Innholdsfortegnelse for November 4, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

Classical Chinese Medicine by Liu Lihong, translated from the Chinese by Gabriel Weiss and Henry Buchtel with Sabine Wilms, and edited by Heiner Fruehauf. Chinese University Press, 644 pp., $90.00 (distributed by Columbia University Press) In mid-February 2020, during the peak of the Covid-19 outbreak in China, Liu Lihong, a slight man with a wispy beard, made his way into Hankou Hospital No. 8 in Wuhan. Dressed in an allwhite infectious disease suit, the only equipment he carried was a small box of acupuncture needles. Liu is the author of Sikao Zhongyi (literally “Contemplating Chinese Medicine,” now translated as Classical Chinese Medicine), a book that has sold more than 500,000 copies since it was first published in 2001 and has made him one of China’s most famous practitioners of traditional…

A Matter of Death and Life by Irvin D. Yalom and Marilyn Yalom. Redwood, 222 pp., $24.00; $18.00 (paper) In the middle of a gusty October three years ago, The New York Times published an obituary under the headline “Sue Hubbell, Who Wrote of Bees and Self-Reliance, Dies at 83.” The story is charming and noble in equal measure, the account of a woman who started over in the middle of her life after her marriage crumbled, following the wide road and the hum of hives. She fixes cars, keeps bees, drives miles for a perfect piece of pie, raises a son, writes it all down, publishes eight books, and is, at moments, “outrageously happy.” Who doesn’t love an obituary like this, where all the action happens in the last…

Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks, 1941–1995 edited by Anna von Planta and with an afterword by Joan Schenkar. Liveright, 999 pp., $39.95 Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith by Richard Bradford. Bloomsbury Caravel, 258 pp., $30.00 “The trouble with the police force,” said Arthur Gerard, the private eye in Strangers on a Train, “is that it has a single-track mind. This case, like many others, took a double-track mind. Simply couldn’t have been solved without a double-track mind.” Writing, for Patricia Highsmith, also took a double-track mind, and she accordingly kept two journals. Two records for the two Pats: “It takes two mirrors for the correct image of oneself,” she wrote. In the first journal, which she called her notebook or cahier and began at…

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach. Norton, 308 pp., $26.95 Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World by Emma Marris. Bloomsbury, 340 pp., $28.00 Every fall in the state of Maryland, where I live, hunters bearing rifles, shotguns, handguns, longbows, crossbows, and other sanctioned culling devices kill about 80,000 white-tailed deer. That “harvest” puts a significant dent in the average statewide deer population of 200,000-plus, but because a doe generally gives birth to twins or even triplets each year, deer are awfully good at replenishing their stock. And so deer can be seen ambling along suburban sidewalks in midday as if headed to Starbucks, or browsing peacefully and voraciously in one’s backyard on the tulips, hostas, lilies, and holly leaves, until one’s red-faced husband storms…

Almost thirty years ago, in 1992, the Supreme Court appeared poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, its 1973 decision declaring that women have a constitutional right to have an abortion. Since 1985 the Reagan administration had been urging the Court to reverse Roe, and the George H.W. Bush administration had continued the campaign. Reagan had appointed three new conservative justices: Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Anthony Kennedy, all of whom were viewed as critics of Roe. Bush had added two more, Clarence Thomas and David Souter. Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Byron White, both still on the Court in 1992, had dissented when Roe was decided. When the Court agreed to review Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, therefore, it looked as if there were more…

Kalevala: The Epic of the Finnish People translated from the Finnish by Eino Friberg and with an introduction by Jukka Korpela. Penguin, 615 pp., $20.00 (paper) The Kalevala: An Epic Poem After Oral Tradition by Elias Lönnrot, translated from the Finnish with an introduction and notes by Keith Bosley, and with a foreword by Albert B. Lord. Oxford University Press, 679 pp., $15.95 (paper) The Kalevala, or Poems of the Kaleva District compiled by Elias Lönnrot and translated from the Finnish with a foreword and appendices by Francis Peabody Magoun Jr. Harvard University Press, 413 pp., $35.50 (paper) “Among Finnish peoples,” I read with close attention at age eleven in the impressively weighty Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology, magic made its influence felt throughout all aspects of material and intellectual life.……

Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future by Saul Griffith. MIT Press, 269 pp., $24.95 If you’re looking for faint gray linings to a very dark cloud, there is, I suppose, one slight benefit of humanity’s three-decade delay in dealing with climate change: we get to see the dimensions of the problem quite starkly because it looms so large. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its Sixth Assessment Report in early August, underlined what we already know: the world is on a trajectory for destabilizing increases in temperature. The report is epic in scope and quality, the product of thousands of scientists volunteering long hours to sift through millions of pages of research. But it pales before the reports that nature issued this summer: record heat…

Joan Mitchell an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 4, 2021–January 17, 2022; the Baltimore Museum of Art, March 6–August 14, 2022; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, October 5, 2022–February 27, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Sarah Roberts and Katy Siegel. San Francisco Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 385 pp., $65.00 In our all-or-nothing culture, creative work is too often either apotheosized or ignored. You’re a rock star or you’re nothing. The public has little appetite for nuance. This makes it difficult to write about the achievement of Joan Mitchell, who was born in 1925, grew up in an affluent and literary Chicago household, and was a presence in artistic circles in New York and Paris from the 1950s until her death in…

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. Knopf, 303 pp., $28.00 Kazuo Ishiguro was a social worker before he was a novelist. Between 1979 and 1982, he worked at West London Cyrenians, a charity that provided support and accommodations to the homeless. While there he applied, rather on a whim, to a new creative writing program at the University of East Anglia. Upon graduating a year later, Ishiguro returned to Cyrenians. He tried to wake up early and write for ninety minutes before work, but found this increasingly difficult as his job grew more demanding. Luckily an editor at Faber had already bought his first novel. Published in 1982, A Pale View of Hills was a notable success, earning him a Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and a place on Granta’s…

I intended this essay, successively, to coincide with various recent events: the death of a president, the launch of a book, the anniversary of a revolution. That I failed to deliver on each of those occasions was the result of something of a blind spot: it was impossible, then as now, to write about Egypt over the past ten years without at last addressing what happened in the summer of 2013.1 I do not mean the army’s ouster of Egypt’s first freely elected post-revolution president, Mohamed Morsi, on July 3, 2013, after three days of enormous protests against his authoritarianism and Islamist policies.2 Nor am I referring to the subsequent crackdown on his supporters, an estimated 80,000 of whom camped in a Cairo public square for forty days demanding his…

A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems by Lawrence Joseph. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 188 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper) Lawrence Joseph is a lawyer-poet (since 2003 a law professor at St. John’s University), a Catholic poet, a metropolitan-and-other-hyphenates poet. He was born in Detroit in 1948, his grandparents Lebanese and Syrian Catholics who arrived in the first wave of Arab immigration to the city, his Detroit-born father inheriting the family grocery store but having to work as a meat cutter on the side to keep afloat. His youth was a mix of Fordism—Gramsci’s term, Joseph is always quick to point out—jukebox soul, and violent unrest. A formative moment for him and his writing came in 1970, when his father was shot and almost killed in a robbery at the store: to some…