Innholdsfortegnelse for June 23, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

ANDREW DELBANCO is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia and President of the Teagle Foundation. JARRETT EARNEST is the editor of Devotion: Today’s Future Becomes Tomorrow’s Archive, which will be published in June. PETER E. GORDON is the Amabel B. James Professor of History and a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. His most recent book is Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization. LYNN HUNT is Distinguished Research Professor in History at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her books include Inventing Human Rights, Writing History in the Global Era, and, most recently, History: Why It Matters. LAURA KOLBE is a doctor and medical ethicist at Weill Cornell Medicine. Her poetry collection Little Pharma was published last year.…

Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer. University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey. University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey. Art Issues Press, 215 pp., $19.95 (paper) When Dave Hickey died last fall at the age of eighty-two, he left behind a singular contribution to the history of art writing, along with a badly bruised reputation, both routinely called “iconoclastic” for lack of anything more precise. The magazines he’d published in since the 1960s hardly took notice. The perfunctory obituaries that did appear treated him as a kind of Hunter S. Thompson of the contemporary art world, ensconced as he was in…

The Song of Our Scars: The Untold Story of Pain by Haider Warraich. Basic Books, 307 pp., $30.00 An Anatomy of Pain: How the Body and the Mind Experience and Endure Physical Suffering by Abdul-Ghaaliq Lalkhen. Scribner, 244 pp., $28.00; $17.99 (paper) Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose by Leigh Cowart. PublicAffairs, 237 pp., $28.00 For the sixteenth-century barber-surgeon Ambroise Paré, pain was a deadly liar. When French soldiers returned from battle with shattered limbs on which wounded tissue had already died, Paré warned fellow surgeons not to take a patient’s word for it in deciding where to amputate: “For I know very many deceived as thus: the patients pricked on that part would say, they felt much paine there.” Taking the report of pain…

Domestic Georgic: Labors of Preservation from Rabelais to Milton by Katie Kadue. University of Chicago Press, 227 pp., $95.00; $27.95 (paper) Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England by Timothy M. Harrison. University of Chicago Press, 337 pp., $95.00; $30.00 (paper) Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton by Nicholas McDowell. Princeton University Press, 485 pp., $35.00 Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton by Joe Moshenska. Basic Books, 456 pp., $35.00 Of the many liberties John Milton took in writing Paradise Lost, his 1667 epic poem on Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, the most delightful and underrated are his efforts to imagine daily life in Paradise before the Fall. Compared to the risks he takes elsewhere in the poem—recasting the devil as its charismatic…

Rethinking Securities Law by Marc I. Steinberg. Oxford University Press, 339 pp., $85.00 Historically the regulation of companies in the United States has been a matter of state law. Corporations were primarily regulated by the state in which they were incorporated, which prior to the Civil War was usually the state where they did most of their business. But with the rise of large national corporations in the late nineteenth century, states began competing as sites of incorporation, offering financial advantages such as generous tax breaks in return for increased incorporation fees and other benefits. In what quickly became a race to the bottom, New Jersey and Delaware were the two chief competitors. But the Delaware General Corporation Law, enacted in 1899, reduced corporate taxes and shareholder “interference” with management…

Relations of Power: Women’s Networks in the Middle Ages edited by Emma O. Bérat, Rebecca Hardie, and Irina Dumitrescu. Göttingen: V&R unipress/Bonn University Press, 199 pp., ?40.00 “Twitchers” is the slang term for bird lovers who, binoculars at the ready, keep patient vigil, watching for the twitch of a twig or flutter of a leaf, the quick gleam of an eye in a thicket, for the mottle on a field to reveal a flock and lift up into the air. If looking for women in medieval records demands comparable training, alertness, sensitivity, and steadiness of purpose, then looking for the relations of power that connected them to one another demands even greater concentration, with a strong measure of detective induction. The contributors to this collection of eight intricate, hardwon essays…

Berg by Bryan Simms and Charlotte Erwin. Oxford University Press, 514 pp., $49.95 On the day before Christmas in 1935, the Austrian composer Alban Berg was pronounced dead in a Viennese hospital for indigents. The cause of death was blood poisoning from abscesses, together with an immune system weakened by powerful medications for asthma and other ailments that he had taken for years. Berg’s opera Wozzeck (1925) had brought him fame throughout Europe, but his much-anticipated Lulu, based on Frank Wedekind’s scandalous Lulu plays, lay incomplete. After six years of labor, he had managed to finish a short score of the entire opera and to revise and orchestrate acts 1 and 2. But he had stopped at bar 268 of act 3, leaving a thousand measures or so to be…

The danger of memory is goingto it for respite. Respite risksentrapment. Don’t debauchyourself by livingin some former version of yourselfthat was more or less naked. Maybeit felt better then, but you werenot better. You were smaller, as the raingauge must fill to the brimwith its full portion of suffering. What can memory be in these terrible times?Only instruction. Not a dwelling. Or if you must dwell:The sweet smell of weeds then.The sweet smell of weeds now.An endurance. A standoff. A rest.…

The Making of Oliver Cromwell by Ronald Hutton. Yale University Press, 400 pp., $35.00; $22.00 (paper; to be published in August) When in 2002 the BBC held a national poll to identify the greatest Briton in history, the tenth place, well below notables like Winston Churchill and William Shakespeare, was taken by Oliver Cromwell. It is not obvious why he should have got even as far as that. Admittedly, Cromwell had a spectacular career. A country gentleman from Huntingdonshire and a keen Puritan, he was a member of Parliament in 1628–1629 and again from 1640 onward. A strong critic of King Charles I for his anti-Calvinist policies, his attempt to rule without Parliament for eleven years (1629–1640), and his sundry illegalities, Cromwell became a prominent figure when the civil war…

To the Editors: James Oakes’s review of my book The Broken Constitution [NYR, May 12] is a case study in whitewashing the central role of race and slavery in the history of the US Constitution. Like other work by Oakes and his fellow hagiographers, the review systematically distorts or suppresses incontrovertible facts of law and history. Theirs is an exercise in denying the explicit and express protection of slavery in the original Constitution and bowdlerizing Lincoln’s consistent record of supporting and upholding the constitutional guarantee of slavery throughout his public career, even after he became president. Their twin dogmas are that the framers cannot have supported race slavery and that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation therefore cannot have broken the Constitution. The trouble with these reassuring-sounding dogmas is that they are legally…

A Conspiratorial Life: Robert Welch, the John Birch Society, and the Revolution of American Conservatism by Edward H. Miller. University of Chicago Press, 456 pp., $30.00 During the insurrection at the US Capitol last year, the so-called QAnon Shaman, sporting a painted face and horned cap, sat on the Senate dais and offered a prayer. He thanked God “for allowing us to get rid of the Communists, the globalists, and the traitors within our government.”1 With those words he paid homage, however unintentionally, to the John Birch Society, the conspiracy-obsessed anti-Communist organization that became a fixture in American life and, especially, Republican politics in the 1960s. The John Birch Society may be little remembered today, but in its time it had a dues-paying membership of at least 30,000, a staff…

Recognition: A Chapter in the History of European Ideas by Axel Honneth, translated from the German by Joseph Ganahl. Cambridge University Press, 178 pp., $79.99; $24.99 (paper) All of us need recognition. We need it from those we love but also from the state if we are to enjoy our rights as citizens, and from society at large if we are to secure esteem for our achievements. In the absence of recognition we languish, unloved and unseen, without legal protection and without the basic sense that we matter as human beings. Think, for instance, of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which invisibility becomes a metaphor for recognition denied. “I am invisible,” the narrator writes, “simply because people refuse to see me.” He feels like a bodiless head at a circus…

Strangers I Know by Claudia Durastanti, translated from the Italian by Elizabeth Harris. Riverhead, 294 pp., $27.00 Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know, published in Italy as La straniera (The Stranger, or The Foreigner), is a nonfiction novel about her parents, who hate fiction. “Whenever we watch something,” she says of her mother, there’s always a moment when she says, “But is it a true story?”—even if we’re watching a horror movie—and I have to lie because if I told her it’s completely made up, she’d lose interest and we’d never be able to do anything together again. Words, if not literal, are a waste of time. For her father, movies like Scarface and Evil Dead are documentaries, real-life stories. Every time I tried to explain that “this never happened,” to…