Innholdsfortegnelse for April 20, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

The Ends of Freedom Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights Mark Paul “Paul forcefully shows that there can be no real freedom without substantial and well-guaranteed economic rights for all: the right to education, the right to a job, and the right to housing. A must-read!” —Thomas Piketty, l’École de hautes etudes en sciences sociales CLOTH $26.00 Justice by Means of Democracy Danielle Allen “Offering an exciting new theory of justice for the twenty-first century, Justice by Means of Democracy is a remarkable achievement.”—Jill Frank, author of Poetic Justice: Rereading Plato’s “Republic” CLOTH $27.50 The Return of Resentment The Rise and Decline and Rise Again of a Political Emotion Robert A. Schneider “Schneider shows us why resentment is so prevalent today, while illustrating what resentment is and how it…

“This book will for many years to come be the only comprehensive and integrated overview of U.S. involvement in the North American–based slave trade from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.”—David Eltis, coauthor of Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade “The impossible elegantly achieved: a history of music continents and thousands of years in just 278 lucid, friendly pages…. it’s a joy to read.”—John Rutter, composer and conductor Little Histories series “Mooney deftly contextualizes one of the most significant figures in horseracing history. Anyone interested in how American sports and society refelect and affect each other should read this book.”—James C. Nicholson, author of Racing for America: The Horserace of the Century and the Redemption of a Sport Black Lives series “Those who cherish economics will be fascinated by…

“A stunning atlas of the present and future.” —Rebecca Solnit, author of several books including Infinite Cities: A Trilogy of Atlases—San Francisco, New Orleans, New York “An incisive portrait of a thoroughly modern woman careening through a meteoric literary career and a reckless personal life.” —Thomas Schatz, author of The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era “Those interested in Islam, religious persecution, or the relationship between religion and politics will find this insightful and disturbing.” —Library Journal “The truest true crime you’ll ever read, and when it’s not scaring you, it will make your blood boil.” —BookTrib “Brilliantly unravels complex and widespread gender-based violence in Guatemala.” —Kerry Kennedy, President of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights “On Minimalism is the story of this music, from its brave…

And then he drifted about—two nights, two days—driven By the surging waves, and his heart looked destruction straight in the face. But when Dawn with her lovely braids brought the third day into the world The wind died down and a calm, clear and still, descended And look!—he caught a glimpse of land, right over there, As he peered ahead intently from the crest of a towering wave. Just as a father’s children would welcome some sign of life When he’s lying deep in sickness suffering harsh pain, Slowly wasting away, attacked by some fiendish Power—And then—O welcome sight!—the gods set him free from his illness: Just so was the sight of land and woods welcome to Odysseus. He struck out, swimming hard, eager to set foot on shore. But…

Harry Bridges: Labor Radical, Labor Legend by Robert W. Cherny. University of Illinois Press, 478 pp., $55.00 I’m in the cabin of a crane, a hundred feet off the ground. My seat is the ultimate La-Z-Boy, an exaggerated captain’s chair out of a sci-fi film. Under the watch of a mechanic named Dylan, who’s employed by the Port of Tacoma and represented by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, I tug gently on the joystick, jerking us forward and backward along the cables that keep us aloft. Were I actually a crane operator and not a visiting journalist, I would know how to correct for “feathering” in the wind. Looking through the glass floor, I would steer the rectangular metal grabber to lift a container from the deck of a…

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship by Christopher James Bonner. University of Pennsylvania Press, 242 pp., $34.95; $24.95 (paper) The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States by Derrick R. Spires. University of Pennsylvania Press, 344 pp., $49.95; $29.95 (paper) Educated for Freedom: The Incredible Story of Two Fugitive Schoolboys Who Grew Up to Change a Nation by Anna Mae Duane. NYU Press, 241 pp., $30.00; $16.95 (paper) Until Reconstruction-era acts and amendments to the Constitution established national citizenship and Black male suffrage, in the eyes of the law free Black people were at best second-class, unwanted citizens in most states of the Union. At worst, they were lumped together with the rest of the Black population—around 90 percent…

To the Editors: In “A Peopled Wilderness,” Martha Nussbaum notes that humans can “support the lives of animals,” and one tool she mentions is “spraying for tsetse flies” [NYR, December 8, 2022]. The spraying does not support the lives of the flies, of course, and for me this raises a question on which I would like to hear her always-astute analysis. When a human action benefits one species but hurts another, what are the philosophical grounds on which we can decide whether it is right or not? Perry LinkRiverside, California To the Editors: Martha Nussbaum’s support for creating a better world for animals is, in my opinion, to be applauded. I feel, however, that two of her premises are wrong and that her big recommendation is deeply mistaken. Let me…

AN ARMY AFIRE How the US Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era Beth Bailey “A truly phenomenal book by one of the nation’s leading historians at the top of her game. This is the very best of ‘military, war, and society’ scholarship, superbly blending human stories with expert historical analysis.” –Gregory A. Daddis, author of Pulp Vietnam 360 pages $35.00 WHO WE ARE NOW Stories of What Americans Lost and Found during the COVID-19 Pandemic Michelle Fishburne “A profound look at the stories behind what was happening in our country during the pandemic. Fishburne pulls back the curtain on the lives of ordinary people during this extraordinary time. The stories are compelling and gripping, each so personal, yet we can all relate on so many levels. As…

Rumaan Alam is the author of three novels, including, most recently, Leave the World Behind. Negar Azimi is the Editor in Chief of Bidoun and has written for Artforum, Harper’s, and The New York Times, among other publications. John Banville’s novel The Singularities was published in October. William Dalrymple is a Codirector of the Jaipur Literature Festival and a cohost of the podcast Empire. He is the author of The Company Quartet, a four-volume history of the East India Company whose titles include The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, and, most recently, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. Matthew Desmond is the Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton. His books include Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won…

CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU Attraction, Love, Sex The Inside Story SIMON LEVAY “[A] stimulating survey of the science of sexual desire … sheds light on a fundamental part of human life.” —Publishers Weekly Singular Pasts The “I” in Historiography ENZO TRAVERSO Translated by Adam Schoene “How do historians place themselves in history? Should the historical be personal? With his familiar acuity of vision, breadth of erudition, and generosity of thought, Enzo Traverso supplies a rich array of answers to these abiding questions—usually boundary-crossing, sometimes surprising, always grounded in a carefully considered politics of knowledge.” —Geoff Eley, author of Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 Every Brain Needs Music The Neuroscience of Making and Listening to Music LARRY S. SHERMAN AND DENNIS PLIES “Engaging and insightful ……

The Furrows by Namwali Serpell. Hogarth, 270 pp., $27.00 “The power of grief to derange the mind has in fact been exhaustively noted,” Joan Didion wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking, before proceeding with her own account of madness following the death of her husband. This phenomenon is so often observed because it’s timeless, as universal as love. Grief is a natural subject for art, or maybe some art is simply grief made manifest. Grief is the subject of Namwali Serpell’s second novel, The Furrows. (Its subtitle bills it as “an elegy.”) Cassandra narrates the book’s first half, describing how her little brother Wayne—“a nutty brown, a scrawny creature, a good kid”—died at the age of seven. The two are unattended on a Delaware beach, though the girl, called Cee,…

Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal by John Yau. Rizzoli Electa, 239 pp., $55.00 I remember Joe Brainard. I never met him, and when I first felt his influence I had no idea who he was or where he came from, but the influence went deep. It came across stealthily and through scattered channels, apprehended in the corner of the eye, in cartoons that appeared in The East Village Other or back issues of his own C Comics (including an unforgettable and much-shared creation called “People of the World: Relax!”) or covers designed for the work of poets such as Ron Padgett and Anne Waldman or flyers for the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. It was the tail end of the Sixties and in the storefronts of the East Village…

Arabesques by Anton Shammas, translated from the Hebrew by Vivian Eden, with an afterword by Elias Khoury. New York Review Books, 269 pp., $17.95 (paper) The epigraph to the second part of Anton Shammas’s novel Arabesques, first published in Hebrew in 1986, reads: Dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white. And everything in three languages: Hebrew, Arabic and Death. These lines are from a poem by Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s unofficial poet laureate. It might seem at first a curious choice for Shammas, an Arab citizen of Israel who left the country shortly after the novel came out. He had come to realize, he told a journalist at the time, that as a Palestinian and a Christian, he would not be afforded equal rights by the state. “My case is…

Bringing them home for the first timeI wondered, had I made the rightchoice, butalready I was a year ortwo down the line, wiping, from their faces,soft landscapesof porridge—too lateto return them—what a joke, and anywaythey’d begunto seem sort ofspecial; not just to me,but also to you and our friends who extendedcompliments when they stopped byfor lunch, andthe more I thought about it, the more Iknew the choice hadn’t reallybeen a choice at all—having themwas the wayof carrying on; otherwise in what wildnesswould I live? HereI am, then, at the end of the day, washing,toweling them dry, not somuch for their sakeas mine.…

Written in the Stars To the Editors: Astronomy has links to tree-ring studies, and Verlyn Klinkenborg’s eloquent review of Jared Farmer’s book Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees stimulates me to read it soon [NYR, March 23]. But when I do I hope that I’ll find that Farmer has applied astronomical knowledge more carefully. Klinkenborg states that the atoms in trees are as old as those in humans and that both formed “billions of years ago in the big bang.” This is approximately true for hydrogen, a component of cellulose and the water in our bodies. But the heavier elements, like carbon and oxygen, formed well after the big bang, mostly in first-generation stars and not in planets and life until planets formed around later-generation stars like the Sun.…

Maxine Hong Kingston: The Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, Hawai‘i One Summer, Other Writings edited by Viet Thanh Nguyen. Library of America, 1,041 pp., $45.00 In 1976 John Leonard reviewed Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts for The New York Times: Those rumbles you hear on the horizon are the big guns of autumn lining up, the howitzers of Vonnegut and Updike and Cheever and Mailer, the books that will be making loud noises for the next several months. But listen: this week a remarkable book has been quietly published; it is one of the best I’ve read in years. Kingston was about as far from literary stardom as a published writer could be. She was from the West Coast, she was first-generation…

“An indispensable read for Anglophone Proust lovers everywhere, The Seventy-Five Folios is a literary treasure in its own right.” —Caroline Weber, author of Proust’s Duchess “A most fascinating journey from the bloody revolutions to the chemistry labs of eighteenth - and nineteenth-century France, all to glimpse the glorious pursuit of scent. Truly a captivating achievement!” —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders “This is what many of us have waited for: a readable and engaging account of Tocqueville’s myriad travels and their impact on his intellectual development … A brilliant book.” —Helena Rosenblatt, author of The Lost History of Liberalism “A major contribution to the debate over whether and how to repatriate the countless objects and artworks acquired through dubious means that reside in the museums of former colonial powers.”…

Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age by Daisy Hay. Princeton University Press, 518 pp., $39.95 If asked to identify a Johnson who held celebrated dinners in eighteenthcentury London, most of us would suggest the convivial cohost of a Soho dining club that attracted luminaries of their professions like the actor David Garrick, the Whig politician Charles James Fox, and the historian Edward Gibbon. Technically speaking, it was Samuel Johnson’s friend the great portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds who started that genial institution—known simply as the Club—in 1764. But thanks to the indefatigably attentive James Boswell, it’s Dr. Johnson who looms largest in our imaginings of their robustly masculine circle. (If women did attend the Soho gatherings, their only official task was to refill the club…

The Indian Ocean Trade in Antiquity: Political, Cultural and Economic Impacts edited by Matthew Adam Cobb. Routledge, 237 pp., $170.00; $52.95 (paper) Globalization and Transculturality from Antiquity to the Pre-Modern World edited by Serena Autiero and Matthew Adam Cobb. Routledge, 282 pp., $170.00; $52.95 (paper; to be published in May) Rome and the Indian Ocean Trade from Augustus to the Early Third Century CE by Matthew Adam Cobb. Brill, 355 pp., $153.00 In March 2022 a team of American archaeologists was excavating a temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis at the ancient site of Berenike, on the shores of the Red Sea in modern-day Egypt, when they stumbled across a series of remarkable finds. Berenike is today a bleak and desolate spot. Under pale blue skies, the flat, treeless red-dust…