Innholdsfortegnelse for June 20, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Zhenya Bruno is the pseudonym of a writer who lives in St. Petersburg. Francisco Cantú is the author of The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border. Martin Filler’s most recent book is Makers of Modern Architecture, Volume III: From Antoni Gaudí to Maya Lin, a collection of his writing on architecture in these pages. Tim Flannery’s books include Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific, Europe: A Natural History, and Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived, which was published in February. Adom Getachew is a Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination and the coeditor, with Jennifer Pitts, of…

Charles Portis: Collected Works edited by Jay Jennings. Library of America, 1,096 pp., $45.00 Haunted Man’s Report: Reading Charles Portis by Robert Cochran. University of Arkansas Press, 224 pp., $39.95; $25.95 (paper) The comedian George Carlin had a routine, in the 1970s, in which he offered up a series of fake headlines in a blustery newscaster’s voice. “A man has barricaded himself inside of his house,” one opens. After a beat: “However, he is not armed, and no one is paying any attention to him.” I always think of that line whenever a famous novelist is praised for their reluctance to appear—for a refusal to give interviews, participate in public forums, be photographed for dust jackets, and so forth. A precious few have managed this inside-out publicity somersault: Thomas Pynchon,…

rubbing the filters back and forththrough a knob on the screen that’s codedto brush glaze and bury echoeson photographs my oiled finger pads never once touchedSo much past arrives on my screencoupled with soft pings in the pocketstrange temple bellAnd in these images pass chords of facesof which I know next to nothingwhile all fall I ride the 63 line from Moynihan to Rhinecliffalongside passengers slumped with buds in their earsas the river rises to meet what rips pastthe morning’s stiff postureAnd so I continue to shepherd things into the land of donepunching send repeatedly with my dominant fingerWelcome nothing, refuse nothingMy one tab is opened to the Tao Te Chingand the other to meals machine-diced and packedin miniature plastic jars that will arriveringed with sodium polyacrylate before tomorrow’s noonWith…

Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream. St. Martin’s, 327 pp., $30.00 Like many contemporary memoirs, Cloistered opens in medias res, giving the reader a taste of the narrative intensity that belongs, chronologically, to the book’s climax. The first paragraph plunges us into a cinematic escape scene—a young nun is bolting through the English countryside, fleeing a monastery under the cover of night: In my mind I am still running. Running toward the road. Running. Running. Running. The darkness is fresh around me, the air slicing across my face in wild, clean shafts. The rush of oxygen is fizzing, moonlit, completely unexpected. I’d forgotten what night tasted like, the great dome of it, just as I’d forgotten what it was—after ten years cloistered—to run cold and wild and…

Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America by Michael John Witgen. Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press, 366 pp., $24.00 (paper) Growing up in the southwestern United States, I often heard stories from my stepfather about people who enriched themselves by stealing from Natives. These were not tales from the past, but ongoing stories taking place on the reservation lands where he was employed and later lived. My stepfather spent much of his career working to preserve land and water rights for tribes and their members, and he spoke to me frequently of the businesspeople, corporations, lawyers, and federal and tribal officials who routinely tried to defraud Native people. Though my stepfather is white, he grew…

Counting the Dead in Gaza To the Editors: My article “Is Israel Committing Genocide?” [NYR, June 6] cited numbers of the dead and wounded in Gaza, including the number of women and children killed, as reported by the United Nations. Shortly after the article went to press, reports circulated that the UN had changed the source on which it relies for fatality statistics in the territory. The total number of deaths reported remained the same, but the UN stated that the Gaza Health Ministry had not yet established the full names and identity numbers of more than 10,000 of those killed. It therefore distinguished between the total death toll (35,233 people as of this writing) and the number of identified victims (24,686 people), only specifying the number of women and…

Floating in a Most Peculiar Way by Louis Chude-Sokei. Mariner, 240 pp., $15.99 (paper) The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora by Louis Chude-Sokei. Duke University Press, 277 pp., $102.95; $27.95 (paper) The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics by Louis Chude-Sokei. Wesleyan University Press, 267 pp., $27.95 (paper) A little over a decade ago, while researching what became my first book, I spent two months in Trinidad conducting archival research at the University of the West Indies. I stayed in a guesthouse run by a Presbyterian Indo-Trinidadian family. When my hosts learned that I was Ethiopian, they told me about the Ethiopian Orthodox community on the island and introduced me to the archbishop who oversaw the congregations in the Caribbean and Latin America. My…

People walk aroundWith people in their head.What some lovely person did.What some lovely person said.Heartthrob in the head. I float to 86th Street with you in my heart.I’m a pigeon cooing to a crumb of bread,Except I’m kind of floating instead—And it’s not a crumb but a whole loaf of bread.I feel I’m in an ambulance and you’re about to save me With a Kit KatAnd a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.I’m in an ambulanceWith my teeth comically chattering.And when I get inside your shop I have to stand in line and you’re behind a counterThat sells the new and does repairs.And everybody stares.I stand there for years.I can remember when I first walked in the store, When aeons ago I first opened the doorTo feathered dinosaurs turning into birdsong,And you…

A Part Apart: The Life and Thought of B. R. Ambedkar by Ashok Gopal. New Delhi: Navayana, 863 pp., $50.00 B. R. Ambedkar: The Man Who Gave Hope to India’s Dispossessed by Shashi Tharoor. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 226 pp., £16.99 The Evolution of Pragmatism in India: Ambedkar, Dewey, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction by Scott R. Stroud. University of Chicago Press, 302 pp., $99.00; $29.00 (paper) On January 17, 2016, Rohith Vemula took his own life. A twenty-six-year-old Ph. D. student at the University of Hyderabad, he was a Dalit (the caste formerly called “untouchables”) and a member of the Ambedkar Students’ Association, which combats caste discrimination. The university had suspended his stipend following a complaint by the leader of the student wing of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party…