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

Rozina Ali is a contributing writer at The New York Times Magazine. Christopher de Bellaigue’s latest book is The Lion House. Emily Berry is the author of the poetry collections Dear Boy, Unexhausted Time, and Stranger, Baby. Elaine Blair is a regular contributor to The New York Review. Carl Elliott is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota and the recipient of a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award. His most recent book is The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No. Coco Fusco is a New York City–based artist and the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba. Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies Emeritus at Oxford and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s…

The Burning Earth: A History by Sunil Amrith. Norton, 418 pp., $35.00 A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown. Timber, 318 pp., $30.00 According to the historian Sunil Amrith, who grew up in Singapore in the 1980s, his home country is “as committed as anywhere on the planet to remaking nature for human ends.” In The Burning Earth, his insightful survey of the long human struggle to escape environmental limitations, Singapore serves as a microcosm. Since the island nation’s split from Malaysia in the 1960s, civil engineers have increased its land area by 25 percent, using sand dredged from riverbeds all over Southeast Asia to expand its margins. Per capita GDP increased by one hundredfold during its…

The Edge of the Alphabet by Janet Frame. London: Fitzcarraldo, 289 pp., £12.99 (paper) The New Zealand novelist Janet Frame had a rather startling story to tell about the relationship between her work as a writer and her existence as a human being. Writing saved her life, she explained, and she meant it literally. In December 1952, at the age of twenty-eight, after spending more than seven years in and out of various psychiatric institutions—following a suicide attempt in 1945 and a hurried diagnosis of schizophrenia—she was institutionalized again and scheduled for a leukotomy, or prefrontal lobotomy. Her mother had signed the consent form. In anguish and fear Frame was counting down the days till the surgery when her short story collection The Lagoon won what was then New Zealand’s…

It was rare that I would walk down a street and look in through a window and want to be insidethe room I saw there, I mean live in it, becauseother people’s furnishings and lighting arrangements disturbed me deeply, but on one occasionI did like what I saw, I liked it so much andfound it so comforting and familiar that I wassure I must at one time have actually lived inthis room, despite all evidence to the contrary, Istarted telling people about it, pointing out thehouse if I ever passed with a companion, often making a particular effort to pass with acompanion, I would reminisce about the formerperiod in my life when I inhabited this comfortable, beautifully furnished, and impeccably litroom, expressing surprise when the companionclaimed never to have visited…

Conscious Objection Peter Godfrey-Smith does well to take a closer look at the reception of Jakob von Uexküll’s Umwelt theory in recent books by Jackie Higgins and Ed Yong [“Visi-le and Invisible Worlds,” NYR, June 6], but like much recent critical engagement with Uexküll, his article decontexualizes the theory’s significance from his larger theory of meaning, which did change over the course of his fifty-year career—and notably during the Nazi period. Uexküll was not a solipsist, at least insofar as he was a sensitive interpreter of Kant’s transcendental idealism—which had set out to refute the solipsism of such con-founding idealists as Hume—but it’s easy to make him sound like one if you quote him sparingly and don’t make too much of that meanly arcane Kantianism. These contemporary authors’ receptions and…

The Selected Shepherd by Reginald Shepherd, selected and with an introduction by Jericho Brown. University of Pittsburgh Press, 163 pp., $30.00 Reginald Shepherd was very good at first lines. He knew how to thrust his reader immediately into a poem’s motivating dilemma. “The Difficult Music,” the first poem in his first book, Some Are Drowning (1994), begins: “I started to write a song about you, then I decided, No.” The urgency, the confident first person, the intimate address, and the drive to sing: these are all characteristic of Shepherd’s work. So is the abrupt swivel, the negation, the balked song. Shepherd always stood a little apart. In the 1990s, when “postmodernism” was the name for a new period style, Shepherd was an unapologetic modernist. His idols were Eliot, Stevens, and…

The Declaration in Script and Print: A Visual History of America’s Founding Document by John Bidwell. Pennsylvania State University Press, 214 pp., $29.95 (paper) It is safe to say that most of the 1.1 million annual visitors to the National Archives Museum, in Washington, D.C., enter John Russell Pope’s magnificent temple on Pennsylvania Avenue to see the permanent exhibition, “Charters of Freedom,” which includes the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and, shown separately, the Bill of Rights. After some displays relating to the Revolutionary War, they encounter the stone-and-bronze case holding the parchment of the Declaration, written in a large, clear hand (or “engrossed,” as ordered by Congress) by Timothy Matlack, an officer in the Continental Army. In his competent clerk’s script, Matlack transcribed the text…

The Life of the Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne by Dale Salwak. Wiley Blackwell, 206 pp., $24.95 (paper) Returning to Hawthorne after many years and remembering, particularly in The Scarlet Letter and “Young Goodman Brown,” a general atmosphere of Puritan rigor versus demonic hedonism, one expects to find a man torn between vice and virtue. It is not the case. Nothing in Hawthorne’s life, as described in lengthy biographies by Arlin Turner, James R. Mellow, and Brenda Wineapple,* or in the new, briefer account by Dale Salwak, suggests that he saw himself as particularly sinful or strove to be strictly virtuous. One need only consider biographies of his near contemporaries Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, for whom moral struggle was always to the fore, to appreciate how little Hawthorne was troubled by such matters.…

I know of only one pie-dish beetleactively pursuing a longer lifebut there may have beenand probably are still othersdeterminedly engaged in the sameundertaking. Approaching the endof its year on earth,turning its flangeto edge off predators, combingnight ground for decayingvegetable matter,it considers its dietand becomes more particular.How decayed, what species of plant,how rapidly consumed,which morsels might proverestorative, how much time should bededicated to resting and dreaming?Further, it is constantlyworking on memoriesof close calls and dubious encounters,learning which insects to avoid,how to stay awayfrom nightbirdsand foxes under a burning moon.With no flight possible, it knowsthe ground with an intensityturned to advantage:rocks live so much longer and are to beenvied and possibly imitated.Adapting instinctualresponses and inheritedrecall, sharing experienceswith other pie-dishes,even if self-obsessed.In the extreme drytaking summer into winter, its flangecollects the scant dew,…

Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 311 pp., $32.00 All portraits depend on the collaboration of artist and sitter, but rarely do both parties appear to be having so much fun as in John Singer Sargent’s second portrait of the Anglo-Jewish heiress Ena Wertheimer, a work of 1904 that he playfully gave an Italian title, A Vele Gonfie—“in full sail” (see illustration on page 18). Though in 1904 Sargent also declared himself “sick of portrait painting,” A Vele Gonfie betrays no sign of that disaffection, unless one considers the exuberance with which the image sends up the conventions at which its maker chafed. “The only expression allowable in great portraiture is the expression of character and moral quality, not of anything…