market town Stratford-upon-Avon, where the eleven-year-old Hamnet, the Shakespeares’ only son, is alarmed by the sudden eruption of strange…

The Hitler Conspiracies by Richard J. Evans. Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $27.95 Conspiracy theories can serve many functions. They may be tactical weapons wielded against political adversaries, or licenses for every form of revilement and victimization; they may be tools of induction into militant cadres or apocalyptic cults; they may offer seemingly reasoned justifications for already deeply held suspicions and animosities; they may provide entertainment in which any true believer can become an investigator, infiltrator, counter-conspirator, or, if committed enough, perhaps world savior. In the age of the Internet they continue to evolve into a proliferating and constantly mutating combination of scripture and adventure story, readily monetized by hucksters and proselytizers, able to incorporate any arbitrary detail—a reference to take-out pizza in a purloined e-mail, say—and inflate it into…

The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 1 by Peter Weiss, translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel, with a foreword by Fredric Jameson and a glossary by Robert Cohen. Duke University Press, 325 pp., $27.95 (paper) The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume 2 by Peter Weiss, translated from the German by Joel Scott, with an afterword by Jurgen Schutte. Duke University Press, 320 pp., $27.95 (paper) To the extent that the German writer Peter Weiss is known in the US, it is for his verse play The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade. Marat/Sade debuted in West Berlin in 1964 and quickly became a hit on the West End and Broadway, in a storied…

Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics by Charles Camic. Harvard University Press, 492 pp., $39.95 We are all Veblenians now. Our understanding of the way people’s acquisitions and activities advertise their superiority—not least in an era of Facebook show-offs and Instagrammable lives—has roots in work that the economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen published over a century ago. Behavioral economics finds a precursor in Veblen. So does evolutionary psychology. Our worries about the “financialization” of capital, with its overgrowth of exotic instruments of debt and the institutions that create and trade them? Veblen got there first. Patriarchy as a system centered on warfare, private property, and the control of women’s bodies: this feminist vision, too, was elaborated in his work. Veblen even presaged the ascent of Trump.…