Innholdsfortegnelse for March 21, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet from Gaza. His first book of poems, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was published in 2022. Catherine Barnett’s fourth book of poems, Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, will be published this spring. She teaches in the Creative Writing Department at NYU. Peter Brooks is the author of Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative. His book-in-progress is Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age. David Cole is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. Linda Greenhouse is a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School and a frequent contributor to The New York Times’s…

The Einstein Forum, an international public think tank in Potsdam, Germany, seeks a new Director to begin in July 2025. The ideal candidate will have an outstanding intellectual record, preferably in more than one genre, and the ability to create exceptional interdisciplinary programming that interests both academic and general audiences. The director will work with a small staff to prepare conferences, workshops, publications, and exhibits committed to bringing the humanities and sciences to life in public discourse and practice. Relevant teaching and organizational experience beyond the Ph.D., as well as fluent English and German, are required. Other languages most welcome, as well as strong international networking and fundraising abilities. Please read the website carefully before applying: www.einsteinforum.de Applications will be accepted through April 15, 2024, with a decision to be made…

“A provocative culmination of Slotkin’s field-defining arguments on the place of violence in creating America.”—Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home “An instant classic… Through painstaking research, Minxin Pei has reverse-engineered the hidden system of preventive repression, exposing a world that is essential to understanding China’s past and, indeed, its future.”—Evan Osnos, author of the National Book Award–winning Wildland “A staggeringly brilliant work of the heart and the head. One can’t read Nolan’s story of forced adoptions in Guatemala and not come away both shaken and intellectually challenged.”—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The End of the Myth hup.harvard.edu…

The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, Volume 30: 1882, Supplement to the Correspondence 1831–1880 edited by Frederick Burkhardt, James A. Secord, and the editors of the Darwin Correspondence Project. Cambridge University Press, 716 pp., $125.00 Recently, a live oak next door suddenly began sporting purple blossoms. This was strange: live oaks make greenishbrown catkins and reddish-green pistils that become acorns if fertilized by the catkins. Not purple flowers. Our neighbor briefly wondered if she was hallucinating, but an investigation revealed a trickster culprit from our house: a determined passiflora vine had struck out across our deck, run down a flight of stairs, scaled the fence, then climbed up into the tree, where it stretched itself ecstatically, filling the old oak with bright new finery. It took most of an afternoon to…

The neighbor’s mulberry tree spilling its fruitonto the sidewalk stained the old sneakersI took from my mother’s closet, but there was no needto steal, there’s almost nothing you can ask forthat my mother wouldn’t give you, except maybethe bone from a T-bone steak—she’s a carnivore, like the coyote in the cemeterywhere I walked each day in my mother’s shoes.It was so hot the asphalt buckledand the cemetery crows kept their beaks open;everyone except me was underground, staying cool.From our respective shades, the solitary coyoteeyed me steadily, as if I belonged to her,but all I wore was borrowed: the shoes, the skirt,the clip holding my silver hair above my sweaty neck,maybe even my sweaty neck. I’m not so dimnot to know you can’t take it with youand still I wanted to…

When we returned to London in 2015, after twelve years in the US, we could not get our son into the local elementary school. His class in Hackney, the neighborhood where we live, had the maximum of thirty kids in it, and none were leaving. Pretty much all the nonreligious schools in the area were at full capacity, too. He ended up getting a spot at a school two miles away. When our daughter started kindergarten a couple of years later, her class was also capped at thirty, and full. Today her class has just fifteen kids in it. Next year the school—located, apparently without irony, on the borough’s first “21st Century Street,” with dedicated green space, bicycle parking, electric vehicle charging, and 40 percent “tree canopy cover”—will close. (It…

She’s lying on the asphalt.Her small belly, her chest,her forehead, her hands,her cold feet bare in the night.A hungry cat paces.Shrapnel ringsas it hits neighboringhouses already bombed.The cat grows hungrier.The cat sees the girl,her wounds still warm.Hungrier.The girl’s father lies next to heron his back. The backpack he wearsstill has the girl’s favorite candyand a small toy.The girl was waitingtill they arrivedto eat her lollipop.The cat gets closeto try the flesh;a bomb pounds the street.No flesh, no girl,no father, no cat.Nobody is hungry.The moon overheadis not the moon.…

The Body of the Soul by Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Yale University Press, 153 pp., $18.00 (paper) Women can do everything, and men can do the rest. I first heard the proverb thirty years ago when I was teaching English as a second language to Soviet Jewish immigrants at a place called NYANA (the New York Association for New Americans). My female students relished quoting it, and, probably because they always prefaced it with “In Russia we say,” I have remembered it as “Russian women can do everything.” I remember also that, when I was a child and before I had ever met any Russian person, the thought of a Russian woman brought either of two starkly contrasting images to mind: an…

Erotic Vagrancy: Everything About Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor by Roger Lewis. Mobius, 645 pp., $28.00 “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me!” squawks Julius Caesar (Kenneth Williams) in Carry On Cleo (1964), a low-budget lampoon of the $44 million epic Cleopatra, whose stars, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, had an infamous off-screen affair. The line might serve as an epigraph for the “unappreciated and remaindered efforts” of Roger Lewis, who describes himself in the jeremiad Seasonal Suicide Notes: My Life as It Is Lived (2009) as “criminally underpaid and under-employed, laughed at by editors …derided by the critics…betrayed by friends.” The Roger Lewis persona is an amalgam of music hall tradition, pantomime, and Restoration bawdy. It is a niche joke about an irate dinosaur Welshman doing battle…

Finding Time Again by Marcel Proust, translated from the French by Ian Patterson. Penguin, 411 pp., $27.00 (paper) The Seventy-Five Folios and Other Unpublished Manuscripts by Marcel Proust, edited by Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, and with a preface by Jean-Yves Tadié. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 334 pp., $29.95 Translations of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time have something of a doomsday problem. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, the first to attempt this novelistic Mount Everest, died in 1930 before reaching the final volume. The recent Penguin Random House version addressed that problem by using seven different translators for the seven parts in which the novel was first published. Those translations came out in 2002 in the UK, but their publication in the US was…

In the Warsaw Ghetto in October 1941 Mary Berg, then a teenager, wrote in her diary about the improbable persistence of laughter in that hellish place: Every day at the Art Café on Leszno Street one can hear songs and satires on the police, the ambulance service, the rickshaws, and even the Gestapo, in a veiled fashion. The typhus epidemic itself is the subject of jokes. It is laughter through tears, but it is laughter. This is our only weapon in the ghetto—our people laugh at death and at the Nazi decrees. Humor is the only thing the Nazis cannot understand. Berg here movingly expresses a common and comforting idea. Laughter is one of the few weapons that the weak have against the strong. Gallows humor is the one thing…

To the Editors: In “Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic” [NYR, January 18], Matthew Desmond has made two false claims about my book, The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide: “Inexplicably, The Viral Underclass ignores pandemic aid altogether” and “Thrasher even goes so far as to claim that during the pandemic the government ‘left us to fend for ourselves.’” First, the Biden-backed Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act Desmond writes about at length passed on March 27, 2021. The Viral Underclass was turned in to my publisher on February 1, 2021: “I turned in the final manuscript of this book’s first edition, in the first days of the Biden Administration.” Second, I wrote extensively about aid throughout the book, especially the tens of billions…

I. Madagascar:“a rice cooking”(about half an hour)“a locust frying”(a split second)Sioux:“dies in less spacethan a roasting of maize”(under fifteen minutes)Burma:monks trainedin the increments of dawn(sifting daybreakthrough their fingerslike bolts of lotus silk)Chile:an Ave Maria said aloudmeasures a soft-boiled egg(earthquakes lastingtwo or three credos) II. I have aced timenow doth time ace meI attend to tidesin deathspan& clockthe rings of treesonce in a blue moona cada muerte de obispotous les trente-six du moisnur alle JubeljahreI think the hoursmight be enough& it occurs to meall it takesis a “pissing while”for mica to turnto meerschaumor loveto dustwho would not exchangea foot-length of jadefor a sundial’s inchof shade…

Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles by Jay Owens. Abrams, 392 pp., $28.00 Before we get to dust itself—and to Jay Owens’s marvelous Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles—it’s worth thinking about how the word is used. “Dust” in the English language seems almost as elemental and variable as dust is in the physical world—a universal metonym of sorts. In the Bible, it stands for many things: earth, a human, the grave, death itself. It can suggest abasement, humiliation, and collapse, but also the innumerable progeny of biblical patriarchs.1 Dust is the very matter of transformation: Adam is created from “the dust of the ground” and Aaron turns the dust of Egypt into lice. In the Book of Common Prayer, it’s a beginning and an ending—“dust…

January by Sara Gallardo, translated from the Spanish by Frances Riddle and Maureen Shaughnessy. Archipelago, 114 pp., $18.00 (paper) In the first months of my pregnancy, I was so exhausted that walking downhill felt like walking up. The only food that appealed to me was pineapple. I tracked my physical state in the notebook where ordinarily I track the progress of my work. On bad days, I’d just write, “Tired tired,” too worn out to come up with another word. I got pregnant on purpose, at the time I thought was right, having wanted a baby since I was too young to bear one, and in those tired-tired months I could not stop thinking about the legions of pregnant people who were as ground down and physically miserable as me—or…

Finally, No More Fees To the Editors: Regarding the issue of the Bundesarchiv profiting from the use of archival material of the Nazi era raised in my letter in these pages [“Shameful Profits,” NYR, April 20, 2023], a spokesperson for the minister of state in the Federal Chancellery and the federal government commissioner for culture and the media, Claudia Roth, issued the following statement: The Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) has already taken the decision to discontinue the previous practice and to waive the fees for the use of images, posters, film and video material from the National Socialist era at the Bundesarchiv. This relates solely to commercial utilisation requests, as utilisation for non-commercial purposes has also been exempt from the obligation to pay fees to…