Innholdsfortegnelse for February 11, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

The Joy of Playing, the Joy of Thinking: Conversations About Art and Performance by Charles Rosen and Catherine Temerson, translated from the French by Catherine Zerner, with a foreword by Israel Rosenfield. Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 138 pp., $21.95 Charles Rosen’s first review in these pages appeared just over fifty years ago, in the February 26, 1970, issue, and it was an absolute stinker. The object of his philippic was the second edition of the Harvard Dictionary of Music, and he laid into it with a will: “The Harvard Dictionary of Music offends against decorum on the first column of its first page.” Having set the terms of engagement, he lashes about him left, right, and center, starting with “the initial entry, A,” before pulverizing con abbandono and Abbreviations. Within…

From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century by William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen. University of North Carolina Press, 416 pp., $28.00 “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?” asks the healer Minnie Ransom in Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel The Salt Eaters, set in Georgia in the 1970s. “Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter.” Minnie is speaking to her friend Velma Henry, who has suffered a severe mental and physical breakdown. Velma is a deeply committed and indefatigable African American1 civil rights activist, wife, and mother, but incessant meetings, disappointing fundraisers, and protests met with violence and mass arrests have left her exhausted, disillusioned, and enraged. Near the beginning…

The Chemical Age: How Chemists Fought Famine and Disease, Killed Millions, and Changed Our Relationship with the Earth by Frank A. von Hippel. University of Chicago Press, 389 pp., $29.00 The Contamination of the Earth: A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age by François Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux, translated from the French by Janice Egan and Michael Egan. MIT Press, 459 pp., $39.95 What is often called “the first use of weapons of mass destruction” took place on April 22, 1915, near the town of Ypres, in western Belgium. Six months earlier, Germany’s hopes for a quick victory in World War I had been dashed on the banks of the Marne, and the country had enlisted some of its top scientists to break the stalemate. One of them,…

The Poet’s Mistake by Erica McAlpine. Princeton University Press, 277 pp., $99.95; $29.95 (paper) Everybody makes mistakes; only some of them become canonical. John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is one of the most celebrated poems in the English language, and it concludes with what appears to be a serious gaffe. Describing the experience of reading Homer in translation, the speaker compares himself to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés surveying the New World for the first time; he is like stout Cortez when with eagle eyesHe star’d at the Pacific—and all his menLook’d at each other with a wild surmise—Silent, upon a peak in Darien. Unfortunately, Keats seems to have mixed up his explorers: Vasco Núñez de Balboa is the one who founded a colonial settlement on the…

Tokyo in the 1960s—shadowy, dazzling, and flooded with life—was photographed without rest. A profusion of Japanese optical companies, many still famous today, were outdoing their Western competitors, and even the city’s grayer, humbler districts had tiny shops whose delicate glass shelves were arrayed with exquisite cameras. In the weekend crowds of Asakusa and Harajuku, every other person seemed to carry one of them. These were the years of the first jubilant flourishing of postwar Japan, life was unfamiliar everywhere, and people were intensely curious. Inspired in each street and station by whirls of images that told them what lipsticks, motorbikes, and televisions to buy, which hot springs and seaside hotels to visit, amateurs filled heavy silk-bound albums with pictures not just of their families, but of steam locomotives, pagodas, flowers,…

Harsh and gray dawned the day of the Stupid Coup, with a lowering sky of dense dark clouds, slippery muddy grass underfoot, and a stiff, unforgiving wind that kept the “Stop the Steal” flags flapping. Face-painted and brightly festooned pilgrims bearing banners—snarling Trump straddling a tank, pumped-up Trump-as-Rambo brandishing a machine gun, grimacing Trump as motorcycle gang chieftain—milled about the archaic hulk of the Washington Monument looking like the remnants of a postapocalyptic cult, with beefy bearded men in camo pants and Harley jackets, and women wearing red, white, and blue sweatshirts and draped in red “Make American Great Again” flags like Roman togas. And everywhere on hats and helmets and sweatshirts and pants was that doubleplosive syllable he had spent his life affixing to buildings and airplanes and “universities”…

Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight Over a Modernist Masterpiece by Alex Beam. Random House, 337 pp., $28.00 Edith Farnsworth’s Country House an exhibition at the Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois, July 1, 2020–November 14, 2021 1. Conventional wisdom holds that the most enticing way to introduce architecture to a lay audience is through the human element that animates this most social of all art forms. Nowhere is that inducement clearer than in books that deal with the private lives of famous architects, which are far more likely to engage general readers than recondite technical treatises or the abstruse theoretical cogitations that have long dominated academic architectural publishing. Domestic architecture in particular frequently arouses deep personal emotions between designers and clients, sometimes with life-changing consequences, and…

In a speech at the Republican National Convention last August, Chen Guangcheng, a blind, iron-willed human rights lawyer and dissident from China whom the Obama administration brought to the United States in 2012, said: Standing up to tyranny is not easy. I know. When I spoke out against China’s One Child Policy and other injustices, I was persecuted, beaten, sent to prison, and put under house arrest.… The CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is an enemy of humanity. It is terrorizing its own people and it is threatening the well-being of the world.… The United States must use its values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law to gather a coalition of other democracies to stop CCP’s aggression. President Trump has led on this, and we need the other countries…

1. On October 16, 2020, Samuel Paty, a forty-seven-year-old history and civics teacher at a public middle school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, a northwestern suburb of Paris, was attacked and beheaded. His assailant, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was eighteen and lived sixty miles away in Normandy. The son of Muslim Chechen refugees, Anzorov was born in Russia and came to France with his parents when he was six. He had never met Paty and didn’t know what he looked like, so he paid two students he found outside the school to identify him. Surveillance cameras show the students pointing at Paty as he walked out the front gate around 5:00 PM. Anzorov followed him and stabbed him repeatedly in the middle of the street with a twelve-inch knife he had bought the day before.…