Innholdsfortegnelse for June 22, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the History Department at Princeton. His latest book is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Steve Coll is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Directorate S: The CIA and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fara Dabhoiwala is completing a global history of free speech and researching a biography of the eighteenth-century Black Jamaican polymath Francis Williams. He teaches at Princeton. Rachel Donadio is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a former Rome Bureau Chief and European Cultural Correspondent for The New York Times. Martin Filler’s most recent book is Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudi to Maya Lin, a collection of his…

Nathalie Sarraute: A Life Between by Ann Jefferson. Princeton University Press, 425 pp., $42.00; $32.00 (paper) “Ich werde es zerreissen”—“I’m going to slash it.” So asserted the five- or six-year-old future novelist Nathalie Sarraute to her Swiss governess as she held a pair of scissors above a stuffed armchair. The governess protested. The future novelist held firm: “Yes, I’m going to do it” …There now, I’m freeing myself, excitement and exaltation impel my arm, I plunge the point of the scissors in with all my strength, the silk gives, tears, I slash the back of the settee from top to bottom, and I look at what comes out of it … something flabby, greyish, is escaping from the slit. Sarraute recalls this youthful outburst in her memoir, Childhood, published in…

The US and the Holocaust a PBS documentary series directed and produced by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein In the Garden of the Righteous: The Heroes Who Risked Their Lives to Save Jews During the Holocaust by Richard Hurowitz. Harper, 451 pp., $28.99 “I am forced to look out for emigration and as far as I can see USA is the only country we could go to,” Otto Frank wrote to an American friend on April 30, 1941. The Frank family—Otto, Edith, and their two daughters, Margot and Anne—had spent the past seven years in the Netherlands, where they fled after Hitler came to power in their native Germany. But the Nazi invasion in May 1940 turned their refuge into a cage. As anti semitic regulations mounted, Frank…

Judgment and Mercy: The Turbulent Life and Times of the Judge Who Condemned the Rosenbergs by Martin J. Siegel. Three Hills/Cornell University Press, 432 pp., $35.95 An acquaintance of mine, a rising star among lawyers who practice before the Supreme Court, asked me what I was reading these days. When I replied, “A biography of Judge Irving Kaufman,” the young man looked puzzled. “The name sounds familiar,” he said. “Who was he?” “The judge who sentenced the Rosenbergs to death,” I offered. He nodded in recognition. “Oh, yes, of course.” Kaufman, who was still serving on the federal appeals court in New York when he died in 1992 at the age of eighty-one, would have been dismayed by that exchange but not surprised. He knew—the world would not let him…

Rattlesnakes fill the lawn one rattlesnakeA baby rattlesnake I’m almost tenYears old because in two months I’ll be nineSummer has stuffed the willow’s darkHair full that flashes white in gusts with hairAnd branches dark green leaves and branches theRattler I hope won’t climb and spotting meDrop from to bite my head the green blades everywhere Bend in the strong gusts and the snakeRivers the blades apart I watch from the deckOn the other side of the fence a windowOpens then closes I’ve been sent toKill it the snake a river parting low in the grass the grassStop with a rake a river that is its own source…

Tolstoy as Philosopher: Essential Short Writings (1835–1910): An Anthology edited and translated from the Russian by Inessa Medzhibovskaya. Academic Studies Press, 411 pp., $149.00; $35.00 (paper) On Life: A Critical Edition by Leo Tolstoy, edited by Inessa Medzhibovskaya, and translated from the Russian by Michael Denner and Inessa Medzhibovskaya. Northwestern University Press, 246 pp., $99.95; $27.95 (paper) Tolstoy’s contemporaries called him the poet of death, and no one has ever described dying so well. “If a man has learned to think,” Maxim Gorky reports him saying, “no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death…. And what truths can there be, if there is death?” People hide from death. They usually act as if dying happens to others, but not to themselves. But sooner…

Guido Reni an exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, March 28–July 9, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by David García Cueto. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 446 pp., €35.58 The Roman church of Santa Maria della Concezione sits atop a precipitous cliff of volcanic stone that frames the modern Via Veneto. Most visitors climb a flight of outdoor stairs to see the crypt, whose five chambers are packed with the skeletons and mummified bodies of 3,700 Capuchin friars, many of their bones attached to the walls and ceilings in elaborate Rococo patterns. A second flight of stairs leads up to the church itself, and to the spectacle that drew visitors long before the crypt received its macabre decoration in the eighteenth century: Guido Reni’s painted vision of…

Who Killed Jane Stanford?: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits, and the Birth of a University by Richard White. Norton, 362 pp., $35.00; $19.95 (paper) American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford by Roland De Wolk. University of California Press, 299 pp., $34.95; $26.95 (paper) It’s not the crime; it’s the cover-up. Someone murdered Jane Stanford, the cofounder of Stanford University, on Tuesday, February 28, 1905, putting a precisely calibrated dose of pure strychnine in her bicarbonate of soda. The murderer had made an earlier attempt, introducing rat poison into Stanford’s nightstand bottle of Poland Spring water. We can’t be sure who the murderer was, but in Who Killed Jane Stanford? the Stanford University historian turned sleuth Richard White conducts a thorough investigation that includes showing who…

Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography by Enzo Traverso, translated from the French by Adam Schoene. Columbia University Press, 206 pp., $110.00; $28.00 (paper) History and Human Flourishing edited by Darrin M. McMahon. Oxford University Press, 213 pp., $83.00; $29.95 (paper) Although enrollments in college history courses have plunged in recent years, interest in the subject remains high, to judge from both the best-seller lists and history’s place in the gladiatorial combat known as American politics. We are, in many ways, saturated in history. But what purpose does it serve? Academic specialists and the general public alike seem more confused by this question than at any time in recent memory. History has always had multiple purposes, of course. Among the oldest is moral education: providing examples of admirable character and…

Ah, how refreshing it is when we fail to do our duty!It’s like being in the countryside!Unreliability becomes a refuge!I breathe more easily now that I’ve missed all my appointments.Yes, I missed them all, with the deliberateness of neglect,I waited to feel the desire to go there, a desire I knew wouldn’t come.I am free, the enemy of organized, clothed society.I am naked, and I plunge into the waters of my imagination.It’s too late for me to be in either of the two places where I should be at this hour,Deliberately arranged for the same hour…It’s fine, I’ll stay here dreaming poems and smiling in italics.It’s so amusing this bystanding part of life!I can’t even manage to light my next cigarette … That would be a gesture,And it can stay…

Cats Galore Encore!: A New Compendium of Cultured Cats by Susan Herbert. Thames and Hudson, 191 pp., $24.95 The Internet Is for Cats: How Animal Images Shape Our Digital Lives by Jessica Maddox. Rutgers University Press, 245 pp., $59.95; $24.95 (paper) Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life by John Gray. Picador, 122 pp., $24.00; $15.00 (paper) All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal, translated from the Czech by Paul Wilson. New Directions, 94 pp., $17.95 Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat by Oliver Soden. Cheltenham: History Press, 185 pp., L16.99; L10.99 (paper) Tigger was my wife’s cat, found as a stray and passed on to her by a cousin when he was about a year and a half old. He lived with her in Boston, before we met, when she was…

To the Editors: Jed Perl’s article “The Chilliest Mystique” [NYR, May 11] states, “A. Michael Noll’s and Frieder Nake’s computer-generated variations on works by Mondrian and Klee are just copycat stuff.” The pioneering investigations in the 1960s of the potential for digital computers in the visual arts and experimental aesthetics were far from what Perl characterizes. In the early 1960s I used programmed randomness along with mathematical order to program a digital computer to produce images—they were called “patterns”—although I considered them abstract computer art. In one experiment, I used a painting by Piet Mondrian to motivate the program, and I then performed experimental psychological comparisons of the Mondrian with the computer version—the computer version was most preferred.1 I also performed research using mathematical variations of the images to determine…