Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2, 2021 i The New York Review of Books

RAE ARMANTROUT ’s latest book of poems, Conjure, was published last year. A new book, Finalists, will be published next year. NEAL ASCHERSON is the author of Black Sea, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, and the novel Death of the Fronsac, among other books. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. CHRISTOPHER BENFEY is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. His latest book is IF: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. JAKE BERNSTEIN is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. He was the senior reporter for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists on the Panama Papers. A movie adaptation of The Laundromat, his most recent book, was released in 2019. ELAINE BLAIR is a regular contributor to The New York Review.…

How to Be Animal: A New History of What It Means to Be Human by Melanie Challenger. Penguin, 260 pp., $17.00 (paper) According to the major monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—humans have a special nature and destiny, different from and superior to those of other animals. Created by a divine power, humans resemble it in not belonging entirely to the natural world. They exercise a freedom of will no other animal possesses and, thanks to the afterlife, are exempt from mortality. In Western societies monotheistic ideas no longer prevail in the explicit forms they once did, but the claim that humans have a unique standing has not been renounced. It continues to shape our view of ourselves and our planet, though the defining feature of humanity is now commonly identified…

What I thought of as a pleasant lingeringon things,tender,without the flurried rush of hope,Freud called “melancholia”: “a state in which a person grievesfor a loss she is unable to identify.” What I experiencedas a general attunement,wishing only to continue— a suspended attitude— Freud described as“narcissistic identification with the objectthat becomes a substitute for the eroticcathexis.” And what if, in my case,there are multiple objects— whatever appears outside this window— the dangling threadsof the weeping cypress— how I would love to makethe elegant, dismissivegesturesof those long fingers— beside the whitephone lines, plungingalmost straight down,or up,taut, catching occasional rays of sun, like a child’s ideaof a message…

The Women of Troy by Pat Barker. Doubleday, 284 pp., $28.00 The Women of Troy is the second novel in Pat Barker’s trilogy-in-progress about the Trojan War. Its predecessor, The Silence of the Girls (2018), was set in the Greeks’ shoreside camp before their artfully planned penetration of Troy hidden in the belly of a “gift”: a wooden horse. In the bleaker sequel, the city has fallen, and Andromache, the wife of Hector, Cassandra, a virgin priestess raped in Athena’s temple, and Hecuba, Priam’s widowed queen, are forced to dwell in the squalid camp as their conquerors’ concubines and servingwomen, while the Greeks wait with increasing desperation for the sea wind to change in their favor so they can sail for home. Barker adds to the group of captured Trojan…

Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town by Jason Stacy. University of Illinois Press, 234 pp., $110.00; $27.95 (paper) During his 2015 visit to the United States, Pope Francis told an audience of American bishops that the Catholic Church should seek to fuse the “epic struggle” of the pioneers with the “homely wisdom” of the settlers. “As one of your poets has put it,” the pontiff explained, the church required “‘strong and tireless wings’ combined with the wisdom of one who ‘knows the mountains.’” How many of the bishops, literate as they might be, recognized that Francis was quoting a gnomic (and faintly Nietzschean) poem from Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, a book that happened to be celebrating its centennial that year?…

More written about than read, more notorious than known, the British heiress Nancy Cunard has much to tell us and warn us against. She was born in 1896 into the Cunard shipping fortune and raised in the English countryside by a loving but distant father and a status-conscious, American-born mother—an unlikely background for a future agitator, leftist publisher, and civil rights advocate. In early 1919, she was severely struck by the Spanish flu. The following year, she moved to Paris, eventually befriending the surrealists and founding an important and innovative press. Her crowning achievement was the Negro anthology (1934), a costly, comprehensive 855-page volume celebrating Blackness and Harlem just as its Renaissance was ending. Negro charted the global force of Black culture, mapping itself onto ideas of race Cunard inherited…

GIBBON & ETHIOPIA To the Editors: In “The Glories of Aksum” [NYR, October 7], Peter Brown quotes Edward Gibbon’s dictum, in chapter 47 of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that medieval Ethiopia “slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world, by whom they were forgotten.” This he condemns as a specimen of the Eurocentricity that has condemned us to see the history of early Christianity in exclusively Greco-Roman terms. There is, of course, much truth in this, but something may be added to what he says. In chapter 42, Gibbon presents Aksum as the western terminal of an oceanic silk road, running from south China through the Indian Ocean to the markets of Persia and Byzantium. Gibbon thinks that if a Christian power had been established…

They took him to beyond Davidstown,Stopped the car on a side road untilThere was no sign of anyone. And then,To get his chords working again,He was to shout at the top of his voice.The more he tried to do it, though,The more it came out as pain, a soft howl. The other one lost his control of speechIn the same season. Hard consonantsDefeated him. It was as if a doorWas locked and he was in a roomBanging, but unable to call out, and fromThe other side a sound came, faint at first,Then familiar, almost clear: pain, a soft howl.…

Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken. Graywolf, 89 pp., $15.00 (paper) So Much for That Winter by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra. Graywolf, 147 pp., $15.00 (paper) Mirror, Shoulder, Signal by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra. Graywolf, 188 pp., $16.00 (paper) Wild Swims by Dorthe Nors, translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra. Graywolf, 124 pp., $15.00 (paper) How slippery the work of the Danish writer Dorthe Nors is, how it sideswipes and gleams. When I consider her four books translated into English—two story collections, a pair of novellas, one novel—I think of music. As with music, I can hold only small strands of Nors’s work in my mind at a time, while the whole composition…

New writing from nyrb NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD by Benjamín Labatut Translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize “When We Cease to Understand the World fuses fact and fiction to turn the modern history of physics into a gripping narrative of obsessed scientists, world-changing discoveries, and the ultimate results—often quite dark—of our drive to understand the fundamental workings of the universe.” —John Williams, The New York Times Book Review Podcast “It is a meditation in prose that bears a familial relationship to the work of W. G. Sebald or Olga Tokarczuk: a sequence of accounts that skew biographical but also venture into the terrain of imagination.” —Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker Paperback • $17.95 HAIFA…

Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs by Camilla Townsend. Oxford University Press, 320 pp., $29.95; $21.95 (paper) The Aztecs: Lost Civilizations by Frances F. Berdan. Reaktion, 232 pp., $25.00 Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest by Fernando Cervantes. Viking, 493 pp., $35.00 Deciphering Aztec Hieroglyphs: A Guide to Nahuatl Writing by Gordon Whittaker. University of California Press, 210 pp., $34.95 Of books on Spain’s conquest of Mexico there is apparently no end. From William H. Prescott in the nineteenth century to Hugh Thomas in the late twentieth, the encounter of Hernan Cortes and the emperor Moctezuma in 1519 and the subsequent overthrow of the Aztec empire have been endlessly recounted. Not surprisingly, the narratives, as the work of Anglo-American and European historians, have been written…

Gideon’s Promise: A Public Defender Movement to Transform Criminal Justice by Jonathan Rapping. Beacon, 238 pp., $26.95; $16.95 (paper) Free Justice: A History of the Public Defender in Twentieth-Century America by Sara Mayeux. University of North Carolina Press, 271 pp., $90.00; $26.95 (paper) Privilege and Punishment: How Race and Class Matter in Criminal Court by Matthew Clair. Princeton University Press, 298 pp., $29.95; $19.95 (paper) In our national debates about criminal justice reform, public defenders have not received as much attention as police and prosecutors. Perhaps this is because their problems seem obvious: they are underpaid and overworked. Defenders tackle insurmountable caseloads by resorting to triage. They hastily review cases assuming that most defendants will waive their right to a trial and plead guilty in order to get a reduced…

My Phantoms by Gwendoline Riley. London: Granta, 199 pp., £12.99 There was “nothing for him” in England. “There were no ‘Homes for Heroes.’ Oh no. No ‘Homes for Heroes.’” My grandmother said this indignantly. And if my mother was there, she used to shake her head and join in: “There was nothing, no. Nothing.” This is the narrator, Bridget, at the beginning of Gwendoline Riley’s new novel, My Phantoms, recounting one of her grandmother’s favorite talking points. “They were talking about my grandfather,” Bridget explains, “who had worked in Venezuela after the war.” That’s where Bridget’s mother, Helen, was born in 1949—and although the family returned to England just a few years later, it’s also where as a toddler Helen renamed herself, effectively, when her first attempts to pronounce that…