Innholdsfortegnelse for December 8, 2022 i The New York Review of Books

Rae Armantrout’s books of poems include Conjure and Finalists, which was published last spring. Peter Canby, a former Senior Editor at The New Yorker, is the author of The Heart of the Sky: Travels Among the Maya. Dan Chiasson is at work on Bernie for Burlington: A Biography of His Rise in a Changing Vermont, 1964–1991. He teaches at Wellesley. Fara Dabhoiwala is the author of The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution. He teaches at Princeton and is writing a global history of free speech. 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. Mike Jay’s books include Emperors…

Home in the World by Amartya Sen. Liveright, 464 pp., $30.00 In 1901, at the age of forty, the writer Rabindranath Tagore founded a small school at Santiniketan, in a rural part of Bengal about a hundred miles north of Calcutta. Twenty years later he added a university alongside it—Visva-Bharati, whose name joined together the Sanskrit words for world and wisdom and whose motto was “Where the whole world meets in one nest.” The educational outlook of these joint institutions was boldly experimental. They were coeducational. There was no physical punishment and little formal discipline. Classes were held outside, under the trees. Fine arts, music, sports, and drama were highly regarded, exams and formal results largely disdained. Teachers and students mingled freely outside their lessons. The overriding aim was to…

ESMOND AND ILIA AN UNRELIABLE MEMOIR by Marina Warner “A wonderfully rich, partly mythical memoir that sifts through the past to connect a family’s secrets to the deep-rooted colonial assumptions that still resonate in a post-Brexit Britain… Eloquent and heartbreaking.”—Ann Kennedy Smith, TLS “In recounting the story of these early years of the couple’s marriage, Warner weaves together fact and fiction in the most dazzling and inventive ways.”—Lucy Scholes, The New York Times Paperback • Photographs throughout • $19.95 THREE RINGS A TALE OF EXILE, NARRATIVE, AND FATE by Daniel Mendelsohn “Exquisite… Three Rings digresses from its digressions, whirling with elegiac elegance from the ‘Odyssey,’ which itself veers away from the main tale only to wind home again… Ornate and oneiric, the results are well worth circling and circling back…

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne E. Fernald. Norton, 365 pp., $12.50 (paper) The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, edited and with an introduction and notes by Merve Emre. Liveright, 242 pp., $35.00 1. Mrs. Dalloway is a book that makes modest claims for itself. Virginia Woolf first planned to call it The Hours but settled on a title consistent with its story about unimportant people on an ordinary London day. She modeled the book in part on Ulysses, as Joyce modeled his on the Odyssey, but her characters do not symbolize anything larger than themselves. “Genius it has,” she wrote in her diary about Ulysses, but added, “It is brackish. It is pretentious.” A “first-rate writer,” unlike Joyce, “respects writing too much to be tricky; startling;…

Frederik Ruysch and His Thesaurus Anatomicus: A Morbid Guide edited by Joanna Ebenstein. MIT Press, 253 pp., $34.95 Almost every day between 1703 and 1730, Frederik Ruysch’s home at Bloemgracht 15, a narrow, four-story townhouse on a canal in Amsterdam’s Jordaan district, was open to visitors wishing to view “something unheard of, surpassing all belief, unless one should see it oneself.” On the ground floor, they first encountered a series of cabinets made of tropical hardwood and containing hundreds of exquisitely preserved animal and human body parts: a constantly changing selection of tumors, stones, and diseased organs, alongside “monsters”—conjoined-twin fetuses, deformed skeletons—and anatomical structures such as blood vessels, human ovarian ducts, and dissected whale eyeballs. Some of these were arranged into baroque tableaux and fantastical still-life compositions. One cabinet contained…

The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan. Simon and Schuster, 339 pp., $45.00 Bob Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is a kind of music-appreciation course open to auditors and members of the general public. It is best savored one chapter, one song, at a time, while listening to the accompanying playlists, which its readers have assembled on music-streaming platforms. Professor Dylan lectures a little, then you press play. My friends and I used to frequent this sort of course in college: Listening at Noon, taught by a beloved emeritus professor of music, Henry Mishkin. Besides us, the other students were all retirees. Mishkin would cue up a record of, say, an aria from Verdi’s Nabucco, wait patiently for the beauty to kick in, then enter a…

Charles Ray: Figure Ground an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, January 31–June 5, 2022. Catalog of the exhibition by Kelly Baum and Brinda Kumar, with contributions by Charles Ray and Hal Foster. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 111 pp., $25.00 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press) In 1962 the artist Robert Morris made a sculpture called I-Box. It was about the size of a large book, with a capital “I” incised into the front surface and hinged like a cupboard door. When opened, the I-shaped portal revealed a black-and-white photograph of the artist facing the viewer wearing only a sly grin. This was before Morris embarked on a strenuous program to sculpt his body, which he then showed off in an infamous 1974 gallery announcement of…

Should we try to leave non domesticated animals alone in “the wild,” imagined as their evolutionary habitat, but also known to be a place full of cruelty, scarcity, and casual death? Or do we have a responsibility to protect “wild” animals from scarcity and disease and to preserve their habitats? And what about predation of vulnerable animals by other animals? Could it possibly be our responsibility to limit that? Can we envisage such a thing as a multispecies society, where “wild” animals are concerned? And what is “the wild”? Does it even exist? Whose interests does this concept serve? My answers to these questions will be, in some cases, controversial. But my conclusions, albeit provocative, are also tentative, since we are searching for new ways to think and act in…

The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz. Princeton University Press, 443 pp., $35.00 Alexis de Tocqueville was a study in contradictions: a French aristocrat of proud heritage who trumpeted the inevitable, salutary rise of democracy, using the United States as his exemplar; a cosmopolitan with an English wife and many friends in the Anglo-American world who brandished a fervent French nationalism; an antislavery advocate who felt no discomfort in supporting the French colonization of Algeria and hired as his main assistant Arthur de Gobineau, who later published one of the founding texts of white supremacy; and finally a man of delicate constitution who undertook an arduous trip on horseback into the wilderness of northern Michigan in order to see Native Americans and new…

Alexandre 291 Grand Street, New York, NY10002 (212) 755-2828; alexandregallery.com Tom Uttech: Headwinds on Windigoostigwan November 5-December 22, 2022 Marlborough Gallery 545 West25th Street, New York, NY 10001; (212) 541-4900 marlboroughgraphicsnewyork.com; Tuesday-Saturday, 10am-6pm Henri Matisse: Portraits November 3, 2022-January 14, 2023 Otsdawa 284 Bert Washburn Rd., Otego, NY13825 (607) 432-6359; www.otsdawa.com; Open by appointment Otsdawa offers limited edition original prints from contemporary artists. Purchase online or contact for details. Prints by Art Spiegelman, Tim Sheesley, Evan Summer and Sondra Freckleton. Summer has shown in 300+ exhibitions; collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Brooklyn Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art. Prince Street Gallery 547 West27th Street, New York, NY 10001; (646) 230-0246 www.princestreetgallery.com; Tuesday-Saturday 11am-6pm Elizabeth Higgins: How the Light Gets In Prince Street Gallery is…

Natural History by Andrea Barrett. Norton, 192 pp., $26.95 In 2017, when Hilary Mantel was midway through her Wolf Hall trilogy, she remarked that “historical fiction comes out of greed for experience. Violent curiosity drives us on, takes us far from our time, far from our shore, and often beyond our compass.” Anyone venturing into Andrea Barrett’s fictional project of the past thirty years will recognize this greed in her work, a restlessness coursing beneath her assured and unruffled prose. Over four short story collections—beginning with Ship Fever (1996), which won the National Book Award—and two historical novels, Barrett has rootled through nineteenth-century Arctic exploration, pre–World War I tuberculosis treatments, fossil and specimen hunting, typhoid and the Irish famine, early aviation, women in science, and the endlessly rich provinces of…