Innholdsfortegnelse for February 25, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His most recent book is IF: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. His latest book is Engines of Liberty: How Citizen Movements Succeed. EAMON DUFFY is Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge. His most recent book is A People’s Tragedy: Studies in Reformation. PAUL FRANZ recently received his Ph.D. from the English Department at Yale. CAROLINE FRASER’s most recent book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Her first book, God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian…

“Bechky introduces readers to the intricacies of a high-stakes job that can change the outcome of some of the most important court cases.”—Discover Magazine “Intriguing…. A lucid analysis of Nero and the Great Fire, enhanced by Barrett’s clear, engaging style [and] his obvious love of his subject.”—Diana Preston, Washington Post “A careful study of what [Clair] argues is an overlooked cause of inequity in the criminal justice system: the unexpectedly combative relationship between defendants and their lawyers.”—Harper’s Magazine “Drawing voraciously on her own and others’ research into faiths…. Luhrmann seeks to map how modern believers make their gods real.”—Ariel Sabar, New York Times “Eminently worth reading…. Now, perhaps for the first time, [Ravenna] emerges triumphant from the shadow of the so-called Dark Ages.”—Ian Thomson, The Spectator “Scott Peeples has plumbed…

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord. Hachette, 468 pp., $30.00; $18.99 (paper; to be published in March) T. S. Eliot, in his 1944 essay “What Is a Classic?,” complained that a new kind of provincialism was becoming apparent in our culture: “a provincialism, not of space, but of time.” What Eliot had in mind was provincialism about the past: a failure to think of dead generations as fully real. But one can also be guilty of provincialism about the future: a failure to imagine the generations that will come after us, to take seriously our responsibilities toward them. In 1945, not long after Eliot wrote that essay, the first atomic bomb was exploded. This made the matter of provincialism about the future all the…

I am tired of playingdeath’s white clerk, I will stand in the glove closeteating an orange. Ten fat bulbs acrosticto the warren wards. Segment: you are twinto endless sisters but this buttered veinis yours, these strings parting your headofficious as batons. Chest puffed with documents.This wet parade ground mucking my hand,it almost cheers me: not to be the lonecreation formal unto sludge. Why, to be impartedwith mouth like a clock that points itself out:my word, my word? The orange warmsin my hand. Runnel of pepper,palm-glow, squalid— less than light.Stirs still some crepitant waking to goldas to a molar filling dislodged, aswimon a vacant pillow. It is 3 AM.The telemetry insists. Around me they seedtheir small bitten flaws, the pulses there are.…

SOUTH TO FREEDOM Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War “Gripping and poignant…. Baumgartner describes, with skill and great sensitivity, the experiences of those enslaved men and women who, in resisting their oppression, bravely quit the United States altogether.”—WALLS TREET JOURNAL “The story of how Black people in a slaveholding society affected federal policy by their movements, by their defiance, and by their very existence has been told before. But rarely has this story been told as compassionately, or rendered as beautifully…. Masterfully researched.”—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Baumgartner has achieved a rare thing: she has made an important academic contribution, while also writing in beautiful, accessible prose.”—NEW REPUBLIC basicbooks.com…

No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. Riverhead, 210 pp., $25.00 “Stream-of-consciousness!” yells the protagonist of Patricia Lockwood’s first novel, No One Is Talking About This. She is, like Lockwood her-self, a writer in her thirties with a huge Internet following. She has, like Lockwood herself, a husband, parents, brothers and sisters, friends—all of whom appear in the novel—but she is just as tightly bound to the commune of “people who lived in the portal.” She is onstage in Jamaica, talking about the world on-line, about life as it is lived through the window of the phone you hold in your hand, and on which you may be reading this review. “Stream-of-consciousness was long ago conquered by a man who wanted his wife to fart all over him,”…

Here, where field drops to sea,where big applause, beginningless,of surf and gulls drowns the fledglingspeeches fluttered from the stageour entrance made this gray-green into:properties and features turnto charges that our presence isassertion, groundless, unconfirmedby rocks and waves that turn asidetheir gaze or merelystand. A man might fall. A birdfalls a fall, grasping strandsof world we cannot, threading worldinto world as loosened from oneplace, anchored to prey, itbends, taking itself underwhat its seeming rupture takesaway: what sudden wave-trough surfacemight have returned a face.…

On January 15, 2021, five days before Joe Biden became our forty-sixth president, the Supreme Court issued an extraordinary late-night order that cleared the way for the execution of Dustin J. Higgs by lethal injection early the following morning. Higgs, a forty-eight-year-old sentenced to death for his participation in the murder of three women in 1996, was the third person to be put to death by the federal government that week, and the thirteenth to be executed since July, when the Trump administration began what Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor aptly called an “expedited spree of executions.” In just six months, the Trump administration put to death over three times as many people than the federal government had executed in the previous six decades. It is difficult to count how…

Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics by Sylvana Tomaselli. Princeton University Press, 230 pp., $29.95 Artificial Life After Frankenstein by Eileen Hunt Botting. University of Pennsylvania Press, 258 pp., $34.95 Frankenstein: The 1818 Edition with Related Texts by Mary Shelley, edited and with an introduction and notes by David Wootton. Hackett, 327 pp., $49.00; $16.00 (paper) Here are some ideas for a social revolution. All schools shall be coeducational, with no fees, plenty of outdoor exercise for pupils, and emphasis placed on both learning a foreign language and treating animals with kindness (in order to reduce in children any disposition toward violent behavior). There shall be equality of partners in cohabiting relationships and equal division of legacies among family heirs. No special favors granted to firstborn sons. Every woman shall aspire…

The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne. Liveright, 612 pp., $35.00 At the end of his remarkable, improbable life, Malcolm X was on the cusp of a reinvention that might have been even more significant than his conversion in prison from criminal predation to religious piety. Although he rose to prominence preaching the bleak, racialist metaphysics of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam (NOI), which depicted whites as “devils by nature,” in March 1964 Malcolm defected from the Nation and converted to Sunni Islam. Charging Muhammad with the sexual exploitation of his teenage secretaries, and the NOI with corruption, criminality, and idolatry, Malcolm pushed a dangerous feud toward its deadly conclusion. As assassins from the NOI closed in, the NYPD and…

Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters by Rosanna Warren. Norton, 712 pp., $45.00 The French poet Max Jacob united, in both his art and his life, the spirits of the ancient and sharply contrasting commedia dell’arte figures Harlequin and Pierrot. Like Harlequin, Jacob had a boisterous, anarchic wit. He was also, like Pierrot, a troubled figure, by turns romantic and saturnine. From the years before World War I until his death in 1944 at the age of sixty-seven, his divergent energies, spilling from poetry and prose poems to fiction and a second and by no means unsuccessful career as a painter, were part of the glory of bohemian Paris. Jacob was a close friend of Picasso’s in the years when Cubism was born. His determination to disrupt narrative…

EARLY ARRIVAL PRESS www.paulpendermd.com; (603) 493-3314 REBUILDING TRUST IN HEALTHCARE A Doctor’s Prescription for a Post-Pandemic America by Paul Pender, MD “An important and timely book” examines how trust develops, how internal and external factors contribute to distrust, and what can be done to correct this growing problem. “An intriguing and thoughtful response to the health care crisis” —Foreword Clarion Review 9780578755960 • Paper, $25.00 • 172 Pages • Health Care Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Audible, and Apple Books. Author’s website: www.paulpendermd.com WEBB HOUSE PUBLISHING webbhousepublishing.com ROSENEATH by Dana McSwain “… an unsettling, psychological terror that slowly builds into a nightmarish crescendo … a deft blend of deeply human horror and personal internal conflict … Replete with lyrical prose and bone-chilling horror, Roseneath is a twisted, grotesque haunted…

To the Editors: I’m delighted the Review chose to write about my most recent book [“A Sickness in the Air,” NYR, February 11], but troubled by the methods your critic deployed. The review relies heavily on material that’s not the book under discussion, notably a profile of me, in New York magazine. I’m confident your defense will be to note that the critic, Ruth Franklin, is a biographer, and this is how she works. I can’t see what’s gained, in a review, by noting the name of my husband, except that it clarifies that I’m gay; perhaps, hence, that “barometer exquisitely calibrated to signifiers of social class: fashion houses, just-trendy-enough restaurants, interiors detailed with the loving eye of a copywriter for a high-end furniture catalog.” I certainly can’t see what’s…