Innholdsfortegnelse for April 8, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy by Adam Jentleson. Liveright, 325 pp., $26.95 We’ve known all along that, Joe Biden’s pleas for “unity” notwithstanding, he would get precious little cooperation from Republicans. Beyond the courtesy of confirming most of the new president’s appointees—one old norm that still obtains, more or less—congressional Republicans will give Biden nothing. And he seeks nothing. His campaign rhetoric was driven by polls showing that most Americans still want to hear their politicians, especially their president, talk about working across party lines. But he and his team aren’t naive enough to believe that he’ll usher in a new age of bipartisanship. Hence the decision to pursue a major Covid relief bill right away and to pass it via…

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth. Bloomsbury, 491 pp., $30.00 A few weeks before the publication in early February of This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, Nicole Perlroth’s disquieting account of the global trade in cyberweapons, multiple US government agencies and major corporations learned that they had been hit with one of the biggest cyber attacks in history. By all accounts, the operation—discovered in early December by the security firm FireEye, whose own closely guarded hacking tools were stolen—had been going on for at least nine months. Hackers believed to be agents of the Russian foreign intelligence service, SVR, appear to have embedded malware into a routine software upgrade from Solar Winds, a Texas-based IT company. When…

Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick. Knopf, 179 pp., $21.00 During a 1971 debate on feminism at Town Hall in Manhattan, immortalized in Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Town Bloody Hall (1979), a small, ladylike person stands up to ask the moderator, Norman Mailer, a question. It is in regard to something she says he wrote in The Prisoner of Sex, to wit: “A good novelist can do without everything but the remnant of his balls.” Gently, to howls of laughter, she says, “For years and years I’ve been wondering, Mr. Mailer, when you dip your balls in ink, what color ink is it?” The tone is a perfect, respectful deadpan, the rhythm lilting, the facial expression the picture of faux innocence. This is Cynthia Ozick. Ozick is known as a…

The Seine: The River That Made Paris by Elaine Sciolino. Norton, 370 pp., $26.95; $17.95 (paper) I live in the center of Paris, a hundred yards from the Seine. Every day I walk along it, or cross one of the bridges that link the Left Bank to the Right. As someone who grew up along the Mississippi, I almost require the sight of a dirty brown stream to feel normal and happy, and thus am the ideal reader for Elaine Sciolino’s well-researched book The Seine: The River That Made Paris, which will tell the reader all there is to know about it. Rivers have always symbolized escape, but these days in Paris, its free flowing taunts. No one can travel to the US, itself riddled with the coronavirus, or to…

The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams by David S. Brown. Scribner, 451 pp., $30.00 Family blessings are a curse, or they can be. If you’re the grandson of an American president as well as the great-grandson of a Founding Father who also happened to be an American president, your very name is both an advantage and a liability. No one knew that better than Henry Adams. Aware that he was hardly a self-made man—“probably no child,” he wrote, “held better cards than he”—in The Education of Henry Adams he spoke with trenchant wit of the privileges that, in a sense, had prepared him for very little. The older he got, the more he became aware of his own ignorance. Or so he said.…

King Rocker a documentary film directed by Michael Cumming and written by Stewart Lee In the opening moments of King Rocker, a new documentary about the English post-punk musician Robert Lloyd, the comedian Stewart Lee stands at the entrance to a large shopping center in Birmingham and speaks about a work of art that used to be there and now isn’t. The dreary commercial space, we learn, once contained a striking piece of public sculpture by the pop artist Nicholas Monro: a gigantic fiberglass effigy of King Kong, his eyes incandescent, his arms raised in fury. The sculpture, Lee says, was installed there for a short time in the early 1970s, as part of a scheme whereby British cities were offered works of public art for six months and then…

This remembrance was organized by Baifang’s friends: Adam and Arlie Hochschild Alice Waters Amanda Urban and Ken Auletta Amy Tan and Lou Demattei Andras Szanto Aryeh and Yvette Neier Andrew J. Nathan Brigitte Lacombe Burr Heneman and Lexy Rome Carl and Marni Crook Carol Christ Chauncey Shey Chen Leiji and Chen Lin Clifford Ross Damian Woetzel David and Kyoko Gelber David Breashears David Fanning and Renata Simone David Shambaugh and Ingrid Larsen David Teece Deirdre English and Wayne Herkness Derek Shearer and Sue Toigo Doug Hamilton Edward Wong and Tini Tran Elaine Pagels and Alan Trist Elizabeth Economy Eric Karpeles and Michael Sell Evan Osnos and Sarabeth Berman Frances McDormand and Joel Coen Gary and Meg Hirshberg Geoff rey Cowan and Aileen Adams George and Tamiko Soros Geremie R Barmé…

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris. Yale University Press, 300 pp., $30.00 In the fall of 1853 Salvador de Castro Jr., a leading Cuban slave trader, traveled to Manhattan to arrange an expedition to West Central Africa to buy slaves and transport them for sale in Cuba. There he met with José Antunes Lopes Lemos, an experienced Brazilian slave trader who had transferred his operations to New York City after Brazil ended its slave trade in 1850. Lemos was one of about a dozen Portuguese and Brazilians who made New York a center of the last decade of the Atlantic slave trade. Because everything they were doing in the city was illegal—the US had outlawed the slave trade in 1808—the…

The Biden administration will not have a lot of time for the Middle East. Its foreign policy agenda will more likely be shaped by the looming question of how to come to grips with Xi Jinping’s China. The Middle East, with the significant exception of Iran, poses no plausible serious challenge to US interests. There is also a lack of resources and opportunities to advance them. This is in part a legacy of the decadeslong war in Iraq, which cost trillions of dollars and exhausted US ground forces, while compromising America’s international reputation; regime change in Libya, which prompted the return of thousands of jihadists and a civil war that immiserated the country; and the Syrian civil war, which Washington prolonged and intensified by inadvertently supplying jihadists with potent weaponry.…

Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home by Alexander Wolff. Atlantic Monthly, 376 pp., $28.00 The collaboration between Germany’s industrial magnates and the Third Reich was a story of mutual exploitation and moral abdication. The electrical parts manufacturer Siemens employed thousands of slave laborers from countries occupied by the Nazis during World War II, including female prisoners who were worked to death assembling V-1 and V-2 rocket components at factories inside the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The insurance giant Allianz earned millions of reichsmarks providing coverage against war damage to the SS-owned firms that ran Auschwitz and other camps, while IG Farben, the parent company of Bayer, manufactured Zyklon B, the poison gas used to murder millions of Jews. Many firms benefited from the “Aryanization program,” which allowed…

Salman Toor: How Will I Know an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, November 13, 2020–April 4, 2021. Catalog of the exhibition published by Paper Chase, 20 pp., $39.00 (paper) The spirit and appearance of Jesus Christ and of Pinocchio, two figures who are rarely found in the same sentence, both can be felt in Salman Toor’s paintings, currently the subject of a show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. These deliciously painted and mostly small-to-medium-size pictures, done in the past few years, seem to follow the doings and observations of one young man, though many of the figures in the scenes, which might be set in a bar, on a stoop, or in an apartment, are young men who resemble one another in…

The Selected Letters of John Berryman edited by Philip Coleman and Calista McRae, with a foreword by Martha B. Mayou. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 726 pp., $39.95 In the early morning hours of December 6, 1962, having broken his ankle, afraid that he was on the verge of a more general breakdown, the poet John Berryman woke up in a hospital bed. He was forty-eight years old, a year into his third marriage, a new father for the second time. From bed he transcribed his dream: First, at vast party I was giving, Randall said “You’ve just got to stop writing these pseudo-poems. Come back & write real ones and we’ll all be with you.” Many guests about—all heard—but not said for them: to me, sincerely, and I felt that…

On July 1, 2020, Nadeen Ashraf, a twenty-two-year-old student at the American University of Cairo, noticed that a 2018 post by a fellow student to an unofficial university-related Facebook group had been removed. The post had warned about another student, Ahmed Bassam Zaki, a young man from a rich and powerful family who sexually harassed and blackmailed young women, and it had garnered many comments, including by other female students who corroborated its allegations. Its author hadn’t known where else to share it, and now it was gone. Ashraf also knew that a female classmate had recently accused Zaki of harassment on her own social media account but had taken down the post when his family threatened legal action. Incensed, Ashraf created an Instagram account, named it Assault Police (i.e.,…