Innholdsfortegnelse for September 19, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Jenny Holzer: Light Line an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, May 17–September 29, 2024 Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle by Jonathan Crary. Zone, 270 pp., $32.00 The Avant- Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, 1917–1935 by Sjeng Scheijen. Thames and Hudson, 480 pp., $45.00 There is no question that “Jenny Holzer: Light Line,” currently at the Guggenheim, is a spectacle. Holzer’s LED display, with her signature cryptic and not-so-cryptic sentences and sentence fragments snaking up the museum’s ramp, turns the monumental rotunda that Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than sixty- five years ago into an advertisement for herself. The exhibition, which is described as a “re-imagination” of an installation Holzer made at the Guggenheim in…

The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freiman. Catapult, 232 pp., $27.00; $17.95 (paper; to be published in November) The satirist’s troubles begin with a bad review. Anna, the writer who narrates The Book of Ayn, has published a comic novel about the opioid crisis that a New York Times critic condemns as “classist.” The novel skewers Big Pharma execs and drug dealers as well as addicts, for which the Times accuses Anna of treating her subject with “excessive moral nuance.” Ha! Excessive nuance. That’s just what the PC police would say. And yet—perhaps there really could be such a thing as too much nuance, if nuance means deriding both victims and perpetrators in equal measure. What kind of novelist would write a both- sides satire about middle- aged factory workers…

Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present by Fareed Zakaria. Norton, 383 pp., $29.99 Fareed Zakaria is a captain of the punditry industry. A longtime host of his own CNN show on international and domestic politics, a columnist at The Washington Post, and the author of best-selling books on current affairs, he seems to have been everywhere and read everything. Born in India of Muslim parents, educated at Yale and Harvard, and now hobnobbing with heads of state, he maintains just enough emotional distance from the United States to look at our internal divisions and external entanglements with a relatively cool eye. In Age of Revolutions Zakaria goes all the way back to the Netherlands in the 1500s to try to understand our contemporary situation, with…

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq by Steve Coll. Penguin Press, 556 pp., $35.00 Twenty years before Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld helped lead the George W. Bush administration’s ill- fated invasion of Iraq, he traveled to Baghdad to meet with the country’s autocratic leader, Saddam Hussein. It was 1983, and the CIA had recently begun covertly sharing battlefield intelligence with Iraq about Iranian troops, helping Saddam stave off defeat in the bloody war he had foolishly launched against Tehran in 1980. This assistance against a mutual enemy had started to thaw American relations with Iraq, which had been strained in the 1970s by the Arab wars with Israel, the OPEC oil embargo, and Baghdad’s engagement with Moscow. Hoping to build…

The Precise Time Department sounds like something from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, but it is a real subdivision of the US Navy. At the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris has her official residence, the department maintains the Master Clock with which all others in the military system are harmonized. At the end of the driveway that leads from the vice-president’s house, there is a public display of these exact hours, minutes, and seconds set beside a huge ship’s anchor, as though this super-accurate chronometer served to hold America steady and prevent it from coming unmoored. Such reassurance seems, of course, ever more illusory. There is a melancholy evocation of the Master Clock and its merciless motions at the start of Promise Me, Dad (2017), Joe…

Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin. Atlantic Monthly Press, 415 pp., $28.00 The inhabitants of Earth speak 7,164 languages, according to Ethnologue, a database that catalogs the living languages of the world. A recent US Census recorded about a hundred of them in New York City, the most linguistically diverse city in history. The Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), a nonprofit that keeps track of the city’s languages, has found more than 700 of them and made a map of more than 1,200 places—restaurants, temples, mosques, community centers—where people speak them. Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by Ross Perlin, one of the ELA’s codirectors, is what might be called a “glorious mosaic” book. It brings…

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder by Mark O’Connell. Doubleday, 288 pp., $29.00; $18.00 (paper) In John Banville’s novel Ghosts (1993), an unnamed character arrives on an island. He has just been released from prison. He recalls that the authorities there seemed to feel that I was special. Perhaps it was just that I had confessed so readily to my crime, made no excuses, even displayed a forensic interest in my motives, which were almost as mysterious to me as they were to them. He served ten years: “life, that is, minus time off for good, for exemplary, behaviour.” As part of his “copious reading,” he had found this quote from John Keats: “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and…

Venezuela has such a technologically sophisticated voting system that it can make the way elections are conducted in the United States look horribly dated. At their polling stations, Venezuelan voters sign in and have their fingerprints verified by a computerized reader. In the voting booth, they make their selections on a touch screen that shows the names and color photos of the candidates. The voting machine then prints out a paper receipt, allowing the voters to see that their vote was properly recorded. They place the receipt in a sealed box, which provides a physical backup for the count stored on the machine. Once the polling stations close, every machine prints out a paper tally, known as an acta, showing the total number of votes cast on it for each…

On July 19, 2024, the International Court of Justice in The Hague handed down its advisory opinion on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank and also, indirectly, of Gaza. It is arguably the most important legal document on that subject since the Six- Day War of 1967 left Israel in control of these territories. The ICJ had been asked by the United Nations General Assembly in December 2022 to give an advisory opinion on the occupation, and although it has no power to compel change, the ramifications of its ruling may well be far- reaching. Much depends on what the major world powers, including the United States, do in response. Israel, for its part, will do everything it can to ignore the court’s decision: The State of Israel’s…

Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park. Random House, 522 pp., $30.00; $19.00 (paper; to be published in October) Same Bed Different Dreams, the second novel by the American writer Ed Park, opens with a question: “What is history?” A confusing thing to ask, impossibly grand, slightly ridiculous. Seemingly unanswerable—though for the rest of the novel various characters give it their best shot. “A litany of trackable moments, the realm of machines,” offers an academic. “From the same Indo-European root that gave us wit.” Another strains for poetry: “A message from a genius, ruined by the rain.” An “official transcript,” defined by what it omits. “A cure for insomnia.” Pick one: “(a) a vital lesson (b) amusement for the idle (c) the sum of symbols (d) a record of pain.”…

San Fernando, Última Parada: Viaje al crimen autorizado en Tamaulipas [San Fernando, Last Stop: A Journey Through Organized Crime in Tamaulipas] by Marcela Turati. Mexico City: Aguilar, 420 pp., $19.95 (paper) In April 2011 Mexican soldiers discovered mass graves in San Fernando, a city of some 30,000 people in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas. One hundred and ninety- three corpses were exhumed and moved to the border city of Matamoros. Soon the local morgue was swamped with people trying to discover whether their disappeared family members were among the bodies. To cover the story, the news magazine Proceso sent a journalist named Marcela Turati. She was shaken not only by the crowd of families seeking information about their relatives but also by the behavior of the local, state, and federal…

Reading the Constitution: Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism by Stephen Breyer. Simon and Schuster, 335 pp., $32.00 Reading the Constitution, the latest book by the recently retired Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, bears the subtitle “Why I Chose Pragmatism, Not Textualism.”* But an alternative subtitle might have been “Why I Got Beat by Nino.” Much of the book is devoted to a defense of Breyer’s dissenting opinions in Supreme Court cases over the past several decades in which the majority opinions were written by Justice Antonin “Nino” Scalia or his acolytes. Breyer’s essential point is that whenever the meaning and scope of a statute are in dispute—which is true of most cases heard by the Supreme Court—a reasonable jurist will not only consider the words of the statute, which…

Hollywood Screwball Comedy, 1934–1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals by Grégoire Halbout, translated from the French by Aliza Krefetz. Bloomsbury Academic, 334 pp., $135.00; $39.95 (paper) Becoming Nick and Nora: The Thin Man and the Films of William Powell and Myrna Loy by Rob Kozlowski. Applause, 244 pp., $29.95 Crooked, But Never Common: The Films of Preston Sturges by Stuart Klawans. Columbia University Press, 366 pp., $110.00; $28.00 (paper) In Howard Hawks’s film Ball of Fire (1941), a group of bachelor scholars is writing an encyclopedia and working on the entries for the letter s. After an encounter with a loquacious garbageman (Allen Jenkins) at the Manhattan mansion that serves as the encyclopedists’ library and residence, Professor Bertram Potts (Gary Cooper), the literature expert, realizes he must rewrite his entry…

Lone Women by Victor LaValle. One World, 281 pp., $27.00; $18.00 (paper) A woman stalks through a house, dousing its rooms in gasoline. She lingers over the corpses of her parents, tucked into the bed in which she was conceived. She strikes a match and sets the place ablaze. She walks out unscathed—physically, anyway; the narrator later notes that “it hadn’t been the fire that burned at her but the guilt.” A wagon waits outside—the year is 1915—and she loads it with a steamer trunk, quite heavy, and makes her escape. She is Adelaide, and she is, we are told, a fugitive; she is, we assume, a killer. The opening pages of Lone Women, Victor LaValle’s fifth novel, are briskly expository: Adelaide’s parents were homesteaders in California, part of a…