Innholdsfortegnelse for April 4, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

David A. Bell is the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Department of History at Princeton. His latest book is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Christian Caryl is an author and journalist. He has worked as an Opinions editor at The Washington Post, a foreign correspondent for Newsweek, and an editor and columnist at Foreign Policy. Jason DeParle writes about poverty for The New York Times. He is the author of A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century. Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia. His books include The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, and Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877.…

The Dissident: Alexey Navalny, Profile of a Political Prisoner by David M. Herszenhorn. Twelve, 307 pp., $30.00 Navalny: Putin’s Nemesis, Russia’s Future? by Jan Matti Dollbaum, Morvan Lallouet, and Ben Noble. Oxford University Press, 280 pp., $29.95; $19.95 (paper) Navalny a film directed by Daniel Roher On February 16, not long after news of the death of Alexey Navalny became public, television cameras caught Russian president Vladimir Putin on a visit to the industrial city of Chelyabinsk. He appeared relaxed, businesslike, at times ebullient. No one asked him about the opposition leader’s passing, and he offered no comment on it. There was no sign of the somber mien Putin assumed in 2015 when asked about the death of Boris Nemtsov, another prominent critic, who had been gunned down just a…

My Name Is Barbra by Barbra Streisand. Viking, 970 pp., $47.00 Although we have been counseled for decades now that “less is more,” sometimes more isn’t enough. This is decidedly the case with Barbra Streisand’s 970-page, indexless brick of a memoir, My Name Is Barbra, an item heavy enough to throw at someone in a fit of pique and injure them. In my own case I had a shoulder replacement right before receiving the book and read it in pamphlet-like segments that my daughter had created by tearing out clumps of pages at the spine. (Viking, please forgive this desecration.) Streisand, who is now eighty-one, spent ten years writing the book. In 1984, when Streisand was forty-two, Jackie Onassis, then an editor at Doubleday, suggested she write a memoir, and…

You said I had to sleep in the cage but the smoke alarmwent off and wouldn’t stop so I was like fuck thisand slept in the other room, whose love seatis hardly better than the cage. But you were pissed.Let us never again begin the day with an argumentwhen I’m wearing a diaper. I’m not a morning personor an afternoon person. I’m not really an evening person.When you hit me, which of us gets enlightened?I’m a pair of stripper heels having a bad dream.Prayer is a snake in the mind. The mountains are clean.You didn’t even ask how I got out of the cage.…

Byron: A Life in Ten Letters by Andrew Stauffer. Cambridge University Press, 401 pp., $29.95 Jane Austen and Lord Byron: Regency Relations by Christine Kenyon Jones. Bloomsbury Academic, 244 pp., $90.00; $26.95 (paper) “I go forth to be recognized,” Lord Byron’s reluctant military leader announces in Sardanapalus, a verse drama about the enigmatic Assyrian king that he intended to dedicate to his admirer Goethe. The play was begun in 1821, when the self-exiled poet was living in Ravenna with his lover Teresa Guiccioli and her compliant husband, while discreetly supporting the Carbonari, a secret revolutionary society that aimed to liberate Italy from Austrian domination. Two years later, having scuppered a plan to join Simón Bolívar’s far more successful battle to free South America from Spanish rule, Byron threw himself into…

In a past life I was not defined by his death.… I was not rerouted like a plane through Charlotte.… I was part of a “nuclear family,” the phrasing of which appears first in 1924 as “the nuclear family complex.”… I did not have a complex.… I smiled for the camera.… Love accumulated like debt—mindless, habit-forming.… Similes were balanced equations.… I had my father’s face, not “you have your father’s face.” In a past life I am on the basketball court behind our apartment when I hear his footsteps on the asphalt.(Does it count as a past life if it happened?) “In a past life” is not supposed to mean your life before tragedy but an existence altogether unrecognizable, which is maybe the same thing: my having been a fir…

The Extinction of Irena Rey by Jennifer Croft. Bloomsbury, 309 pp., $28.99 Most translators are the worthiest of people: gifted, erudite, hardworking, and modest in their material needs. People who crave money and fame choose other jobs. Babysitting would pay better, though that’s true of many intellectual and creative professions these days. And even when the work you’ve translated succeeds brilliantly, few readers even notice that it’s yours. After all, it has someone else’s name on it. For most of the history of publishing, with the exception of the highest-profile works (for instance, Homer), even those who were searching might have had trouble finding the translator’s name. Paid translation was often seen not as a vocation but as a quick source of income, a more intellectual version of taking in…

La Duchesse: The Life of Marie de Vignerot, Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France by Bronwen McShea. Pegasus, 466 pp., $28.95 In the premodern history of women, few places and times were more remarkable than seventeenth-century France. It is true that the vast majority of women there were peasants who spent most of their lives helping to scratch sustenance out of a recalcitrant soil. But for a small number of wealthy, aristocratic women, the period afforded extraordinary opportunities. They could exercise substantial political influence. They could act as patrons of the arts and charitable institutions. If not subject to a father or a husband, they could control their own fortunes. While they could hardly ever choose their husbands, they might still enjoy a surprising degree of…

The Complete Personal Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson edited by Trenton B. Olsen. Routledge, 530 pp., $160.00; $52.95 (paper) Known today as a writer of adventure stories for youth (Treasure Island, Kidnapped) or for his horror classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or even for his light-poetry collection A Child’s Garden of Verses, in his day Robert Louis Stevenson was celebrated equally for his essays. He wrote more than a hundred, of which seventy might be classified as personal. Edmund Gosse argued that these personal essays “reveal him in his best character” and that “if Stevenson is not the most exquisite of the English essayists, we know not to whom that praise is due.” Richard Le Gallienne predicted that “Stevenson’s final fame will be that of…