Innholdsfortegnelse for December 5, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by Charles Taylor. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 620 pp., $37.95 When the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor published his first book, The Explanation of Behavior, in 1964, academic psychology was dominated by the radical behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. Today Skinner is in bad odor, remembered as a kind of mad scientist who tortured lab rats with starvation and electric shocks to demonstrate the power of “operant conditioning.” But in his book The Behavior of Organisms (1938), he set out a simple and powerful argument why the best way to study the minds of animals and humans is to carefully observe what they do. Traditionally, Skinner wrote, “the ultimate direction and control” of sentient creatures “have been assigned to entities placed within the…

Broken Archangel: The Tempestuous Lives of Roger Casement by Roland Philipps. London: The Bodley Head, 382 pp., £25.00 The more closely one contemplates the life—or lives—of Sir Roger Casement, the more of a cipher he becomes. The very endeavor to fix his image seems somehow to leach the pigmentation from it, until all that is left is a spectral shimmer. Like T. S. Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat, whenever and wherever one looks for him, Casement is not there. This insubstantiality is all the more marked, and remarkable, for the fact that Casement was one of the most prominent public figures in British and Anglo-Irish life at the turn of the twentieth century, internationally celebrated and more than once decorated for his work in exposing the horrors that indigenous peoples…

THE RETURN OF TRUMP: A SYMPOSIUM Garry Wills on losers, Zephyr Teachout on fear, Bridget Read on con men, Quinn Slobodian on tariffs, Linda Greenhouse on the Court, John Washington on borders and walls, Suzanne Schneider on National Conservatives, Michael Hofmann on words without consequences, Ben Tarnoff on bashing the system, and more PLUS Olivia Paschal: Appalachia After the Flood Jonathan Mingle: Trump Against Climate Science Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller: What Anora Wants Anahid Nersessian: A Sculptor of the Spoken Word Gabriel Winslow-Yost: Coppola’s Folly Andrew Arsan: Lebanon in the Whirlwind Subscribe to our newsletters for the latest reviews, dispatches, and interviews at nybooks.com/newsletters, and read every issue we’ve published since 1963 at nybooks.com/issues.…

whizzed past, we liked the look of it, it liquefieddeath, it was here to stay, it actuallyhad nowhere else to go, was in its last stages now, longed to berevelation, longed to be part ofnature making itswhistling sounds above, itsscreamingbelow. The classrooms exploded. The bits of desks lay aboutin the dust-filled amnesia. Were we supposed towake up, or was it never sleepagain—sleepa mind blown to bitsafter each ordnance hits & the cratersopen …We are so late in this story.Unable to tell our heroes from our tormentors.Unable to be convinced ever again ofanything.Convinced. The word like a year in which nothing happened, a dayblown off the record—the spreean exhausted teacher unveiling yet againthe temporarylesson.You’d think it must be about great love.You’d think it must be aboutpoverty or endgame or the provisional…

The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction by Gísli Pálsson. Princeton University Press, 291 pp., $27.95 The concept of species extinction is now so quotidian that it requires no explanation, but just two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was an entirely alien concept. Back then, the word “extinction” was used almost exclusively in relation to Britain’s landed gentry—a lineage described as having become “extinct” when the family name died out and its associated properties passed into other hands. Some fairly clear-cut instances of species extinction were known by the middle of the nineteenth century (the dodo, for example), but habits of thought rooted in religion, along with a far more limited knowledge of the world…

In July, two months after Alice Munro died, her daughter Andrea Skinner revealed not only that she had been sexually abused by her stepfather for several years starting when she was nine but that when confronted with this truth sixteen years later her mother “chose to stay with, and protect [her] abuser,” Gerald Fremlin. Andrea said that she wanted these facts to “become part of the stories people tell about my mother.” It might also be said that they were part of the stories her mother had given to the world. As with many revelations, all this realigns what we already knew about Munro’s life in a way that makes more sense. It also throws a sharp light on Munro’s later fiction, throughout which elements of Andrea’s experience, and all…

John Banville’s novel The Singularities was published in 2022. Dean Browne’s chapbook Kitchens at Night was published in 2022, and his first book of poems will appear next year. He lives in Cork, Ireland. Anne Enright is Professor of Fiction at University College Dublin. Her eighth novel, The Wren, the Wren, was published last year. Tim Flannery’s books include Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific, Europe: A Natural History, and, with Emma Flannery, Big Meg: The Story of the Largest and Most Mysterious Predator That Ever Lived, which was published this year. Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for The Guardian. His latest book is The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World. Jorie Graham’s most recent poetry collections are [To] The Last [Be]…

I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be.Eight, allergic to dust,asthmatic, stigmaticwith mystery rashes,balanced tiptoe on a stackof peat briquetteswound in butcher’s twine,fingers smutty fromSuttons Premium Polish Coal.In that bungalowshadowed by mountain, thingsclenched past function—blunt tools, used batteries.Hand-me-down grudges.Where do you dispose of them,old keys? One’s blue-greenbrass with smoky thumb stain,chunky, no discernible fitwith anything begun since me.Layabouts could scan cloudsin that pinhole in its head.This memory flukes through it.And I press the edge,the teeth, till it hurts.…