Innholdsfortegnelse for September 22, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

In the Black Fantastic Ekow Eshun “Visually stunning, intellectually cohesive. Ekow Eshun’s exhilarating exhibition shows black art on the move and creating fresh idioms.” —Financial Times How to Stay Smart in a Smart World Why Human Intelligence Still Beats Algorithms Gerd Gigerenzer “Gigerenzer explains why technology is so addictive and offers tips for fostering digital self-control. A seriously compelling, eye-opening, and well-researched investigation.” —Library Journal Long Days, Short Years A Cultural History of Modern Parenting Andrew Bomback “Empathy and frankness shine through on each page. This book is enjoyable to read and likely to be validating for many parents of young children.” —Library Journal Methuselah’s Zoo What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives Steven N. Austad “Not only fun to read—it is the best book written on the lives and…

Doing this and that, further shredded by ribbons I’m your inner child from before the procedure of ambition I ran the neighborhood on training wheels Heavy rubberized pastel flowed from my bike tassels Blues and greens that mean something different now that my ear has aged I live inside you where music fills the empty space of my head I mean shell The winding shape of mathematical beauty found in all nature I’m a kind of nature too I wanted you to live more, said the clock’s chipped tooth History is full of lost blue baubles, all priceless is something ideological to think Thus it should be thought frequently, because after all Knowledge of the future is hell When you heard that rumor about me I wasn’t really there I…

Stevan harvey fine art projects 208 Forsyth Street, New York, NY 10002 www.shfap.com; (917) 861-7312 Wednesday–Saturday, 12PM–6PM In The White Album, Peter Acheson shows work from 1984 through the present, focused on a lighter palette. Acheson uses language and collage in his myraid, variegated surfaces to expand our visual universe. Through October 8th, 2022. Victoria Munroe Fine Art 67 East 80th Street #2, New York, NY 10075; (917) 900-6661 victoriamunroefineart.com; margo@victoriamunroefineart.com Wednesday–Saturday, 11AM–5PM and by appointment Fulvio Testa: Nowhere Watercolor & Chinese Ink September 29–October 29, 2022 Yossi Milo Gallery 245 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001 (212) 414-0370; info@yossimilo.com Meghann Riepenhoff: Ice September 10-October 22, 2022 Marlborough Gallery 545 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001; (212) 541-4900 www.marlboroughnewyork.com; Tuesday–Saturday, 10AM–6PM Eduardo Arroyo September 17-October 29, 2022 Alexandre 291…

I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour. Norton, 421 pp., $32.50 I must write. If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure…. I will not have earned death. — Jean Rhys There isn’t an adjective more appropriate than “haunted” to describe the deeply troubled, self-lacerating, and finally (to a degree) triumphant life of the Caribbean-born Jean Rhys. As presented by Miranda Seymour in I Used to Live Here Once, her richly detailed, exhaustively researched, and warmly sympathetic new biography, Rhys appears to have been haunted by memories of her girlhood on the small, largely impoverished island of Dominica, then a British colony. Most vividly and memorably in her later works of fiction—the teasingly elliptical ghost story “I Used…

Elaine Blair is a regular contributor to The New York Review. She is an inaugural winner of the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism. Dan Chiasson’s fifth book of poetry is The Math Campers. He teaches at Wellesley. Deborah Eisenberg is the author of five collections of short stories. 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. Tim Flannery’s most recent book is Europe: A Natural History. Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia. His books include The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, and Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Michael D. Gordin is the Rosengarten Professor…

The Orphanage by Serhiy Zhadan, translated from the Ukrainian by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler. Yale University Press, 324 pp., $18.00 (paper) When I visited Ukraine in July 2016, only one way remained across the Siverskyi Donets River to the separatist Luhansk People’s Republic: a bridge half destroyed by shelling, passable only on foot. From Stanytsia Luhanska, a Don Cossack settlement, elderly people and mothers with young children traversed the bridge, hauling carts of tomatoes and cucumbers to sell on the other side. Those moving in the opposite direction were arriving to collect their government pensions. The wait at the border was a minimum of five hours, and there was no shade. We had to leave Stanytsia by 3:00 PM, when the shooting was scheduled to start again. Serhiy…

The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 276 pp., $28.00; $18.00 (paper) Second-wave feminism was a movement with many fronts: antidiscrimination and legal equality; subsidized child care; health care and reproductive rights; the prevention and prosecution of domestic and sexual violence; the redefinition of gender roles. Radical feminists came out of the student left of the 1960s, thought of themselves as (nonviolent) revolutionaries rather than reformers, and, at the beginning of the movement, held strongly anticapitalist and communitarian views. These radicals made feminism popular: their political actions, reported in the media, drew large numbers of women to the movement; their books became best sellers. But as the US took a strong rightward turn in the late 1970s, feminism, like other liberation movements,…

The Ukraine war and global economic troubles momentarily overshadowed domestic discord in the United States earlier this year, but it didn’t go away. The groundless insistence by former president Donald Trump and his supporters that the 2020 election was stolen, Republican efforts to limit voting rights and to install state officials willing to disregard adverse election results, and the activity of far-right militias that orchestrated the insurrection in Washington on January 6, 2021, have all continued. Trump is bent on vengeance, and he intends a sweeping replacement of federal civil servants with loyalists if he is reelected president in 2024.1 In June the Supreme Court handed down a series of grossly retrogressive decisions on guns, abortion, and environmental regulation that have threatened America with fragmentation to a degree not seen…

Angela Davis: An Autobiography by Angela Y. Davis. Haymarket, 358 pp., $28.95 Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing edited by Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean. Verso, 323 pp., $29.95 (paper) In 1969 a UCLA student who was also an undercover FBI agent revealed in the campus newspaper that the school’s philosophy department had recently hired a member of the Communist Party. A week later, the San Francisco Examiner reported that that person was a twenty-five-year-old professor named Angela Davis. The University of California Board of Regents confronted Davis and asked if she was a Communist. Yes, she replied. “While I think this membership requires no justification,” she wrote the board, “I want you to know that as a black woman I feel an urgent need to find radical…

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai. Viking, 270 pp., $26.00 The Lockheed Martin Hellfire 114 R9X, nicknamed the “ninja bomb” or the “flying Ginsu,” is an air-to-surface, drone-launched missile, approximately five feet long and seven inches in diameter, weighing roughly one hundred pounds, with a top speed of 995 miles per hour. Most members of the Hellfire family are designed to carry different types of warheads depending on the objective, from bunkers to buildings and “soft-skinned targets”—human beings to be taken out in groups. Carrying no explosives, the R9X is unique. To avoid collateral damage, the R9X is designed to kill a single human being with what is called a kinetic or hit-to-kill design. As The Guardian reported in September 2020, “The weapon uses…

The Goodby People by Gavin Lambert. McNally, 217 pp., $18.00 (paper) Gavin Lambert’s The Goodby People is set during the inexhaustibly fascinating few years preceding its original publication in 1971, in the city of Los Angeles, where the earth trembles and the hedonistic sun shines no matter what. Though the fantasies it churned out for some decades had branded the psyche of the world, the rigid Hollywood studio system, with its iron grip over all aspects of the US movie industry—and the piously punitive high moral tone it adopted during the 1940s and 1950s of anticommunism, “family values,” and homophobia—was then completing its retreat into the past. The Vietnam War was in full, gruesome swing, and for many young white Americans, it was a seriously disorienting experience to have their…

Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet by George Monbiot. Penguin, 339 pp., $18.00 (paper) What will we be eating in the future? Will it be wholesome, locally grown organic produce or some Soylent Green–like nightmare food? The only certainty, George Monbiot argues in Regenesis, is that we cannot continue to eat what we eat today. Climate disruption will see to that. And even if climate impacts are less severe than some project, industrial agriculture and the so-called global standard diet it creates are environmentally unsustainable and are destroying the planet’s soils so rapidly that we already stand on the brink of a worldwide catastrophe. We have, Monbiot warns, a very brief period in which to reshape our food systems. Regenesis begins with an examination of the seductive idea that…

The Hangman and His Wife: The Life and Death of Reinhard Heydrich by Nancy Dougherty, edited and with a foreword by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. Knopf, 623 pp., $40.00 Pension Schmidt, better known as “Salon Kitty,” was one of the most glamorous bordellos in Nazi Germany. Among its illustrious clientele were foreign diplomats, government ministers, generals, and regime functionaries. The interior of the grand bourgeois building—located at 11 Giesebrechtstraße in Berlin, close to Kurfürstendamm—was elegant, with expensive rugs, crystal chandeliers, plush armchairs, and thick velvet drapes. The madam of the establishment was Kitty Schmidt, who had run brothels across the German capital since the early interwar years. “She didn’t take stupid women,” one of her employees later told an interviewer. “She liked women who were married and who wanted to earn a bit…

First there is the outsider. Then there is a second outsider—less Outside than the first, but still. Then there is the third outsider, Who is now, actually, inside something, Albeit something slightly less definable. Eventually we all move together Into some kind of sanctuary, An estuary, Until someone decides to leave again. And the thorn birds are preening their violet plumage In the topmost branches of the flame trees. Bees drone among the flowering ivy Draped over the crumbling stone wall. Bells testify, not as witnesses to indict you But as guides and mothers calling you to be Their children. The helicopters fly Upriver in formation—if two of something Can be said to be in formation. Then A pleasant realigning of the fireboats With the side of the sea where,…

GREENLEAF BOOK GROUP www.greenleafbookgroup.com; (512) 891-6100 A DEATH IN DURANGO by Doug Twohill An epic feud waged between the Vanderhorns and Stricklands, shaping the history of southwest Colorado. A Death in Durango is a love letter to the history and spirit of the Wild West. 9781632995582 • Paper, $15.95 • 220 Pages • Westerns Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, IndieBound, and Bookshop.org. THE ELEVATED PRESS www.TheElevatedPress.com; (818) 389-5933 FALLOUT SHELTER by Steven Schindler Set against the backdrop of the Bronx in the 1970s, three Catholic school friends suspect there’s more to a priest’s mentoring than merely spiritual guidance. 9780966240832 • Paper, $16.00 • 296 Pages • Fiction Available on Amazon and The Elevated Press. Author’s website: www.StevenSchindler.com SHE WRITES PRESS shewritespress.com THE PORTRAITIST A Novel of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard…