Innholdsfortegnelse for October 6, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

Insulin—the Crooked Timber: A History from Thick Brown Muck to Wall Street Gold by Kersten T. Hall. Oxford University Press, 455 pp., $32.95 Diabetes: A History of Race and Disease by Arleen Marcia Tuchman. Yale University Press, 266 pp., $25.00 On April 9 of this year, The New York Times featured an obituary for Arthur D. Riggs, a scientist likely unknown to most readers. Riggs’s career was largely spent at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California, where he discovered how to use recombinant DNA technology—which brings together genetic sequences from multiple sources—to convert bacteria into factories that produce hormones for clinical use. Among his notable successes was the creation of artificial human insulin. “We chose insulin because it looked doable, and there was a need,” Riggs…

HERmione by H.D., with an afterword by Francesca Wade. New Directions, 241 pp., $19.95 (paper) Winged Words: The Life and Work of the Poet H.D. by Donna Krolik Hollenberg. University of Michigan Press, 378 pp., $85.00 At the end of The Gift, a memoir of H.D.’s American childhood unpublished in her lifetime, she appends a chapter set in the present, London, 1943. An air raid takes her household by surprise, and she describes what it’s like in her fifth-story flat in Lowndes Square with “terrific shattering reverberations of the great guns.” Annie Winifred Ellerman, her partner (better known by her pen name, Bryher), switches off the lights, closes all the doors, and turns on a small lamp only after the blackout curtains are drawn: The noise was so terrible now…

Today is not the end. It’s just the beginning. —Donald Trump, January 6, 2021 1. Our political End Times glitter with surreal scenes—the green-tinted shock and awe unleashed over Baghdad, the “Brooks Brothers warriors” rioting at the Miami election bureau, the jetliner piercing the Manhattan skyscraper—and beneath the unearthly beauty of the Capitol dome that frigid January day, I gazed in wonder at the latest of them: the heaving bodies in their winter clothes, the dark-uniformed, club-wielding police falling back before the phalanx of fists and bicycle racks and flagpoles, and, floating over the straining limbs, the swirls and eddies of bear spray and tear gas in nauseous yellow and green. Was it all a grotesque mirage? Is this what revolution really looks like? And yet we know now that from…

Breaking the Promise of Brown: The Resegregation of America’s Schools by Stephen Breyer, with an introduction by Thiru Vignarajah. Brookings Institution, 127 pp., $19.99 Among the thousands of cases the Supreme Court has decided, only a handful of dissenting opinions stand out. There is Justice John Marshall Harlan’s solitary dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision upholding the doctrine of “separate but equal.” “All citizens are equal before the law,” Harlan objected. “There is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens.” Another is Justice Robert Jackson’s warning in Kore matsu v. United States—the 1944 ruling that upheld the wartime internment of more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens—that the Court had delivered a decision that “lies about like a loaded weapon…

The Slowworm’s Song by Andrew Miller. Europa, 251 pp., $18.00 (paper) Around ten years ago, the British writer Andrew Miller found himself in something of a crisis. Until then, his career had been a pretty gilded one. His first novel, Ingenious Pain (1997), set in the eighteenth century, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—worth €100,000—from a shortlist that included Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chroni cle, Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, and Don DeLillo’s Underworld. The five novels that followed, three of them also historical, were generally well received, with Oxygen (2001) shortlisted for the Booker Prize and Pure (2011) winning the Costa Book of the Year Award (for which—controversially for Britain’s more high-minded critics—novels, children’s books, biographies, and poetry were pitted against one another).* By that stage, Miller was…

In the Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, the Booths, and the Spirits by Terry Alford. Liveright, 298 pp., $27.95 When eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln died of typhoid in the White House in February 1862, his parents were devastated. For weeks President Lincoln held solitary grieving sessions every Thursday, the day of his son’s death. Mary Lincoln swung between agonized sobbing and passive despair. She wore mourning clothes for months, wrote on stationery trimmed in black, and could not bear to look at photos of Willie or enter the room in which he had died. Solace came to her through spiritualism, the popular movement that allegedly put the living in direct contact with the dead. Mary communicated with Willie and other deceased loved ones through mediums and her own powers of…

Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press, 323 pp., $28.00 Near the end of Terry Eagleton’s Critical Revolutionaries, there’s a sentence that made me stop for a moment in disbelief. Perhaps it was meant to. F. R. Leavis was by far the most dogmatic of the twentieth-century critics with whom the book is concerned, and Eagleton writes that the Cambridge don held that “literary criticism was the best training ground for the development of a free, unspecialised, disinterested intelligence, which could be brought critically to bear on social existence as a whole.” I read those words with something like wonder. The best …the whole? Really? I can’t imagine anyone today making that broad claim, even leaving aside the increasingly specialized nature…

China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Changing World by Liang Hong, translated from the Chinese by Emily Goedde. Verso, 307 pp., $26.95 Liang Village sits on the edge of the North China Plain, about 650 miles south of Beijing. The area was settled by migrants who came in waves throughout Chinese history, attracted by the fertile soil in what was traditionally one of the country’s breadbaskets. But its economic promise faded a long time ago. The brickworks shut in 2004; the elementary school, which also closed, is rented out to pig farmers, and the doctored sign over the door—“The Liang Village Pigpen Imparts Knowledge and Educates the People”—reads like a mocking commentary on the village’s decline. Much of the local economic activity is concentrated in…

The Kural: Tiruvalluvar’s Tirukkural translated from the Tamil by Thomas Hitoshi Pruiksma. Beacon, 214 pp., $24.95 Suppose you are traveling on a municipal bus in the sunbaked South Indian city of Chennai, and you know Tamil. At some point, overwhelmed by the sheer density of color and form that you can see through the window, you raise your eyes to the board just above the driver’s seat, where a couplet is inscribed: Firmness of action is firmness of mind—All else is else It’s like a cool breath of air from the sea. You can only wonder at the miraculous economy of expression, and at its slightly unnerving poetic quality. Or the board may say: One who lets go of any thing and any thing is free Of the pain of…