Innholdsfortegnelse for July 22, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

SARAH ARVIO’s new book of poems, Cry Back My Sea, will be published in August. NEAL ASCHERSON is the author of Black Sea, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, and the novel Death of the Fronsac. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. PETER C. BAKER is a writer in Evanston, Illinois. His first novel, Planes, will be published next spring. ANNE DIEBEL works as a private investigator with QRI in New York City. CAROLINE FRASER’s most recent book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, received the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Her first book, God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church, was reissued in 2019. MICHAEL GREENBERG is the author of Hurry Down Sunshine and Beg, Borrow,…

1. Slow moving objects flying in groupsLights in the trees. Like those minutes beforethe storm when we stood at Kyle’s weddinglooking up. A decision has to be madeabout taking shelter. Too high to be birdstoo slow to be conventional aircrafther white dress stood out against the dark graysudden drop in pressure. Lightsin the trees. Slow moving. The radarwe shut the radar down and recalibrated to rule out ghost tracksNo notable exhaust from a known propulsion system in other wordsI want to know what it would doto the art if they are not RussianWhat I mean by “erratic” isunknown sources. A beautiful ceremonybecause the wall cloud visible behind themhas to be made. I was in Paris oncewith Bobby who was mourning his motherand filming public sculptures. Every few hours he wouldin…

Parallel Phenomena: Works on Paper by Carroll Dunham, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Gladys Nilsson, and Peter Saul an exhibition at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York City, May 13–July 2, 2021 The words “down under,” which have long been almost synonymous with Australia and New Zealand, might come to mind when thinking of the work of Susan Te Kahurangi King. This is not merely because she is from New Zealand. It is because her art presents a kind of visual, psychological, and expressive upside-down world. In pictures she has been making since the late 1950s—even before she was a teenager—she has created a vast, riveting, and often bewildering universe. It is also a sometimes funny and surprisingly erotic realm, one in which people, animals, cartoonish people, and actual cartoon characters, such…

Heinrich Heine: Writing the Revolution by George Prochnik. Yale University Press, 312 pp., $26.00 If I had to nominate an ideal poet, a Platonic poet, a conservator and repository of poet DNA, a poet to take after and on and from, a forsake-all-otherssave-only-X poet, it wouldn’t be Byron, though it would be close. It wouldn’t be MacNeice, though ditto. It wouldn’t be Mandelstam or Akhmatova or Cavafy or Apollinaire or Ovid or Brecht or Li Bai or Bishop or Baudelaire or Les Murray or T.E. Hulme. It would be Heine. Harry or Heinrich or Henri Heine, to taste. Oscar Wilde’s older Parisian cemetery-mate Heine (1797 (?)–1856). Of those named he has perhaps the least presence in English, though it’s a strange thing to say of someone who has furnished three…

1 A guilty pleasure—that’s what true crime is said to be, by everyone from avid fans to literary scholars. A recent article called “The Ethical Dilemma of Highbrow True Crime” by the essayist Alice Bolin describes the “centurieslong obsession” as an addictive hunger, something on which readers have “gorged.” Reporting on crime has always been voyeuristically enjoyed, yet the taste has often been indulged surreptitiously. Its forebears in the English language include eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury British crime broadsides originally sold at public executions. The shame of purchasing such crass items, according to one scholar, inspired subterfuge: “Although respectable London families would not themselves be seen buying broadsheets describing the most recent outrage, they would send a footman out to buy half a dozen copies from a street hawker.” Thomas De…

I came to Cali in late May, at the end of a month in which all of Colombia had been engulfed in antigovernment protests. No place had been hit harder by violence in the course of the turmoil than this airy, pleasant city of some two million people, traversed by a smoothflowing river and shaded by enormous trees—ceibas, jacarandas, caracolís. Cali likes to style itself the salsa capital of the world and, more ambitiously, the “Branch Office of Heaven.” Maybe, but on the morning of May 28 a minor government official, enraged because he was not allowed through a roadblock guarded by adamant teenagers, took out a gun and killed two of them pointblank. He was then beaten to death by the others. It was the thirty-ninth known violent death…

Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade by Nathaniel Rich. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pp., $27.00 In the opening lines of the Bible, having brought forth the world and everything in it, God makes his inaugural address to Adam and Eve. “Be fruitful, and multiply,” he tells them, “and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” God’s first, foundational decree explicitly casts the relationship between humanity and nature as one of separation and control. The whole sorry business with the serpent, the forbidden fruit, and the banishment doesn’t come about for another two chapters, but if you were in the mood for a little…

On Violence and On Violence Against Women by Jacqueline Rose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 423 pp., $30.00 In Torrey Peters’s recent novel Detransition, Baby, a character named Reese, a trans woman, considers her past attraction to Stanley, a violent cis man: Reese wanted… to get hit in a way that would affirm, once and for all, what she wanted to feel about her womanhood: her delicacy, her helplessness, her infuriating attractiveness.… In old books she had read, Reese remembered women saying that if your husband doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t love you, a notion that horrified the feminist in Reese but fit with a perfect logic in one of the dark crevices of her heart.… So yeah, Stanley, bring it on. Hit Reese. Show her what it means to be…

True Crime Detective Magazines 1924–1969 by Eric Godtland, edited by Dian Hanson. Taschen (out of print) I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara, with an introduction by Gillian Flynn and an afterword by Patton Oswalt. Harper Perennial, 344 pp., $17.99 (paper) I’ll Be Gone in the Dark an HBO documentary series directed by Liz Garbus, Elizabeth Wolff, Myles Kane, and Josh Koury My Favorite Murder a podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark The Ripper a BBC/Netflix documentary series directed by Jesse Vile and Elena Wood Tales of the Grim Sleeper a documentary film written and directed by Nick Broomfield, Barney Broomfield, and Marc Hoeferlin Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession edited by Sarah…

The writer whom Janet Malcolm loved most was Chekhov, and one of her great strokes was to bring his spirit to her reporting—the small, telling gesture that burned a character into the reader’s mind. One thinks, for example, of her description of a revered New York psychoanalyst, who stood out from the others in the fishbowl of a psychoanalytic convention “the way a lady’s slipper leaps out at you in the woods.” These observations, embedded in an unfurling scroll of impeccable facts, explication, analysis, and original ideas, set her journalism apart from every other practitioner of her generation. Malcolm often deployed this kind of fairy-tale imagery to great effect. In The Silent Woman, her masterful book about the competing versions of the defenselessly dead Sylvia Plath and her defensively alive…

Encircling by Carl Frode Tiller, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland. Graywolf, 326 pp., $16.00 (paper) Encircling 2: Origins by Carl Frode Tiller, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland. Graywolf, 445 pp., $16.00 (paper) Encircling 3: Aftermath by Carl Frode Tiller, translated from the Norwegian by Barbara J. Haveland. Graywolf, 506 pp., $20.00 (paper) Carl Frode Tiller’s Encircling trilogy starts from an unlikely premise. David, a thirty-something resident of Trondheim, Norway, has lost his memory. He puts an ad in the local paper asking for people who knew him when he was young to write to him and fill him in on his early years. In effect he asks them to write him an identity. He gets a number of lengthy replies. The first volume of…

It’s wrong to live wrong I was thinking thisand wringing my hands I wrung my hands Wasn’t it right to live right and to writeabout the right life rather than living wrong and writing about the wrong life Which isrighter which is wronger The thing is if you have the wrong life you don’t wantto tell thinking always that somehow you will right it Righting and writing it’s a kindof redress a new dress I’ll put on when I rewrite my life I’ll run out and get it nowwhile there’s still time a red dress for joy a red dress for redress and I’ll dress youdown as I walk out the door You’ll ring and ring but I won’t rush back I won’twrite back You’ll be right and I’ll be…

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. Crown, 446 pp., $28.00 Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman. Little, Brown, 341 pp., $28.00; $17.99 (paper) One morning a few years ago, as I entered the York Street subway station in Brooklyn, a friendly young woman handed me a promotional Tshirt from the office-leasing company WeWork. It was gray and very soft, and it said “HUSTLE HARDER” in a graffiti-like font. It became a gym shirt, then a dir ty-household-projects shirt. Recently I was going to throw it away, but it felt like a memento—of what, I wasn’t sure. It had always been tricky to say exactly what WeWork was.…

DEFT ENOUGH? To the Editors: I was taken aback by the remark in Michael Kazin’s otherwise excellent review [“Ending the Kennedy Romance,” NYR, May 27] that “[Kennedy’s] only enduring diplomatic success was a treaty banning atmospheric nuclear tests.” The deft manner in which President Kennedy handled the Cuban Missile Crisis was an extraordinary achievement, which entitles him to a place in the pantheon of our greatest presidents. Jim Altschul New York City Michael Kazin replies: During the missile crisis, in the fall of 1962, which came close to mushrooming into a nuclear holocaust, Kennedy did indeed pursue a strategy more cautious than what his advisers, who included his brother Robert, recommended. But the US Navy’s “quarantine” of Soviet vessels headed to Cuba ended the standoff only because Soviet premier Nikita…