Innholdsfortegnelse for April 7, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

Final Report by the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States. 288 pp., December 2021, available at whitehouse.gov/pcscotus/final-report/ The Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States had an image problem from the moment President Biden established it last April, fulfilling a campaign promise that he would examine what might be done with a Court that was “getting out of whack.” The Democratic left, hungry for payback for the two seats they regard Donald Trump and Mitch Mc-Connell as having “stolen,” dismissed it as an effort to shield the president from having to confront their demand to add two or even four additional seats to the Court. Others simply shrugged after noting that Biden asked the thirty-fourmember commission—mostly law professors, arrayed from the center-left to…

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, from the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz. Beacon, 308 pp., $29.95 According to Eric Berkowitz’s Dangerous Ideas, the first public book burning in recorded history likely occurred in 430 BCE. Because the Sophist philosopher Protagoras questioned the existence of the gods, who had inflicted defeats in war and a devastating pestilence on Athens, his fellow citizens wanted to appease them by incinerating his sacrilegious writings. Two hundred years after Protagoras’s works were devoured by flames, Chinese scrolls and wooden tablets suffered the same fate during the reign of Qin Shi Huang.1 In Imperial Rome books were burned assiduously, including many Christian texts, and then pagan texts once the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century. A…

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley: Blood Moon an exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, September 24, 2021–April 3, 2022. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Karen Patterson. Fabric Workshop and Museum/Gregory R. Miller, 319 pp., $45.00 Seeing a video made by the artists Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley for the first time can feel like encountering a newly invented language. How best to take it in? Should you sit? Stand? Close your eyes and listen? Take notes? In each of their black-and-white videos, usually about ten minutes long, a handful of characters, most of them acted by Mary, tell a story in rhyming verse full of off-kilter wordplay, double entendres, and semantic switcheroos. The density of the puns and the breakneck pace of their delivery, combined…

The Rāmāyaīa of Vālmīki: The Complete English Translation translated from the Sanskrit by Robert P. Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, Rosalind Lefeber, Sheldon I. Pollock, and Barend A. van Nooten; and revised and edited by Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman. Princeton University Press, 943 pp., $27.50 (paper) In 2007 the Indian government planned to dig a deepwater channel through the thirty-mile stretch of sea that separates the southern tip of the country from Sri Lanka, which is too shallow for cargo ships to navigate, forcing them to go around the island. The shipping channel would have reduced the journey by some 250 miles and saved a great deal of time, fuel, and money. But a group of hard-line Hindu activists protested that the digging would disturb a…

“Hurry up! Get a move on… Sniper! Sniper!” Soldiers shouted at people, who began running under the elevated road leading to the bridge over the Irpin River. They had spent days in basements and shelters in Irpin—less than two weeks ago a green and pleasant suburb on the northwestern edge of the capital—while Russian troops attempting to reach Kyiv were attacking their houses and apartment blocks, and they were terrified. Above them were dozens of abandoned cars where the roadway ended; the bridge, on the road between Irpin and Kyiv, had been blown up by Ukrainian forces to slow the Russian advance. A man sprawled by a yellow bike, presumably shot dead by the sniper. Watching the exodus from Irpin gave me flashbacks to the first days of the war…

The Chancellor: The Remarkable Odyssey of Angela Merkel by Kati Marton. Simon and Schuster, 344 pp., $30.00 In 1989, as the Berlin Wall was breached and the political order of Europe was upended, two obscure people in their mid-thirties watched it happen from inside an imploding Communist state, the German Democratic Republic. In Dresden, Vladimir Putin, an agent of the KGB, burned secret files in a furnace at the intelligence agency’s headquarters. He most probably observed the chancellor of the other Germany, Helmut Kohl, sweep into Dresden and address an enthusiastic crowd about the unity of the German nation. Putin knew the end was nigh. Just 120 miles away in East Berlin, Angela Merkel, a disillusioned and rather bored quantum chemist, joined a good-natured crowd of her fellow easterners surging…

Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate by M. E. Sarotte. Yale University Press, 550 pp., $35.00 The last thing Joe Biden must have expected upon fulfilling his dream of becoming president in January 2021 was that a year later he would face a Russian invasion of Ukraine and the largest armed conflict in Europe since World War II. This wasn’t supposed to happen. China was seen as the new threat. The Quad—the alliance of the US, Japan, India, and Australia, designed to contain Beijing’s geopolitical ambitions—was the main focus of Washington’s foreign policy. Now suddenly Vladimir Putin, keen to prove Russia’s status as a great power, was hell-bent on reconquering the second-largest republic of the former Soviet Union. The scope and brutality of his…

George V: Never a Dull Moment by Jane Ridley. Harper, 559 pp., $35.00 Why does monarchy exist, and what purpose does it serve? At a time when the British monarchy has been much troubled, even those who think it an absurd anachronism must concede that it has shown an astonishing capacity for survival. If you start with Athelstan, who from around 930 was called “king of the English,” then England has been ruled by kings and queens for nearly eleven hundred years. Four years after King George V acceded to the throne in 1910 a terrible war ravaged Europe and ended with the collapse of four empires as well as the demise of many other kingdoms and principalities across the continent. But George—who during that war changed his dynasty’s name…

Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain by Padraic X. Scanlan. London: Robinson, 448 pp., £25.00; £12.99 (paper) Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain London: Viking, 306 pp., £18.99; £9.99 (paper) In 1833 Britain allocated the extraordinary sum of £20 million—40 percent of the British treasury’s annual expenditures at the time, and the equivalent today of some $3.35 billion—in compensation payments to make a clean and final break with slavery. This was the year that it freed enslaved people throughout its empire and a quarter of a century after it outlawed participation in the transatlantic commerce in Africans, which it had dominated for 150 years. During that time it had shipped three million slaves to the Americas. Since then the country has attempted to recast the historical understanding of…

Late Fragments: Flares, My Heart Laid Bare, Prose Poems, Belgium Disrobed by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French and edited by Richard Sieburth. Yale University Press, 427 pp., $30.00 (to be published in May) The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French by Aaron Poochigian, with an introduction by Dana Gioia and an afterword by Daniel Handler. Liveright, 343 pp., $27.95 The Salon of 1846 by Charles Baudelaire, translated from the French by Jonathan Mayne, with an introduction by Michael Fried. David Zwirner, 159 pp., $12.95 (paper) Last year was the two hundredth anniversary of Charles Baudelaire’s birth. We now have new translations of his poetry and prose, and a reissue of the essays that revolutionized art criticism. This trio of works leapfrogs…

The Letters of John McGahern edited by Frank Shovlin. London: Faber and Faber, 851 pp., $40.00 Seamus Heaney once characterized the Irish novelist John McGahern as a ruminant, given to chewing the cud. He meant it as a compliment. He was defending McGahern’s third novel, The Leavetaking (1974), against the charge of recycling material from his first, The Barracks (1963). The accusation wasn’t unfair. The death from cancer of McGahern’s mother, Susan, when he was ten, is at the core of both novels, and it’s described in very similar terms. Later he returned to it again, in terrifying detail, in his memoir All Will Be Well (2005). But, Heaney suggested, the echoes and repetitions were irrelevant. This is how memory becomes imagination, by repeating itself. John McGahern was born in…