Innholdsfortegnelse for October 7, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His most recent book is IF: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. PETER BROWN is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His books include Augustine of Hippo: A Biography and, most recently, Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity. ROBYN CRESWELL teaches Comparative Literature at Yale and is the author of City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut. DEBORAH EISENBERG’s latest collection of short stories is Your Duck Is My Duck. 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. HOWARD W.…

The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570 an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, June 26–October 11, 2021. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Keith Christiansen and Carlo Falciani. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 327 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Alice Neel: People Come First an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 22–August 1, 2021. Catalog of the exhibition by Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 255 pp., $50.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power edited by Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone. Routledge, 368 pp., $160.00 The Obama Portraits by Taina Caragol, Dorothy Moss, Richard J. Powell, and Kim Sajet. National Portrait Gallery/Princeton University Press, 139 pp., $24.95 The Obama Portraits Tour an…

Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter, translated from the German by Isabel Fargo Cole. New York Review Books, 253 pp., $17.95 (paper) As you finish one of these stories you might have the sensation that you’ve awakened abruptly in unfamiliar territory, far afield from where you thought you were headed, and that while you were busy reading, something was done to you—that, for instance, you were implanted with some device that resonates to the frequencies of the cosmos. At least that’s what happens to me. Evidently, Adalbert Stifter has always had plenty of detractors, to whom absolutely nothing, or at least nothing of interest, happens. His formidable critics Friedrich Hebbel and Arno Schmidt, to cite two examples, were tirelessly contemptuous of what they saw as the triviality of Stifter’s subjects and…

Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa by Brian J. Peterson. Indiana University Press, 333 pp., $90.00; $35.00 (paper) France’s Wars in Chad: Military Intervention and Decolonization in Africa by Nathaniel K. Powell. Cambridge University Press, 360 pp., $99.99 Living by the Gun in Chad: Combatants, Impunity and State Formation by Marielle Debos, translated from the French by Andrew Brown. Zed, 239 pp., $95.00; $29.95 (paper) The Trial of Hissène Habré: How the People of Chad Brought a Tyrant to Justice by Celeste Hicks. Zed, 217 pp., $95.00; $24.95 (paper) Sometime in late 1983 or very early 1984, I traveled to Ouagadougou, the capital of a West African country then called Upper Volta, to get a sense of a man whose recent rise to power was already a sensation…

To the Editors: Linda Greenhouse generously calls my book Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty?: The Unnecessary Conflict “a novel and useful contribution to discourse on LGBTQ rights,” and appreciates “the willingness of one of the legal academy’s most prominent advocates for LGBTQ equality to meet the other side halfway” [NYR, July 1]. But she questions whether “the very notion of accommodation can be seen in today’s America as anything more than a noble thought experiment.” She doesn’t believe that it is possible to reach any compromise with the religious right, some elements of which, she accurately notes, are dangerously antidemocratic and even theocratic, promoting a paranoid narrative of “grievance conservatism—conservatives’ belief that they are losing unfairly even when they are actually winning.” My subtitle calls the conflict “unnecessary.” She responds:…

They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans by Macon Fry. University Press of Mississippi, 213 pp., $25.00 I’ve never met Macon Fry but I often meet his goats, Inky and Dinky. Every weekend—at least before Hurricane Ida shipped us on an all-expenses-unpaid vacation to Alabama—my young son and I take a bike path that begins at the corner of Audubon Park and follows the ridge of the levee upriver. The path is part of the Mississippi River Trail, which runs three thousand miles to Lake Itasca in Minnesota, but our destination is only two miles away. There, just past the US Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans headquarters, we reach what my son calls the “crazy houses.” Or as the local newspaper once put it,…

Pessoa: A Biography by Richard Zenith. Liveright, 1,055 pp., $40.00 Even among the eccentric annals of poets who talked to God, angels, tutelary spirits, and disincorporated souls, Fernando Pessoa is a special case. The architect of Portuguese modernism, Pessoa invented as many as 136 independent aliases, or, to use his word, heteronyms, to which he attributed much of his work. There’s nothing unusual about publishing under a name that’s not your own. But Pessoa—a self-described medium and amateur astrologer—treated his alter egos as actually existing contemporaries, past lives he was living in real time. He gave them distinct literary styles and cast their birth charts. These surrogates were prolific. When Pessoa died in 1935, he left behind only a smattering of writing bearing his signature. He did, however, leave 25,000…

The storm passed though electricity flickeredand stirred-up color had yet to settle At the window of the rental with my life half-packedin shadow I was unseen by themthe city foxes who must always worrybeds unmade door kicked in more than once They investigated the fallen beechits roots exposed like the apartmentof somebody who has diedunable to tidy up first Stronger trees asleep on their feetnothing more they could do and the grass flattened under the book of waterStorm Dennis threw at England My host would write of me online laterit was as though no one had even been there Dusk that untrustworthy timewhen holes appear in the civic fabricand insights are expected to emerge Characters left over from the seancetape recordings played through a telephonedouble exposures two CCTV photoscentury-old police…

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake. Random House, 352 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper) Imagine that you are afloat on your back in the sea. You have some sense of its vast, unknowable depths—worlds of life are surely darting about beneath you. Now imagine lying in a field, or on the forest floor. The same applies, though we rarely think of it: the dirt beneath you, whether a mile or a foot deep, is teeming with more organisms than researchers can quantify. Their best guess is that there are as many as one billion microbes in a single teaspoon of soil. Plant roots plunge and swerve like superhighways with an infinite number of on-ramps. And everywhere there are probing fungi.…

Fall: The Mysterious Life and Death of Robert Maxwell, Britain’s Most Notorious Media Baron by John Preston. Harper, 323 pp., $28.99 Over the past two years—since the arrest of Jeffrey Epstein in July 2019 on charges of trafficking minors and then his suicide in prison; Prince Andrew’s calamitous television interview the following November, in which he tried to dissociate himself from Epstein’s crimes but instead brought his public career to an end; and the dramatic arrest in July 2020 of Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s associate and former girlfriend, and her incarceration in a federal prison in Brooklyn—an image has recurred before my mind’s eye. Around ninety years ago a little boy called Jan Hoch, wearing a yarmulke and curled sidelocks, belonged to an Orthodox Jewish community—impoverished, Yiddish-speaking, devout—in the small town…

JAMES JOYCE HOLIDAY CARDS “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe.” This quote from Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” from Dubliners, is printed in Ireland on acid-free stock, 100% recycled, FSC certified and carbon neutral. Six 4⅛" x 5⅞" cards with envelopes. Blank inside. #05-JJHC6 • $29.95 GERTRUDE STEIN AS A CHILD HOLIDAY CARDS Like all of the wildly imaginative art of Edward Gorey, this drawing, entitled “Gertrude Stein as a child decorates a dog for Christmas,” seems more truthful than reality. Archival photographs of Gertrude Stein as a child of three—long curls, big hair bow, frilly pinafore, and earrings no less—seem to miss something elemental. Leave it to Edward Gorey to get it right. Not only Gertrude’s portrait, but her interest; long…