Innholdsfortegnelse for June 6, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon by Adam Shatz. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 451 pp., $32.00 Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience by Ato Sekyi-Otu. Harvard University Press, 276 pp., $49.00 (paper) Decolonization, said Frantz Fanon, began a new chapter of history. It’s common enough for the politically engaged to magnify their engagement, if only to sustain themselves through the cycles of danger and boredom that accompany serious political struggle, but in this case Fanon might have understated things. Stronger nations have overtaken weaker ones since the beginning of recorded history—indeed, since before there were nations in our sense at all. Contrary to much current opinion, colonialism did not begin with the Enlightenment, whose ideas were later twisted to support it.1 Until the last century imperialism was as universal…

For months now an enormous excavating machine has been drilling deep into central Rome beneath Piazza Venezia, at the foot of the looming Victor Emmanuel II National Monument—a white marble pile of steps and columns that is probably the closest we will ever get to experiencing the grandeur of ancient Rome. Also known as the Altar of the Fatherland, and with an eternal flame for the unknown soldier flanked by a solemn honor guard, the monument is nicknamed “The Typewriter.” Romans have been deflating pomposity for millennia. On another side of the piazza is Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini had his headquarters and from whose balcony he delivered speeches to adoring throngs. Piazza Venezia is one of Rome’s busiest traffic circles—a whirl of cars, buses, taxis, and mopeds with no stoplights…

Look Again: European Paintings, 1300–1800 a new installation of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s European Paintings galleries, which reopened last November after a thoughtful, beautiful refurbishment and reinstallation, now display more than seven hundred works, including a discrete selection of sculpture and the decorative arts (and even a small sampling of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century paintings). After efforts to raise $600 million to fund David Chipperfield’s design for the wing housing modern and contemporary art stalled in 2016, those plans were shelved, and the museum shifted its attention to the long-deferred maintenance of the second-floor galleries’ skylights. This complex undertaking was launched in 2018 after approval from NewYork City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. Housed in attics above the glass-paneled…

Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300–1300 by Peter Heather. Knopf, 704 pp., $40.00 Peter Heather’s Christendom is a colossal book written by a colossus in the field. Aptly subtitled “The Triumph of a Religion,” it covers a millennium, from the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine in 312 to the baptism of Grand Duke Mindaugas of Lithuania, the last pagan ruler in Europe, around 1250. Heather has always had a vision of Europe as a whole, Mediterranean and northern, eastern and western. His Goths and Romans, 332–489 (1991) introduced us to the Gothic society that once spread from Crimea to the Danube, across the plains north of the Black Sea that are now war zones in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Since then he has closely studied both…

In his best-selling biography of Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson tries to explain how a man who attempts such “epic feats” can also be “an asshole.” He finds himself seeking help from William Shakespeare: “As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex.” How better to fill the gap between epic and asshole than with the lesson Shakespeare was apparently trying to teach us when he wrote Hamlet and King Lear? The only other time the word “tragic” appears in Isaacson’s book is when Musk is regretting his choice of outfit for an audience with the pope: “My suit is tragic.” When tragedy encompasses such trivialities, it’s not so hard to believe that those great plays really are trying…

Like most of my colleagues in the international human rights movement, I use the term “genocide” sparingly. During my fifteen-year tenure at Human Rights Watch (HRW), which I cofounded in 1978, I applied the term to only one of the many great crimes that we monitored: Saddam Hussein’s slaughter of the Iraqi Kurds in 1988. The Kurds had suffered severe abuses under Saddam’s dictatorship, and during the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988 they rebelled. In response Saddam used chemical weapons against them, as he had against Iranian forces. A particularly large attack took place in March 1988 against the Kurdish city of Halabja, killing about five thousand people. Then, over the following six months, Saddam’s forces rounded up Kurdish men and boys from northern Iraq and bused them to a desert…

Early last September, at a restaurant a block from Mexico City’s National Palace, the leaders of the Movement for National Regeneration, known as Morena, gathered for a changing of the guard. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Morena’s founder and figurehead, handed a wooden stick adorned with colorful ribbons to his protégée, Claudia Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City. She had just won the primary to run as Morena’s presidential candidate in the June 2 election. Sheinbaum is poised to win. Polls give her an advantage of over twenty points. Mexico does not allow second presidential terms, and so López Obrador is entrusting the “Fourth Transformation” — his mission to write the next great moment of Mexico’s history—to her. (López Obrador has defined the other three transformations as Mexico’s independence…

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong. Random House, 449 pp., $30.00; $20.00 (paper) Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses by Jackie Higgins. Atria, 308 pp., $18.99 (paper) When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness by David M. Peña-Guzmán. Princeton University Press, 259 pp., $24.95; $17.95 (paper) Recent writing about perception by neuroscientists and philosophers has tended toward a disconcerting message: we have nothing like the simple, direct contact with the world around us that we might suppose. Instead, we are told, our brains actively synthesize a picture of the world, continually guessing, extrapolating, and projecting. Stronger versions of this view hold that what we perceive is a kind of simulation or model—not one imposed on…