Innholdsfortegnelse for April 21, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

Don Carlos an opera by Giuseppe Verdi, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, February 28–March 26, 2022 The first act of Verdi’s Don Carlos is almost an opera in itself: in a matter of minutes the prospect of a happy destiny is born, blooms, and dissolves. The elements of its setting—a forest in winter, a fire kindled in the wilderness, a starry sky—have a poetic openness not to be found in the sterner scenes toward which the story is headed. Perhaps that separateness accounts for its being so frequently omitted as inessential, although the loss seems drastic: in the Met’s persuasive and powerful new production, this prelude seems the indispensable glimpse of a world elsewhere, whose possibilities are never to be revisited. In retrospect it makes the setting of…

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp., $30.00 For weeks after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney remained closeted away in various undisclosed locations while Bush administration officials announced the start of a global war on terror. Cheney, the chief architect of that war, finally resurfaced in his office in the West Wing of the White House, where Bob Woodward of The Washington Post asked him how long the war might last. Cheney was forth-right: “It may never end. At least, not in our lifetime.” It was the closest any public figure has come to predicting endless war—the dream of every militarist from Clausewitz and Moltke to Cheney and his fellow Vulcans in…

How Rights Went Wrong: Why Our Obsession with Rights Is Tearing America Apart by Jamal Greene, with a foreword by Jill Lepore. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 299 pp., $28.00; $17.99 (paper) If there’s one thing Americans can agree about, it’s that we disagree. We are divided into warring camps on issues from abortion to guns to taxes—even on wearing masks and getting vaccinated. There have been so many diagnoses of why we are riven that it can be daunting to come up with a new explanation. Jamal Greene, a constitutional law professor at Columbia Law School, proposes one: in How Rights Went Wrong, he argues that our conception of constitutional rights as absolutes drives us into all-or-nothing conflicts in which one side necessarily wins and the other loses. In a pluralist…

When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe by Maureen Quilligan. Liveright, 301 pp., $29.95 Elizabeth I launched her defense against the Spanish Armada in 1588 with an unforgettable image: “I have the body of a weak, and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” Only a sovereign could transcend sexual difference, cloaking a king’s power in a woman’s flesh. But some saw this gender paradox as a kind of monstrosity. John Knox, the Scottish religious reformer and radical, had published The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in 1558, the year of Elizabeth’s coronation. In it, he asked: How is it that the weak, the foolish, and the impotent may rule the strong? “Their sight in civil…

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden. Princeton University Press, 300 pp., $29.95 You must know the parable about the frog that sits in a pot of water being gradually heated, allowing itself to be boiled alive: because the change happens gradually, it never realizes it should leap out. Reading Kathryn Paige Harden’s book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality is a similar experience, as the author ingenuously points out. “Like a frog being slowly boiled alive,” she observes, readers follow her argument “from an uncontroversial premise to a highly controversial one.” Harden’s “uncontroversial premise” in this case is that siblings raised in the same family share a childhood environment and 50 percent of their DNA randomly assigned at conception, and…

On May 10, 1981, François Mitterrand was elected president of France. It was the first time in the twenty-three-year history of the Fifth Republic that a Socialist had wrested power from the Gaullist center-right, and his victory set off raucous waves of drunken celebration, as well as shivers of fear among business leaders who worried about the new president’s pledge to nationalize banks and other major industries. “Whoever does not accept rupture with the established order, with capitalist society, cannot belong to the Socialist Party,” Mitterrand had said in a rousing speech at Épinay ten years before. Now he planned to make good on his promise of rupture. On May 7, 2017, Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker and economy minister who just months earlier had founded his own centrist…

Lessons from the Edge by Marie Yovanovitch. Mariner, 394 pp., $30.00 Here, Right Matters: An American Story by Alexander S. Vindman. Harper, 245 pp., $26.99; $17.99 (paper; to be published in June) There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill. Mariner, 422 pp., $30.00 If you’ve ever been curious about how America’s so-called deep state really works, these three memoirs are a good place to start. Their authors were, until recently, unknown to the public, having quietly risen to just below the surface of the American foreign policy establishment. None of them, it’s fair to say, would have written a memoir had they not been catapulted to national prominence as witnesses in Donald Trump’s first impeachment hearings in the fall of 2019. Marie…

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts by Jed Perl. Knopf, 161 pp., $20.00 An anecdote: it is twenty or so years ago, and two friends, J. and M., are in Florence, relaxedly on the trail of some of the city’s less well known artistic treasures. In a nondescript street, M. pauses before a nondescript church, which, according to his Royal Automobile Club guidebook to Italy, published in 1928—yes, he has his eccentricities—houses a fragment of a mural by Filippo Lippi (1406–1469) that is not to be missed. They enter the church, deserted on this weekday morning, and stand in the spot where what survives of the mural is supposedly to be found. However, on the wall there is only an enormous and exceedingly bad painting, in a heavy…

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso. Hogarth, 191 pp., $26.00 Reviewers of Sarah Manguso’s writing love to tally her words and pages—as is often the case for very short books (the “slim volume”) and very long ones (the “doorstop”), as though such extremes are feats beyond belief. Her work falls into the former category: books “brief as a breath” and “slim as a Pop-Tart,” written in a style that has been described as “fragmentary” and “aphoristic” (terms Manguso herself has disavowed), “with the precision of a miniaturist.” It is difficult to do a lot with a little, and Manguso, a poet as well as an essayist and memoirist, covers quite a bit of distance with a minimum of means. Manguso’s prose is an uncommon mix of economy and obsession. Her…

A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick by Cathy Curtis. Norton, 388 pp., $35.00 The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick edited and with an introduction by Alex Andriesse. New York Review Books, 283 pp., $18.95 (paper; to be published in May) 1. It is unfair to begin an essay on Elizabeth Hardwick with an instance of her cruelty; she was one of the fairest literary critics of her time, as well as the most elegant and humane. Yet the faintest hint of certain themes, overheard in a novel or play or the chatter of a cocktail party, could provoke her to astonishing acts of savagery. These themes included academics, politicians, youth cults playing at revolution, biographers, diarists, and, above all, marriage, with its unremitting and awful capacity to turn…