Innholdsfortegnelse for October 20, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

Body Am I The New Science of Self-Consciousness Moheb Costandi “An absorbing and expansive read that unpacks a bundle of fascinating, shocking, and sometimes heart-breaking case histories. Raises vital questions about our relationships with the fleshy vehicles that carry us through life.” —Lindsey Fitzharris, author of The Facemaker Zickzack William Firebrace Zigzag through the politics, architecture, literature, film, art, music, food, and history of six locations on the edges of the German-speaking world. “Firebrace is at once keen dragoman, critic, poet, constantly astonished spectator, and informal reporter.” —Jonathan Meades, author of An Encyclopaedia of Myself Digital Lethargy Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection Tung-Hui Hu “Provides deep insight into the mechanisms of the digital age while avoiding any hint of feel-good criticism. Poetic and incisive, Digital Lethargy masterfully diagnoses a…

We don’t forget we don’t forget All night your stars blaze on the hill which is to say all our lives Childhood shut fast behind a door My mother, too built a room that she would later die in. She dug her own grave in the air And in the small backyard there was a stone lion a thicket of ivy And in the house there were books But the words that were there were not omens of death, they are alive And everything you wrote is alive So tip the milk back into the jug Take the blanket from the crack under the door Come back, come back from the beyond where the moon stays sad all night but doesn’t hurt it doesn’t hurt when the clock runs backwards…

In the Eye of the Wild by Nastassja Martin, translated from the French by Sophie R. Lewis. New York Review Books, 112 pp., $14.95 (paper) Lamb a film directed by Valdimar Jóhannsson The French anthropologist Nastassja Martin is lying on a misty Siberian steppe, surrounded by “wads of brown hair stiffened by dried blood.” While she waits for the arrival of a Russian army helicopter, she wonders about “how to survive despite what I have lost in the other’s body, how to live with what has been left behind there.” Her loss is literal: a Kamchatka brown bear “went off with a chunk of my jaw clenched in his own.” Throughout her memoir, In the Eye of the Wild, Martin never calls this encounter an attack. Instead, she describes it…

The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound by T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot. Liveright, 161 pp., $40.00 (to be published in November) Eliot After The Waste Land by Robert Crawford. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 609 pp., $40.00 The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition edited by Ronald Schuchard. Johns Hopkins University Press, 8 volumes, 6,534 pp., $700.00 When, on October 23, 1922, T. S. Eliot assembled and dispatched to the New York lawyer and bibliophile John Quinn a packet containing drafts of The Waste Land as well as a notebook of early poems tentatively entitled Inventions of the March Hare and a selection of loose-leaf manuscripts of individual poems, he included in the package (surely…

A Cultural History of Hair in the Middle Ages edited by Roberta Milliken. Bloomsbury Academic, 236 pp., $110.00; $35.95 (paper) In 1326 the women of Florence petitioned the Duchess of Calabria to ask her husband the duke to relax legislation preventing them from wearing false hair, part of a package of sumptuary laws that ordered people to wear clothing, accessories, and hairstyles suitable to their social positions. Class identification was so integral to social order that attempts to pass as a member of a different class were seen as attacks on the very fabric of society, and false hair might have made the ordinary women of Florence appear falsely aristocratic. Similar legislation was enacted in countries across medieval Europe. A little over a century later, Pope Eugene IV issued a…

Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy at NYU. His latest books are As If: Idealization and Ideals and The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity. Neal Ascherson is the author of Black Sea, Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland, and the novel Death of the Fronsac, among other books. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Christopher Benfey is the Mellon Professor of English Emeritus at Mount Holyoke. His most recent book is If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. Emily Berry is the author of the poetry collections Dear Boy, Stranger, Baby, and Unexhausted Time. Peter Brooks is the author of the recent Balzac’s Lives and Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, to be published in October. Joshua Cohen’s most recent novel, The Netanyahus, won the…

The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor—the Truth and the Turmoil by Tina Brown. Crown, 570 pp., $35.00 Queen Elizabeth II was seated in St. Edward’s Chair so long ago that her character defined the monarchy, not the other way around. Her reign began when the British Empire was dissolving and departing, and the young were too worshipful of the welfare state, Philip Gibbs lamented in The New Elizabethans (1953), his assessment of where “English” society could be headed. He prayed that the sovereign would be a queen of peace. She had succeeded George VI only seven years after the fall of Berlin. Her realm still bore the scars of bomb sites. Gibbs also prayed that the young queen not be so overburdened as her father by the ceaseless…

A night match at Arthur Ashe: September and it’s summer a little while longer so long as these breezes drift in, so long as Alcaraz at nineteen fucking unreal in Gerald Marzorati’s phrase returns most anything the veteran Čilić sends his way and three hours fifty-three minutes go by— relentless shot-making, vicious, precise. My father says watching tennis for hours is a waste: Isn’t it boring? The noise of time does not sadden me runs the book I flip through during breaks till my eyes grow too tired—no one I know will pay Ticketmaster’s ransom to join me. And then the 2:30 AM walk back across the quaint bridge to the 7 train, heading home among strangers who’ve seen it through, something joining us briefly— as when the voice of…

Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf. Knopf, 494 pp., $35.00 Jena 1800: The Republic of Free Spirits by Peter Neumann, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 244 pp., $27.00 The cult of individuality was born amid a melding of minds. Meldings must be preceded by meetings, of course, and the meetings took place in Jena, a university town in the German duchy of Saxe-Weimar with a population of 4,500 or so. If Jena was small, the minds that gathered there in the last years of the eighteenth century were large, and included the most consequential poets, critics, and philosophers of the era. The sparks they threw out electrified the world. Why Jena? In Magnificent Rebels, an engrossing…

PEN2PAPER PRESS www.pen2paperpress.com; (917) 237-6991 IS THERE ANY LOVE DOWN BACK? The Four Boys by Alexander O’Neil No child should ever have to endure the agonies and traumas. NO ONE EVER ASKED US, IS THERE ANY LOVE DOWN BACK? 978-1648032608 • Paper, $8.99 • 160 Pages • Biography/Memoirs. Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart e-Book, and Book Depository. PRINCE IBRAHIM’S FAVORITE Human Trafficking Series by Nancy Hartwell Enonchong This sequel to Harem Slave may be enjoyed independently. Tammy married the man who rescued her, but Prince Ibrahim wants her back, and tension builds… 978-1520855417 • Paper, $12.95 • 326 Pages • Fiction Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Walmart e-Book, and Book Depository. GREENLEAF BOOK GROUP www.greenleefbookgroup.com; (512) 891-6100 SYMBOL MAKER’S DAUGHTER by Clare Gutierrez 1400s England. Rivalry for…

Those of us who find it strange that a country should be deeply shocked by the death of a ninety-six-year-old woman must remind ourselves that it is a crime in England to let your thoughts dwell on the death of the monarch. The Treason Act of 1351, still in force, makes clear that this most terrible of offenses is committed by anyone who can “compass or imagine the Death” of the sovereign. This thought-crime arises, presumably, from the belief that a world beyond the reign of the anointed queen or king ought to be unimaginable. For if it is not, that supremacy is deprived of its most potent magic: the illusion of permanence. The subject (and the British are subjects, not citizens) is compelled to feel for the ruler the…

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World by Sinclair McKay. St. Martin’s, 437 pp., $29.99 The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin by Kirsty Bell. Other Press, 385 pp., $18.99 (paper) Sinclair McKay writes at the start of his new book, Berlin, that the city displays its wounds openly, in walls pockmarked by bullets, in ruins and fragments, making no attempt to smooth “the jagged edges of history.” Kirsty Bell, in The Undercurrents, does not quite agree. She notes silences and gaps as well as visible scars. In her view of Berlin, the maze of stone blocks making up the Holocaust Memorial leads us openly into the depths, but the ruins of the Potsdamer Bahn-hof, now planted over with grass, are an “anti-memorial,” a “promenade”…

Alphawood Foundation Reconstructing the Garrick: Adler & Sullivan’s Lost Masterpiece University of Chicago Press Strata: William Smith’s Geological Maps University of California Press Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases San Francisco, New Orleans, New York Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South Yale University Press Visual voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin Bard Graduate Center Charles Percier: Architecture and Design in an Age of Revolutions Frazier History Museum Kentucky by Design: The Decorative Arts and American Culture Aperture The Open Road: Photography & the American Road Trip Whitney Museum of American Art Hopper Drawing Brooklyn Museum Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties Joan K. Davidson, president of Furthermore and president emeritus of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, created…

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley. Pegasus Crime, 415 pp., $29.95 Lucy Worsley is a popular British historian and the chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. She is interested in women’s lives, the national obsession with murder, and the history of the British home, which makes Agatha Christie her ideal subject. Like Christie herself, Worsley is a prolific writer who aims to address a broad demographic and whose books are made into television shows. Accordingly, Agatha Christie reads as though it were being spoken to a camera: ideas are expressed as simply as possible; there is no argumentative rigor; the tone is upbeat until, at the end of each chapter, it becomes ominous; the lexicon is limited (“dark” and “darkness” are her refrain); and there are goofy asides…

Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis. Knopf, 810 pp., $40.00 Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century by Dana Stevens. Atria, 415 pp., $29.99 It always feels like an appropriate moment to talk about Buster Keaton, if only because talking about him leads naturally to watching his films and experiencing again the shades of awe and amazement they reliably awaken. The present occasion is the publication of James Curtis’s Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life, an encyclopedic biography that lays out his trajectory and vicissitudes in novelistic detail, and Dana Stevens’s Camera Man, a series of meditative essays that examine Keaton and his world from a multitude of vantage points. These two quite different books complement each other nicely. Curtis keeps…

The California Days of Ralph Waldo Emerson by Brian C. Wilson. University of Massachusetts Press, 244 pp., $90.00; $26.95 (paper) With the exception of Herman Melville, nineteenth-century American writers are better known for staying home than for venturing to exotic locales. Henry David Thoreau boasted that he had “travelled a good deal in Concord.” A move around the corner in Amherst, a distance of half a mile, left Emily Dickinson with “a kind of goneto-Kansas feeling, and if I sat in a long wagon, with my family tied behind, I should suppose without doubt I was a party of emigrants!” Poe’s imaginary expeditions—to the South Pole and the Moon—confirmed Dickinson’s quip that “to shut our eyes is Travel.” No one was more insistent on the virtues of staying home than…