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

PETER C. BAKER is a freelance writer in Evanston, Illinois. His first novel, Planes, will be published in the spring of 2022. T.H. BREEN is the author of several books on the American Revolution, most recently The Will of the People: The Revolutionary Birth of America. ANNE ENRIGHT is a Professor of Creative Writing at University College Dublin. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Granta, among other publications. She has published seven novels, including, most recently, Actress. HELEN EPSTEIN is Visiting Professor of Human Rights and Global Public Health at Bard. She is the author of Another Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Terror and The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Against AIDS in Africa. GREGORY HAYS is…

Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act by Nicholson Baker. Penguin Press, 450 pp., $30.00 Nicholson Baker’s latest book, Baseless, is stuffed with examples of just how inventive we humans can get when devising ways to harm one another. Most of these are biological and chemical weapons cooked up by the American military-industrial complex in the middle of the twentieth century. They include diseases cultivated in laboratory conditions and tools for spreading those diseases, like bombs filled with spore-coated feathers or nozzles designed to be attached to airplanes, the better to shower sickness on enemy cities. In one depressing chapter, researchers at a Montana lab funded by the military exposed ticks and other insects to highly infectious diseases, hoping to turn them into…

The Italian Renaissance of Machines by Paolo Galluzzi, translated from the Italian by Jonathan Mandelbaum. Harvard University Press, 276 pp., $39.95 Renaissance Invention: Stradanus’s Nova Repertaan exhibition at the Newberry, Chicago, August 28–November 19, 2020. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Lia Markey. Northwestern University Press, 264 pp., $49.95 Let’s say you’re under siege in your castle, surrounded by an unseen enemy just outside the walls, unable to leave home for weeks or months, your strength and hope waning, your desperation growing. (Even if you’re not a fifteenthcentury Sienese nobleman, you may have no trouble imagining this at the moment.) You badly need reinforcements, but none arrive. Here’s something you can do: first, have all your horses shod backward, then evacuate the castle in the dead of night. When the…

That One Should Disdain Hardships: The Teachings of a Roman Stoic by Musonius Rufus, translated from the Greek by Cora E. Lutz, with an introduction by Gretchen Reydams-Schils. Yale University Press, 124 pp., $22.00 How to Keep Your Cool: An Ancient Guide to Anger Management by Seneca, selected, translated from the Latin, and with an introduction by James Romm. Princeton University Press, 220 pp., $16.95 How to Be Free: An Ancient Guide to the Stoic Life by Epictetus, translated from the Greek and with an introduction by A.A. Long. Princeton University Press, 173 pp., $16.95 The Pocket Stoic by John Sellars. University of Chicago Press, 124 pp., $12.00 Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday. Portfolio/Penguin, 264 pp., $25.00 Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital…

CALHOUN American Heretic “In this much-needed new biography, Robert Elder cuts through two hundred years of interpretive tangle to reveal Calhoun as he was and as he remains with us today—perhaps the most creative and darkly influential reactionary America has ever produced.”—MATTHEW KARP,author of This Vast Southern Empire “This engrossing biography reveals how the United States and one of its most prominent intellectuals grew in tandem during the first half of the nineteenth century. As much as we might like to forget Calhoun, Elder reveals just how short the path from his America to our own actually is.”—AMY S. GREENBERG,author of A Wicked War “Timely and thought-provoking…. A much-needed biography.”—WALL STREET JOURNAL basicbooks.com…

The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. by Peniel E. Joseph. Basic Books, 373 pp., $30.00 Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X met only once, at the US Capitol during the Senate debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That chance encounter was immortalized in a photograph that shows the two men shaking hands and smiling but reveals little trace of the public feud that has linked them in our historical imagination. Their conflict has cast arguably the longest shadow over African-American politics and the struggle for racial justice of any contretemps since the one between W.E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington at the turn of the twentieth century. Just a few years after King came to international…

Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane and an introduction by Douglas Palmer. University of Chicago Press, 256 pp., $65.00 In 1815 William Smith published the first detailed geological map of an entire country. Its scope was ambitious, as his long, practical-poetic title suggests: A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with part of Scotland; exhibiting the collieries and mines, the marshes and fen lands originally overflowed by the sea, and the varieties of soil according to the variations in the substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names. The map is an object of great beauty, its array of thirty-four tints identifying different types of rock, clay, and sand: vivid green for the chalk downs, tawny red for the clay of Fuller’s Earth, purple…

It was made of water, but not helpfully, a stag walked inside. It was a voice on the radio, a voiceover, telling us about the technical difficulties making the funeral hard to hear at the moment when the great man’s death became a family matter. A stag became concealed at the moment a car turned the corner. It required the driver to do more than pay attention. One must be slow in advance of what’s coming. The funeral came back with music. A song about what could last. It stayed the same, hanging around the house like a lovesick teenager, or a grownup with nothing to do, or curtains, or sirens, anything with duration that acts permanent.…

It never covered everything like a shroud.It was always suspended overlike nineteenth-century women waiting for proposals. It was an alphabet on topof the one you knew, a redo,trills on the scales, glissando.It knew what it was doing between things. It is very patient, teachingyou, it was different from the world, it waitedfor you to say, I do not understand. I was like everyone else.I stopped lifting weights and walkedinstead, I did not shopif I could help it, found new usefor what I had.I did inside what I had donein the world. When I thoughtabout what I lost, I loved myself. It comes from the ocean.It means our interior burns.Our coolness burns, miles inland. It was haphazard.It loved to see you alteredin your usual location.…

How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others by T.M. Luhrmann. Princeton University Press, 235 pp., $29.95 Angels and Saints by Eliot Weinberger, with a guide to the illustrations by Mary Wellesley. Christine Burgin/New Directions, 159 pp., $26.95 “People evangelize because they fear that the belief to which they have committed themselves may not be true.” T.M. Luhrmann has spent many years doing fieldwork as an anthropologist studying faith communities, and her insights into the experience of American charismatic Christianity are slightly sad. These are people who believe that God speaks to them directly; it is easy to think of them as being full of certainty, perhaps even grandiosity. What Luhrmann describes, however, is a more fretful relationship with the divine. The evangelicals she interviewed worked hard to…

The Woman Who Stole Vermeer: The True Story of Rose Dugdale and the Russborough House Art Heist by Anthony M. Amore. Pegasus Crime, 262 pages, $27.95 In an essay first published by The New Yorker in 1995, Lawrence Weschler described an exchange with Antonio Cassese, the presiding judge at the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, whose litany of the horrors recounted in his court had just concluded with a Muslim prisoner’s going mad after being forced to castrate a fellow prisoner with his teeth. Asked how he kept from going mad himself, Cassese replied, “You see, as often as possible I make my way over to the Mauritshuis museum, in the center of town, so as to spend a little time with the Vermeers.” For Weschler, who had…

1774: The Long Year of Revolution by Mary Beth Norton. Vintage, 502 pp., $18.00 (paper) When, Mary Beth Norton asks, did the American Revolution begin? The question is surprising, largely because the answer seems to have been settled long ago—by people who actually participated in it. The revolutionary story that most of us learned at school usually starts in 1760, with the coronation of George III. The colonists loved him. They expected him to defend the British constitution, champion Protestantism, and promote commercial prosperity throughout the empire. But then, according to this familiar narrative, everything slowly turned sour, and within a few years the new monarch and his supporters in Parliament managed to alienate Americans who pledged their undying loyalty to Great Britain while at the same time protesting, often…

DEMOCRACY’S GENUINE CRISIS To the Editors: Jackson Lears’s review of Twilight of Democracy by Anne Applebaum [“Orthodoxy of the Elites,” NYR, January 14] fails the first rule of book reviewing: evaluate the book written on its own terms, rather than the book you as the reviewer wish the author had written. Instead of engaging Applebaum’s arguments about how and why former cold warriors have embraced rightwing political movements with tactics reminiscent of the defunct Soviet states, Lears spends the majority of his review attacking Applebaum for perceived past ideological crimes, such as her support of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and for her status as a “would-be transatlantic intellectual.” Nor can I see how the professional associations of Applebaum’s parents have anything to do whatsoever with the quality…