Innholdsfortegnelse for April 29, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

MARY JO BANG is the author of eight books of poems and a translation of Dante’s Inferno. Her translation of Dante’s Purgatorio will be published in July. She is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis. ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New YorkReview. SARAH CHIHAYA is an Assistant Professor of English at Princeton. She is one of four authors of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism ERICA ARMSTRONG DUNBAR is the Charles and Mary Beard Professor of History at Rutgers and the National Director of the Association of Black Women Historians. HOWARD W. FRENCH is a Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. His latest book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to…

It was like a whip, the animated snappingof the man lying like an overturned turtleon the bed in the upstairs bedroom,his henchmen and henchwomen downstairs, gliding in the corridors, the new warmthof the sun in the window reducing itselfto the size of a stamp on the wooden deskin the empty office. The question is not whether we have free will, but what choiceshistory offers us. The strongest forceis conformity, not passion, not even greedfor possessions because who would ever want a diamond unless they were told to.Here, someone must have said, you want this.…

The sight of one crossing my yard—all copper-zinc—in broad daylight, is etched on my eye.It’s mostly at night, though, when they snag a hapless deer, their voices are raised on high.No sooner do they corner a woodchuck or raccoonthan their cover of “Ghost Riders in the Sky” resounds from here to Oregon.The version I myself favor, to kick off a road trip,is Frankie Laine’s of 1963. Others reckon Johnny Cash to be preeminent. Still others heappraise on Elvis Presley and Burl Ives.This midnight mix of yodels and yippie-yi-oohs may derivenot from a whole pack but a single pair.In Alaska a hunter’s been known to set out knives covered in ice-blood on which coywolves will parethemselves down to the bone.Though this may be no more than a brouhaha over competing claims…

The Patrons and Their Poor: Jewish Community and Public Charity in Early Modern Germany by Debra Kaplan. University of Pennsylvania Press, 239 pp., $75.00 Stepchildren of the Shtetl: The Destitute, Disabled, and Mad of Jewish Eastern Europe, 1800–1939 by Natan M. Meir. Stanford University Press, 343 pp., $90.00; $30.00 (paper) On December 1, 2020, with the holiday season approaching and the latest congressional stimulus package stalled, The Washington Post reported that “about 26 million Americans say they don’t have enough to eat as the pandemic worsens.” The Post recommended several organizations to which readers could donate, including charities and philanthropies for artists and restaurant workers, for children facing hunger or without access to books or the Internet, for asylum seekers, and for the many in need of food, shelter, and…

SPITE The Upside of Your Dark Side “Would you risk harming yourself just to hurt someone else—out of spite? That ancient emotion is back in full force, as you may have noticed. We’d better understand it, as both a destructive and productive force. This is a timely book.”—AARON JAMES, author of the New York Times bestseller Assholes: a Theory “Spite is an eye-opening examination of humanity’s nastier impulses—from Achilles to Trump. An erudite and eloquent guide, McCarthy-Jones deftly examines cutting-edge psychological research and evolutionary theory with some truly startling insights for our personal relationships, business, and politics. You will never look at your human nature in quite the same way again.”—DAVID ROBSON, author of The Intelligence Trap…

Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Kurt Beals. New Directions, 186 pp., $16.95 (paper) 1. In a year-end roundup of “Four Books That Deserved More Attention in 2017,” the New Yorker critic James Wood, who had placed Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone at the top of that list, offhandedly referred to the moment “when Erpenbeck wins the Nobel prize in a few years.” The tension between the critic’s high expectations and the book’s low visibility tells you a good deal. On one, fairly banal, level, it points to a predictable disparity between the author’s popularity at home and her profile abroad. Erpenbeck, who was born in East Germany in 1967, into a family of distinguished writers and intellectuals going back several…

Abe: Abraham Lincoln in His Times by David S. Reynolds. Penguin Press, 1,066 pp., $45.00 Amid the dismal presidential contest of 1856 that put James Buchanan, a moss-backed northern apologist for slavery, in the White House, Walt Whitman, in an essay entitled “The Eighteenth Presidency!,” summoned a very different sort of national leader. Whitman envisaged a “heroic, shrewd, fully-inform’d, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American,” perhaps a “boatman come down from the West across the Alleghanies,” who would “walk into the Presidency, dress’d in a clean suit of working attire.” Then this champion of “the real America” would overturn the politics of “filth and blood,” “dirt and excrement” that had crushed the masses “under the feet of slavery.” That figure uncannily resembled Abraham Lincoln, then virtually unknown outside Illinois: Lincoln the lawyer…

Vesper Flights: New and Collected Essays by Helen Macdonald. Grove, 304 pp., $27.00; $17.00 (paper; to be published in July) In her tour-de-force memoir, H Is for Hawk (2014), the English writer and naturalist Helen Macdonald described how she survived her grief over the death of her father by adopting and obsessively training a giant bird of prey. In rich, sometimes anguished prose, she portrayed a relationship with her goshawk that was fraught with animal violence and human need. The forty-one short essays in her recent collection, Vesper Flights, carry the same tension. No longer confined to a single grief or creature, Macdonald’s fascination with the natural world ranges from the habits of cuckoos and glow-worms to the biodiversity of trees. A lament for the loss of natural habitats (“the…

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S NOTEBOOKS The covers of these notebooks are reproductions of two of seven of Virginia Woolf's notebooks in which she drafted the 1931 novel The Waves. Today, the notebooks are at The New York Public Library. The notebooks are beautifully detailed, with a spine of buckram bookbinding cloth, a ribbon marker, a curved memento pocket, and the lion symbol of the NYPL embossed on the spine. Historical and credit information is detailed in each endpaper of the notebook. Hardcover; 5” x 7”; 144 lined pages; Acidfree FSC-certified paper; 100% recycled binding boards. MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPT SILK CHIFFON SCARF The pattern on this sublime scarf is based on motifs found in a circa-1500 book of hours in the collection of The Fitzwilliam Museum. Based on a strewn-flower border from a page…

WHICH MUSONIUS? To the Editors: In his “Tune Out & Lean In” [NYR, March 11], Gregory Hays discusses recent translations and introductions that aim to make later Stoics such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius available to broader audiences. The review also covers Yale’s 2020 reissue of Cora Lutz’s 1947 translation of Musonius Rufus, Epictetus’s teacher, for which I provided a new introduction. Hays asks if we should take Stoicism to task, for instance, for its alleged narrow focus on the individual and its related failure to address structural and systematic exclusion and oppression. The Stoics, after all, did not propose that slavery be abolished. But in his critique of what he sees as ancient Stoicism’s potential complicity with problematic, right-wing aspects of its current revival, Hays gets Musonius Rufus…

Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee. Knopf, 872 pp., $37.50 I was once taken to an event at the New School by Barbara Epstein and she introduced me to Janet Malcolm at the drinks party afterward. “I’ll never forget what you said about Anne Stevenson’s lasagne,” I said to Malcolm. “I’m not sure I said much,” she replied. “Oh, you did,” I said, with a friendly smile. “You said the worst thing anybody can say about a lasagne. I think you used the word ‘curly.’” Malcolm looked bemused and we moved on to other things. The exchange stuck in my mind, though, because in a tiny way it encapsulates one of the problems of biography. When I got home, I checked my copy of The Silent Woman, Malcolm’s excellent…

Anti-System Politics: The Crisis of Market Liberalism in Rich Democracies by Jonathan Hopkin. Oxford University Press, 306 pp., $27.95 The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism by Thomas Frank. Metropolitan, 307 pp., $26.99 The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee. One World, 415 pp., $28.00 Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America by Ian Haney López. New Press, 263 pp., $26.99 Ever since the early twentieth century, advocates of taming capitalism in the public interest have assumed that energized citizens and activist government could counter the power of concentrated wealth. The Progressive Era, in which legislation was enacted to constrain the robber barons of the time, was cut short by World War I. But after…

Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by Charles Seife. Basic Books, 388 pp., $30.00 The world’s first scientist-celebrity, Isaac Newton, was entombed in Westminster Abbey with high ceremony, alongside statesmen and royalty, under a monument ornately carved in white-and-gray marble, bearing a fulsome inscription in Latin: “Mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race!” His fame had spread far across the European continent. In France the young Voltaire lionized him: “He is our Christopher Columbus. He has led us to a new world.” An outpouring of verse filled the popular gazettes (“Nature her self to him resigns the Field/From him her Secrets are no more conceal’d”). Medals bearing his likeness were struck in silver and bronze. When Stephen Hawking died, in 2018,…

BRIAN T. WATSON btwatson20@gmail.com; (781) 367-2008 HEADED INTO THE ABYSS The Story of Our Time, and the Future We’ll Face by Brian T. Watson A unique, big-picture assessment of the unprecedented forces and developments besieging our societies and the world. Powerful and interconnected, these forces and their dynamics will carry us into any number of disasters well before 2100. We have the knowledge and solutions to address our difficulties, but for many reasons we will not employ them. Describing the current interplay of capitalism, politics, technology, the Internet, human nature, and other realities, the book is unflinching in its sobering conclusions. 9780578594118 • Paper, $13.00; 9780578624341 • eBook, $9.99 • 306 Pages • Current Affairs/Political Science/Media Studies Available on Amazon. ATMOSPHERE PRESS (740) 416-0443 PUSHBACK Selected Poems of Resistance by…