Innholdsfortegnelse for August 19, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So. Ecco, 260 pp., $27.99 The presence of the author is so vivid in Afterparties, Anthony Veasna So’s collection of stories, he seems to be at your elbow as you read. The intimacy both enlists and unsettles; So died in December of a drug overdose at the age of twenty-eight. Although youth isn’t generally an advantage for fiction writers (except possibly where publicity and book advances are concerned), people who can write accomplished and interesting fiction at twenty-five are likely to have something to offer at that point in their lives that might not be available to them at fifty, no matter how greatly and in what ways time may amplify their powers. The personality that animates Afterparties is unmistakably youthful, and the stories themselves are…

Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund. Verso, 196 pp., $18.95 (paper) Ellinor, the protagonist of the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s novel Long Live the Post Horn!, is a thirty-fiveyear-old former journalist working as a publicist in Oslo for a three-person agency founded by her mentor, Dag, who has just committed suicide. Ellinor is depressed herself, but her depression, abetted by the short, dark days of an impending Norwegian winter, has condemned her to lethargy rather than despair. We enter her stream of first-person narration in the listless days following Dag’s death as she does her sluggish best to feign an interest in Stein, the boyfriend she sees on and off; in her mother and sister and what she calls their “tiny…

The Delusions of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups by William J. Bernstein. Atlantic Monthly, 482 pp., $35.00 Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles by William Quinn and John D. Turner. Cambridge University Press, 288 pp., $24.95 We delight in the folly of others. As Charles Mackay wrote in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, “Is it a dull or uninstructive picture to see a whole people shaking suddenly off the trammels of reason, and running wild after a golden vision, refusing obstinately to believe that it is not real, till, like a deluded hind running after an ignis fatuus, they are plunged into a quagmire?” Mackay’s book, first published in 1841 in three volumes, covers an eccentric miscellany of popular delusions, from the…

In the summer of 1938 Sanora Babb, an aspiring, talented, and determined young writer, joined the volunteer staff at camps in California’s Imperial and San Joaquin Valleys run by the Farm Services Administration, which housed thousands of destitute farmers displaced by the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. Babb had a singular empathy for the “Okies,” since she had been raised in dire poverty in Oklahoma and Colorado. She wrote formal reports and kept personal notes on the tribulations of her charges: their hunger, resilience, search for work, and attempts at family life. Babb passed some of these papers to her boss, the FSA administrator Tom Collins; he shared them with a visitor to the camps, John Steinbeck, who had just become famous for his book Of Mice and Men (1937). Babb also…

The Invention of Sicily: A Mediterranean History by Jamie Mackay. Verso, 296 pp., $26.95 Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History by John Julius Norwich. Random House, 362 pp., $32.00 Under the Volcano: Revolution in a Sicilian Town by Lucy Riall. Oxford University Press, 278 pp., $73.00 Who governs Sicily? Does it matter? With a population of five million (similar to Scotland’s, larger than Croatia’s), this island of 10,000 square miles lying off the toe of Italy’s boot has a special autonomy within the Italian state: it has its own regional parliament and makes its own laws in such areas as agriculture, fishing, the environment, and cultural heritage. At the same time, it is very much governed from Rome and subsidized by Rome far more generously than other regions…

W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert. W.E. B. Du Bois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst/Princeton Architectural Press, 144 pp., $29.95 Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Bois at the Paris Exposition edited by Julian Rothenstein, with an introduction by Jacqueline Francis and Stephen G. Hall. Redstone, 140 pp., $35.00 (paper) A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication by Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer. Harvard University Press, 308 pp., $49.95 W.E.B. Du Bois carried himself as if he were “the Negro race.” Throughout his very long life—ninety-five years—his personal successes and victories were the successes and victories of all African-Americans. The problems he encountered as a Black man were the…

As the House impeachment managers proved, Donald Trump encouraged his supporters to act violently not just in the days leading up to the siege of the Capitol on January 6 but for weeks, months, even years preceding it. Republican partisanship prevented the Senate from convicting him of “inciting violence against the Government of the United States.” But there is no doubt that Trump harnessed and inflamed an armed and loyal far-right movement—one driven by white supremacist and antigovernment conspiracy theories, enraged by largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests, and irritated by Covid-19 restrictions—to storm the Capitol in order to stop Congress’s certification of Joseph R. Biden’s election as president. Since most participants in that movement still believe that Biden’s victory was fraudulent and that a liberal “deep state” has usurped…

The Supreme Court term that ended July 1 marked the first for Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and as a result was the first in which conservatives had a decisive 6–3 majority. Many liberals had braced themselves for the worst, expecting that with the addition of a third Trump-appointed justice, Chief Justice John Roberts would no longer be able to exercise his sometimes moderating influence and the Court would veer sharply to the right. But with the notable exception of a disturbingly partisan voting rights decision, the doomsayers were wrong. In many of its most controversial cases, the Court came to surprisingly bipartisan agreement. Its three liberals were in the majority in nearly half of its nonunanimous decisions. And the Court ruled more often in favor of defendants than the government…

Classic Picture Books For Ages 3–7 • Legendary authors and illustrators offer silliness, sweetness, and rebellion, in just the right proportions. D’Aulaires’ Book of Animals • The Backward Day The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars Jenny’s Birthday Book • Now Open the Box • Cheerful $80.95 with free U.S. shipping Whimsical Early Readers For Ages 3–7 • Fun with words, yucky gourmet food, and a hare-and-tortoise-like race are a few of the subjects of these silly books. Three Ladies Beside the Sea • Junket is Nice Ounce, Dice, Trice • The Marzipan Pig Mud Pies and Other Recipes • The Two Cars $77.95 with free U.S. shipping Heroes NEW For Ages 8–14 • Real and fantastical adventures in action-packed stories that take place in small-town America, Ireland, war-torn…

Craft: An American History by Glenn Adamson. Bloomsbury, 387 pp., $30.00 Art Isn’t Fair: Further Essays on the Traffic in Photographs and Related Media by Allan Sekula, edited by Sally Stein and Ina Steiner. Mack, 326 pp., $45.00 Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, November 22, 2019–February 2022 When Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s problematic cousin, wrote of taking stock of his own “mental furniture,” he meant assessing the background experiences and assumptions that informed his thought—the objects we barely see but instinctively accommodate as we move around the metaphorical room. Galton’s scientific star has dimmed since his death in 1911 (fathering eugenics has consequences), but he wasn’t wrong about furniture. Last summer, when a flamboyantly stately French commode…

1. On August 11, 1965, Marquette Frye, a twenty-one-year-old African-American, was pulled over in Los Angeles while driving his mother’s Buick, then arrested after failing a sobriety test. In the argument that followed, Frye was struck by the officers as residents began hurling objects at them. Six days of civil unrest that became known as the Watts riots ensued, leaving thirty-four people dead and miles of the city pockmarked by charred ruins. When Frye died in 1986, his New York Times obituary called the riots “the biggest insurrection by blacks in the United States since the slave revolts.” Between 1964 and 1967, black anger over policing practices, voter suppression, poverty, and economic inequality boiled over in cities throughout America. In the summer of 1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson created the…

Fathoms: The World in the Whale by Rebecca Giggs. Simon and Schuster, 340 pp., $27.00; $17.00 (paper) Nine years ago, mid-August, I was riding in a small open boat in the Quirimbas Archipelago, just off the coast of Mozambique. We were looking for whales. After running across the turquoise shoals to a deeper channel, the boat slowed and the pilot idled the motor. I remember thinking how odd it seemed to expect to see a whale in such a vast expanse of water. I felt absurdly like Melville’s Redburn: “A whale! Think of it! whales close to me.” But after a while we saw in the distance a sudden darkness on the surface—a low skerry of whale flesh—and a biological mist above it. Behind me, seated squarely amidships, a young…

Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night by Julian Sancton. Crown, 350 pp., $30.00 History is replete with tales of polar explorations that devolved into ordeals of unimaginable suffering. In May 1845 Sir John Franklin, a veteran British sea captain, set sail from England with 128 crewmen on two naval vessels, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, to find the Northwest Passage to the Pacific. Two months later, whalers encountered the ships in Baffin Bay, between Baffin Island and the west coast of Greenland. Then they disappeared. It took a decade for search parties to piece together the crew’s fate. Trapped in the Arctic ice pack and dying of scurvy, the men had abandoned the ships and marched south through the Canadian wilderness,…

True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman. Crown, 394 pp., $28.00 Stan Lee: A Life in Comics by Liel Leibovitz. Yale University Press, 179 pp., $26.00 Make Ours Marvel: Media Convergence and a Comics Universe edited by Matt Yockey. University of Texas Press, 358 pp., $90.00; $29.95 (paper) In the universe of superheroism, hyperbole is the coin of the realm. “The Galactus Trilogy,” a much admired comic book saga published by Marvel in 1966 and taking up three issues of The Fantastic Four, is a not untypical tale of superlatives multiplied and obliteration avoided, emblazoned with the warning “If This Be Doomsday!” The planet-devouring Galactus is poised to consume Earth’s “elemental energies.” Diverted at first by a benign supernatural entity named Uatu the Watcher, who…

Summerwater by Sarah Moss. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 203 pp., $25.00 Lear stands on the heath railing, drenched by a deluge. In Bleak House the solemn “drip, drip, drip” of the Lincolnshire rain keeps time with the regularity of a metronome. Bathsheba’s ill-fated marriage to the caddish Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd is met with a violent cloudburst of “liquid spines.” A mizzling, persistent damp leaches through the mud-splashed pages of Wolf Hall. It’s only fitting that the literature of the British Isles—what Hilary Mantel has Cromwell describe as that “miserable rainy island at the edge of the world”—is awash with cascading rivulets of rain, and Summerwater, Sarah Moss’s seventh novel, is no exception. It is set on the banks of a large loch in the Trossachs…