Innholdsfortegnelse for November 18, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

SLOANE CROSLEY is the author of several books of essays. Her second novel, Cult Classic, will be published in June. JASON DEPARLE writes about poverty for The New York Times. He is the author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century. MARTIN FILLER’s latest book is Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on architecture in these pages. MICHAEL GORRA is the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece and The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, among other books. He teaches at Smith. COLIN GRANT’s books include Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of…

When Should Law Forgive? by Martha Minow. Norton, 252 pp., $27.95; $17.95 (paper) One night in September 2018, in a gentrifying neighborhood just south of downtown Dallas, a twenty-six-year-old accountant named Botham Jean came home from work. Without locking his apartment door, he changed into shorts and a T-shirt, served himself two scoops of vanilla ice cream, and settled onto his couch to watch a football game. Before the ice cream began to melt, a stranger barged in, yelled, “Let me see your hands,” then shot him dead. The stranger was an off-duty police officer, a white woman named Amber Guyger. Guyger lived in the apartment directly below Jean’s. She later said that she had accidentally entered the wrong apartment, mistaking Jean, who was Black, for an intruder in her…

Good Behaviour by Molly Keane, with an introduction by Amy Gentry. New York Review Books, 291 pp., $16.95 (paper) Molly Keane: A Life by Sally Phipps. London: Virago, 338 pp., £20.00; £9.99 (paper) In the opening scene of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, a novel about an Anglo-Irish household in the first half of the twentieth century, a fifty-seven-year-old woman named Aroon St. Charles is arguing with Rose, the family cook. Aroon has made rabbit quenelles for her elderly widowed mother, bedridden upstairs. Rose reminds Aroon that Mummie hates rabbit. Aroon says that Mummie is fine with rabbit. Besides, she’ll say it’s chicken and Mummie will never know the difference. Aroon brings up the tray before Rose can intervene. Mummie takes one whiff of the rabbit, vomits, and dies. All this…

To the Editors: As an author and longtime devotee of The New York Review of Books, I’d aspired to be mentioned in its pages, but not as a naïf relic, which was the case in “Conceiving the Future,” Anna Louie Sussman’s review of three books touching on childbearing in our moment of extreme ecological disruption [NYR, September 23]. The 1969 Mills College valedictory address mentioned at the review’s beginning initiated my more than half-century of grappling with the complexity of problems like overpopulation, wildlands conservation, and women’s reproductive rights. In countless talks, editorials, and essays; as a bioregional organizer and participant in numerous national and international conferences; and in my seven books, I also addressed such topics as ecological restoration, community economics, and technological excess, always hoping to contribute to…

Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy by Edward Ball. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 395 pp., $28.00; $20.00 (paper) At the start of D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation, the American Civil War has recently ended. With the defeat of the Confederacy, the southern white population is now kept in subjugation by white northern “carpetbaggers” in league with newly appointed black legislators. Early on in the film (based on Thomas Dixon’s novel The Clansman), a black face appears on the screen. Gus, one of the liberated enslaved, in the uniform of the Union Army, loiters outside the house of the virginal southern belle Flora and follows her to the woods. The “black brute,” with “his yellow teeth grinning through his thick lips,” as Dixon describes…

In Memory of Memory: A Romance by Maria Stepanova, translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale. New Directions, 432 pp., $19.95 (paper) “I always knew I would someday write a book about my family,” writes Maria Stepanova in a chapter of In Memory of Memory called “On Beginnings.” Most of her Russian Jewish ancestors were ordinary people who devoted their lives “to remaining invisible, to achieving a desired inconspicuousness, to hiding in the dim household light and keeping themselves apart from the wide current of history.” She on the other hand is a poet and journalist, “the first and only person in the family who had a reason to speak facing outward.” Her job, and possibly her life’s purpose, is to “build a monument to those people, making sure they…

AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND BLACK STUDIES Whaling Captains of Color America’s First Meritocracy Skip Finley “Engaging… Meticulously researched… Skip Finley provides a critically important analysis of the social and legal conditions on land which encouraged so many people of color to brave the dangers of the sea.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Alphonse Fletcher University Professor, Harvard University “Much more than a prodigious work of scholarship… An entertaining read that puts the focus where it properly belongs: on the multicultural essence of a fishery that spanned the globe.” —Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea Pub June 2020. 6.125 x 9.25 in. 304 pp. 41 b&w halftones. Naval Institute Press 978-1-68247-509-6 Cloth, $42.95 AMERICAN STUDIES Christmas Past An Anthology of Seasonal Stories from Nineteenth-Century America Edited by Thomas Ruys Smith…

Wayward by Dana Spiotta. Knopf, 274 pp., $27.00 Dana Spiotta is a decade writer. Lightning Field (2001) is a dreamy yet precise study of lifestyle consumerism in Los Angeles in the early Aughts (Spirit Gyms, yurts). Stone Arabia (2011) and Innocents and Others (2016) both touch down in the 1980s (pop culture, punk, landlines). Her best-known book, Eat the Document (2006), features one of the finest opening chapters of any novel this century and moves between the 1970s and 1990s with masterly command, creating a nuanced portrait of crumbling American idealism. With each novel, she tethers herself to a moment in time, devising original interviews and transcripts from the period with such verisimilitude that it can take a moment for the reader to realize these too are part of the…

I am your lifeguard, remoteand mindful, a wind that throws itself from tree to tree that catches the constellations facing the other waybefore they trip in this prison they call the futurethis mixed, pollinated sea they call a prison I consider all the apple trees that died during my lifetime the cheap figurines of CantinflasXs on a calendar in the horse diver’s room upon the bleached ribs of a goatherd a civilization is foundedthe clean T-shirts of the murderer’s child they say under moonlight the towboat comes inwhat world is using my voice to call your name…

Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster. Henry Holt, 783 pp., $35.00 Henry James went to prison on a December morning in 1884. He was a good walker and probably set out on foot from his flat off Piccadilly, cutting through London’s Green Park and then down through Westminster toward the river, heading for Millbank Penitentiary, today the site of Tate Britain. It had once held convicts waiting to be transported to Australia. Now it was on the verge of closing, but it was still busy enough to let James work up a scene for his new novel. You can read the results of that morning’s trip in the third chapter of The Princess Casamassima (1886), with its account of “a vast interior dimness” in…

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LULU PUBLISHING www.lulu.com BALLASTED WINGS Why That Day? by Susan Knox Kopta “A creative, immersive, and affecting portrait of bipolar disorder… unconventional approach proves to be effective … poetic sincerity… vividly describing the gamut of emotions…” —Kirkus Reviews 978-1-4834-2952-6 • Paper, $8.92 • 131 Pages • Literary Fiction Available on Barnes & Noble, Audible, and GoodReads. Author’s website: www.BipolarLinks.com BEAVER’S POND PRESS www.beaverspondpress.com; (952) 829-8818 STANDS BEFORE HIS PEOPLE Enmegahbowh and the Ojibwe by Verne Pickering and Stephen Schaitberger Enmegahbowh was probably the only Native American in the 1800s who spoke English, lived through American settlement, and left a written record. He participated in many treaty negotiations for land cessions and met leading politicians. He became an Episcopal priest in 1859. The history includes murders, lynchings, near rebellion, and massive…