Innholdsfortegnelse for July 1, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

1. Workmen have stripped the barbed wire from around the Capitol. The shattered windows have been replaced. The blood has been scrubbed away. And from the halls of the grand whitedomed building the National Guard troops have at last departed. The coup that did not succeed in overturning the election goes unpunished. More than four hundred of its foot soldiers have been arrested but its instigator remains at large. The former president golfs at his country clubs and receives visits of tribute from the leaders of his party. Nearly half of Republicans tell pollsters Trump was “called by God to lead.” Seven in ten say the election was stolen and the current president is illegitimate. The attempted coup of January 6 destroyed two cardinal principles of American politics. The first…

Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World by M.R. O’Connor. St. Martin’s, 354 pp., $29.99 From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way by Michael Bond. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 288 pp., $29.95; $17.95 (paper; to be published in August) Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America by Jon T. Coleman. Yale University Press, 329 pp., $30.00 It is a little-known fact that limpets are brilliant navigators. Renowned for their ability to hold fast, they are surprisingly mobile. When submerged by the incoming tide, limpets set out on a slow journey across the intertidal boulders of their habitat. They move using a single muscular foot, rather as snails do, and deploy a rough tongue-like organ, known as a radula, to scrape…

My brief love affair with Bollywood—India’s mainstream Hindi-language cinema—began when I was ten, in 1994, with the release of a film called Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (What Am I to You?). A crowd-pleasing threeand-a-half-hour love story set during an endless and elaborate Hindu wedding, it became the highest-grossing Bollywood movie up to that time, earning $138 million. Its fourteen upbeat songs stormed the Indian music charts and its throwback wedding rituals popped up in actual weddings. Before HAHK, my cousins and I hadn’t known that the girl’s side in a wedding could ransom the shoes of the groom for a hefty sum; now we turned into ardent shoe-snatchers. Bollywood movies in the 1970s and 1980s tended to favor the social underdog and revel in a kind of glorious kitsch and…

Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry edited by Mollie Godfrey. University Press of Mississippi, 222 pp., $99.00; $25.00 (paper) When I watch footage of Lorraine Hansberry—a striking enunciator and the fiery and brilliantly self-possessed Black woman best known for her play A Raisin in the Sun—I sometimes forget the sense of belatedness I felt when I wrote about her life in Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry (2018). I often worried that it was too late to fill the gap of decades when her work was neglected, although even now much of her writing is out of print or has never been published. Yet even so, hearing Hansberry’s voice brings a sense of possibility and the opportunity to recover her spirit as well as her legacy. A…

Looking back on the latest round of fighting in Gaza, one can’t escape the grim sense of déjà vu. How many such rounds have there been? I can’t remember. Worse, eerie and compulsive repetition suits the way many, perhaps most, Israelis—including, it seems, the higher echelons of the army and intelligence services—tend to think about Gaza and Hamas. On the surface, the primitive logic goes like this: Hamas is a murderous, barbaric organization that wants only to kill as many Israelis as possible and is continuously building up its military capabilities to that end. In practice, the only useful way of dealing with Hamas is therefore to pound it to pieces once every few years (or months), thus reestablishing what the Israeli army and government fondly call “deterrence” (it’s their…

The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France by James McAuley. Yale University Press, 301 pp., $30.00 Most ages and places have had their iconic forms of self-display. Today we have the carefully curated social media page, with its endless series of aptly titled “selfies.” Early modern Europe had the daily pageant of court society, with its graceful, witty, professedly nonchalant aristocrats who had every muscle under tight control and every piece of clothing precisely arranged. And then there was the continental fin de siècle, which summons up images of cancan dancers, Impressionist paintings, and opulent Viennese coffeehouses. For the wealthy bourgeois families who dominated European society at that time, the performance of the self took place in large part through the acquisition and display…

Women as War Criminals: Gender, Agency, and Justice by Izabela Steflja and Jessica Trisko Darden. Stanford Briefs/Stanford University Press, 169 pp., $14.00 (paper) One morning in the late spring of 1996, while reporting on the aftermath of the conflict in Bosnia, I was filming in a churchyard in Pale, the wartime capital of the Bosnian Serb statelet of Republika Srpska, when I noticed a rather dowdy older woman walking up the path to pay respects to a grave. She wore low-heeled shoes and a skirt of indeterminate color that fell below the knee. A large handbag was looped over her arm. Like many Central European women of a certain age, she had styled her gray-brown hair with a shampoo-and-set. She looked like someone’s granny. Such was her ordinariness that I…

The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism by Katherine Stewart. Bloomsbury, 342 pp., $28.00 Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty?: The Unnecessary Conflict by Andrew Koppelman. Oxford University Press, 202 pp., $34.95 The current struggle over the place of religion in American public life presents a paradox. At least by one measure, the country is less religious than it has ever been: Gallup reported recently that for the first time in its eighty years of opinion research, fewer than half of all Americans hold formal membership in a house of worship, and a third of the young-adult members of Generation Z—the cohort born in the late 1990s—claim not only no formal religious affiliation but no religious preference at all. Furthermore, same-sex couples have won one of the major…

Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Kate Masur. Norton, 456 pp., $32.00 The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War by Van Gosse. University of North Carolina Press, 745 pp., $39.95 At the core of the latest national reckoning over race is an incontrovertible fact: the Civil War killed slavery, but it did not kill entrenched racism and Black subjugation. One historical interpretation, lavishly publicized and increasingly in vogue, blames this not only on the tenacity of the defeated slaveholding South but also on the racism of the victorious North, and on the white supremacy upon which the nation was supposedly founded. Some white northerners may have claimed a commitment to political and civil equality…

Detroit Resurrected: To Bankruptcy and Back by Nathan Bomey. Norton, 313 pp., $27.95; $17.95 (paper) Rescuing Retirement: A Plan to Guarantee Retirement Security for All Americans by Teresa Ghilarducci and Tony James, with a foreword by Timothy Geithner. Columbia University Press, 166 pp., $24.95; $19.95 (paper) American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation by Sarah L. Quinn. Princeton University Press, 288 pp., $35.00; $24.95 (paper) Downhill from Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality by Katherine S. Newman. Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 322 pp., $30.00 After almost thirty-eight years as a technical assistant at a Detroit public library and six years of retirement, Barbara Yokom found herself, in 2018, stocking shelves at big box stores. She was sixty-three. The heavy lifting was a daily difficulty, and she hadn’t expected to…

Separated: Inside an American Tragedy by Jacob Soboroff. Custom House, 388 pp., $29.99; $17.99 (paper) Taking Children: A History of American Terror by Laura Briggs. University of California Press, 240 pp., $24.95 In July 2019 Elora Mukherjee, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School, testified before Congress about conditions at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) facility in Clint, Texas, that housed migrant children who had been separated from their parents: At Clint, I saw children who were dirty. They could not wash their hands with soap because none was available. Many had not brushed their teeth for days. They were wearing the same clothes they had on when they crossed the border. Clothes that were covered in nasal mucous, vomit, breast milk, urine. Multiple children…

Nazis and Nobles: The History of a Misalliance by Stephan Malinowski, translated from the German by Jon Andrews. Oxford University Press, 471 pp., $38.95 In its March 26, 2020, issue, The New York Review published a fascinating article by David Motadel entitled “What Do the Hohenzollerns Deserve?” Motadel colorfully described the ongoing attempt of the Hohenzollern family (descendants of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was deposed in 1918) since German reunification to recover property and artworks seized by the Soviets when they occupied eastern Germany after World War II; the family also seeks the right to reside in one of its former palaces. Its efforts have run up against the legal problem that descendants of those who had given “significant support” to either the Third Reich or the German Democratic Republic…

Neutron Stars: The Quest to Understand the Zombies of the Cosmos by Katia Moskvitch. Harvard University Press, 296 pp., $29.95 The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack. Scribner, 226 pp., $26.00; $17.00 (paper) Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality by Frank Wilczek. Penguin Press, 254 pp., $26.00 The physicist Richard Feynman, in a lecture to undergraduates at the California Institute of Technology in 1961, posed a question and then answered it: If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made…

Time’s Monster: How History Makes History by Priya Satia. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 363 pp., $29.95 Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities by Mahmood Mamdani. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 401 pp., $29.95 Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew. Princeton University Press, 271 pp., $35.00; $24.95 (paper) In the summer of 1932 Eric Williams arrived in England from the British colony of Trinidad. Like most of the island’s population, his family was so poor that he and his eleven siblings had rarely tasted milk. But from his earliest youth his father, a disillusioned postal clerk, obsessively pressured him to achieve academic success. There were no universities in the West Indies; few Trinidadians progressed beyond primary school, and almost all professions…