Innholdsfortegnelse for May 27, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

RAE ARMANTROUT’s latest book of poems, Conjure, was published last year. A new book, Finalists, will be published next year. WHITNEY COX is an Associate Professor of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. The second edition of his book Modes of Philology in Medieval South India was recently published. ARIEL DORFMAN, a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke, is the author of the play Death and the Maiden. His books include the children’s story The Rabbits’ Rebellion and a forthcoming novella about the apocalypse, The Compensation Bureau. IRINA DUMITRESCU is a Professor of English Medieval Studies at the University of Bonn. Her book The Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature was published in paperback last year. MICHAEL GORRA’s books include Portrait of a Novel: Henry…

A profound global change shapes the foreign policy of the Biden administration. From the end of World War II until the past decade, the world saw the United States as unquestionably the greatest power, with a thriving democracy and an economy envied by all. That reputation is now gone. It didn’t disappear just in the last four years, but Donald Trump’s presidency accelerated the decline, wreaking havoc on long-standing US policies and practices, weakening what had been the unique strengths of alliances that stretched around the globe, and intensifying the sense of grievance, distrust of authority, and racial, cultural, and political polarization that now afflict American society. China, the United States’ only near peer economically and militarily and its greatest foreign threat, now holds the view that the US is…

JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917–1956 by Fredrik Logevall. Random House, 792 pp., $40.00 Why, nearly six decades after his murder, do Americans still care so much about and, for the most part, continue to think so highly of John Fitzgerald Kennedy? More than 40,000 works of fiction and nonfiction have been published about his life and death, a steady stream that spiked on the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination in 2013. “So few years in the nation’s highest office—yet so many books,” a Washington Post reporter remarked at the time. A poll taken last June by YouGov rated JFK one of the four greatest presidents—tied for third place with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and trailing only Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. That posthumous ranking is a rather…

“Dazzling.… Amar ties searching constitutional analysis into a gripping narrative of war, popular tumults, political intrigue, and even fashion, highlighted by vivid profiles of statesmen.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review) “Akhil Amar, one of America’s greatest constitutional teachers, has written one of America’s greatest constitutional histories.”—JEFFREY ROSEN, president & CEO, National Constitution Center “This masterpiece of a book reveals Akhil Amar to be the greatest constitutional historian of his generation.… This book will be the canonical account of the birth of our Constitution and our early years as a nation for decades to come.”—STEVEN GOW CALABRESI, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law basicbooks.com…

The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony archival recordings by Julius Hemphill, with Malinké Elliott, K. Curtis Lyle, Abdul Wadud, Baikida Carroll, John Carter, Olu Dara, Nels Cline, Allan Jaffe, Jehri Riley, Jack Wilkins, Jerome Harris, Dave Holland, Steuart Liebig, Roberto Miranda, Michael Carvin, Alex Cline, Jack DeJohnette, Philip Wilson, Ursula Oppens, Daedalus String Quartet, Ray Anderson, Marty Ehrlich, Janet Grice, John Purcell, and Bruce Purse. New World Records, 7 CDs, $111.93 “I like to make things,” the saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill told an interviewer from the Smithsonian in 1994, a year before his death from diabetes. “It might not equate to the great American novel… but I can hold your attention for a little while.” A revealing remark: disarmingly casual in tone, yet hinting, in its sly understatement, at…

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss. Riverhead, 324 pp., $26.00 There is a scene in Eula Biss’s new book of essays, Having and Being Had, that makes me almost howl with recognition. Her son, “J,” begins school and is given a starter pack of Pokémon trading cards by another boy. J’s desire is kindled. He finds out he can buy more cards using the money he gets for doing his chores. Before long, he is taking part in a miniature market exchange on the school playground. The children argue about what the cards are worth. Some cards are sparkly, some more powerful in attacking others, some desirable simply because they are rare. These flimsy pieces of cardboard have no objective value; each card is worth only what another child…

Light drizzle as if the Atlanticwere examining its conscience November no longer pretendsRain dowsed its bonfires and sparks Santiago is Spain’s secret capitalPatrols arrive day and night Pilgrims wander its streets, exhaustedor eager, like ordinary tourists A woman sat by the cathedralShe leaned on her backpack and sobbed The pilgrimage is overWhere will she go now Cathedrals are only stonesStones don’t know motion Evening approachesand winter (translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh)…

AFRICAN AMERICAN AND BLACK STUDIES Afro-Nostalgia Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture Badia Ahad-Legardy “Part Afrofuturistic, part academic, this book will make you rethink how you understand Black history and storytelling.” —BookRiot “Essential.” —Ms. Magazine “This thoroughly researched book seeks and sheds light on the spaces where Black joy can live and flourish. Though its tone is academic, its insights reach far beyond the classroom…. A worthy addition to any multicultural studies library and to readers interested in American culture.” —The Museum of Americana A volume in The New Black Studies Series Pub April 2021. 6 x 9 in. 224 pp. University of Illinois Press 978-0-252-08566-6 Paper, $26.95; 978-0-252-05255-2 eBook, $14.95 Appealing Because He Is Appalling Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism Edited by Tamari Kitossa Readers are invited to…

The Diaries: 1918–38 by Henry “Chips” Channon, edited by Simon Heffer. London: Hutchinson, 1,002 pp., £35.00 “I am very fond of Chips,” the London society hostess Maud Cunard declared in 1926, “and so is everyone else.” “I seem,” Chips himself remarked a few months earlier, “to be enormously popular.” Fondness and popularity are transient things, and Henry “Chips” Channon, a busy socialite and minor MP, would now be a mere footnote in political history, the fleeting flibbertigibbet of one or two other people’s diaries, if it weren’t for his own diary, the teeming, two-million-word monument to himself that he built up secretly, with occasional gaps, between 1918 and his death forty years later. The Diaries: 1918–38 is the first of three volumes that will present the text in as full…

JOHN HUNT PUBLISHING THE CONSCIENCE OF A PROGRESSIVE by Steven Klees “Essential reading in our current political moment …. A valuable roadmap to the power of progressive thinking and policy.” —Chuck Collins, Institute for Policy Studies “In these very troubling times Klees’s book avoids merely cataloging crimes to smartly critique conservative and liberal perspectives and reflect on … positive contributions of progressives on many critical issues.” —Michael Albert, co-founder Z Magazine “Exceptionally well written, reasoned, reported, organized and presented.” —Midwest Book Review 978-1-78904-496-6 • Paper, $19.75 • 216 Pages • Politics/Current Affairs/Economics Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Indiebound. FRIESENPRESS friesenpress.com; (800) 792-5092 CHANGGANLI by Jiwen This story received the Chinese National Best Network Novel Award for 2019. A thought-provoking tale about historical preservation with a white-hot conflict and…

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated from the Italian by the author. Knopf, 157 pp., $24.00 Another language, another soul. In her first book written in Italian, In altre parole (In Other Words, translated by Ann Goldstein), Jhumpa Lahiri explains how she reached what to many people seemed a baffling decision: to forsake English, the language in which her four previous books had been written and published to immense critical and commercial success, for a foreign language in which she was not yet fluent. Born in London but raised from toddlerhood in the US, Lahiri has often described herself as someone who grew up torn between two cultures, that of America and that of her Bengali immigrant parents—a split that has been the dominant theme of her novels and short stories.…

The Life of the Mind by Christine Smallwood. Hogarth, 229 pp., $27.00 The Life of the Mind begins in the toilet, a single-occupancy restroom at an unnamed Manhattan university: “Dorothy was taking a shit at the library when her therapist called and she let it go to voicemail.” Expletives are pretty rare in this darkly comic first novel, and Christine Smallwood’s decision to put one into her opening sentence tells us that what she’s actually concerned with is the life of the body, with the embarrassing and at times humiliating details of our physical existence. Dorothy lives in Brooklyn with her blandly sensible boyfriend, Rog—neither of them has a last name—and teaches four courses a term as an English department adjunct. Now she reads a taped-up notice from student health…

Endless Song: Tiruvāymoḻi by Nammāḻvār, translated from the Tamil by Archana Venkatesan, with a foreword by David Shulman. Gurgaon: Penguin Random House India, 528 pp., ₹599.00 Śathakopan of Kurukur likely lived in the ninth century of the Common Era. He certainly spent nearly all of his life in the far southern reaches of Tamil-speaking India, which was then the domain of the Pandyan kings of Madurai and is today the southernmost part of the state of Tamilnadu. As with most early Indian authors, practically nothing about his historical existence is known: we have his poetry, as well as a vast body of much later exegetical and hagiographical texts. In the poems, the reader encounters a sophisticated, erudite writer dedicated to revering the Hindu deity Vishnu in his many aspects. Śathakopan’s…

THE WRONG CULPRIT To the Editors: In her lively, wide-ranging, and learned review of Vaughn Scribner’s Merpeople: A Human History [NYR, March 25], Marina Warner states that “Proteus, whom Homer calls the Old Man of the Sea, savagely rapes Thetis, the sea goddess; the child of this union is Achilles.” She identifies her source for this unusual paternity accusation as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, leading one to wonder whether Ovid had the revisionist daring to nullify Homer’s oft-repeated epithet for Achilles—“son of Peleus”—in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. It turns out he didn’t, though the relevant episode from the Metamorphoses (11.217–265) does subvert the protean aspects of Proteus in book 4 of the Odyssey by ascribing to a sea goddess—the Nereid Thetis—the shape-shifting transformations that had been the Homeric Proteus’s stock-in-trade…