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

Look Away: A True Story of Murders, Bombings, and a Far-Right Campaign to Rid Germany of Immigrants by Jacob Kushner. Grand Central, 315 pp., $30.00 On September 1—the eighty-fifth anniversary of the start of World War II—Germans went to the polls in two states in the former East Germany, Thuringia and Saxony, to elect members of the state parliaments. Local elections are often regarded as a bellwether of political trends across Germany, and many greeted the results with something close to panic. For the first time since the war, a far-right party, the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD), came out a winner, obtaining a plurality of nearly 33 percent in Thuringia. (The AfD finished second in Saxony, behind the Christian Democratic Union, the party of former chancellor Angela Merkel; three weeks…

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the imaginary Maurilia, whose inhabitants invite visitors “to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be.” In return the visitors “must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one.” The “lost grace” of Maurilia approximates Beirut’s, which likewise “can be appreciated only… in the old postcards.” It is with nostalgic regret that from time to time I examine postcards in the decaying souvenir shops of Beirut’s once-fashionable Hamra district. They depict, in sepia and colortint, Ottoman mansions, lush gardens, venerable covered souks, a seafront promenade, ancient mosques, churches and synagogues, Roman columns amid metropolitan chaos, and a magnificent central plaza originally named the Place des Canons. After World War I, it was renamed the Place des Martyrs to…

Henry Hobson Richardson: Drawings from the Collection of Houghton Library, Harvard University by Jay Wickersham, Chris Milford, and Hope Mayo. Monacelli, 331 pp., $84.95 Rare are the architects whose works permanently alter our perceptions of how structures should look and function. Rarer still are the master builders who both change the way we see things and also attract a school of followers who carry their ideas well into the future. Such transformative figures are easy enough to identify in twentieth-century architecture—Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe immediately come to mind. Although it is harder to find their equivalents among the scrum of nineteenth-century architects before historical eclecticism gave way to the full emergence of modernism, one conspicuous exception is H. H. Richardson, whom Lewis Mumford with good reason…

The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. Catapult, 162 pp., $24.00 Not long ago, a friend was visiting from out of town. On her last evening in New York, we still had catching up to do, so we met early for dinner to cram in every update we could. We kept talking as we headed to the subway, and didn’t stop until we were forced to by the noise of the rattling train, whose screeching brakes defeated us. I smiled and shrugged at her, knowing that our next sentences would have to wait until we got off—that there would be a gap in our conversation and that whatever we were about to say would probably be forgotten forever. And while we were silent, I noticed a group of three young…

Making No Compromise: Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, and the Little Review by Holly A. Baggett. Northern Illinois University Press, 296 pp., $36.95 Running a small literary magazine is a tough job. It’s hard to make the numbers add up, and as much as a beleaguered editor may dream, offers of funding from generous millionaires are rare. So when in 1917 Ezra Pound wrote to Margaret Anderson, the founding editor of The Little Review, with a proposal that he join the masthead and bring a financial backer along with him, he perhaps knew the odds were on his side. Pound was straightforward: he was looking for an “official organ,” he told Anderson. A place where I and T. S. Eliot can appear once a month (or once an issue) and where…

Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De Leon. Viking, 367 pp., $32.00 In 2018 I paid smugglers to sneak me across the border between Guatemala and Mexico. I was researching my first book and following in the footsteps of an impoverished Salvadoran man who, along with his five-year-old daughter, was fleeing to the United States to ask for asylum after receiving death threats from two different gangs. I’d heard for years from people in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico about how human smuggling worked, how it was changing, how it differed from border to border. But none of that settled my nerves. Before hiring anyone, I checked with some locals I’d been put in touch with in the remote Peten region…

Is Art History? by Svetlana Alpers. Hunters Point, 359 pp., $40.00 The peasants in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Wedding Dance refuse to behave. Decked out in jaunty colors and upbeat codpieces, they lift their doughy limbs and clod-shaped shoes in exuberant party mode. Painted in 1566, the year of the Calvinist iconoclastic frenzy known as the Beeldenstorm, the picture was long read by art historians as a homily on lower-class dissipation. The problem, Svetlana Alpers observed more than fifty years ago, is that none of Bruegel’s hundred or so revelers actually look very debauched. In the foreground they dance hand to hand, not cheek to cheek, in the middle ground they stand around chatting, and while distant fields allow for a bit of snogging, nobody is vomiting or fighting…

Mickalene Thomas: All About Love an exhibition at the Broad, Los Angeles, May 25–September 29, 2024; the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, October 20, 2024–January 12, 2025; Hayward Gallery, London, February 11–May 5, 2025; and Les Abattoirs, Musee–Frac Occitanie Toulouse, June 13–November 9, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by the Hayward Gallery. DAP/Hayward Publishing, 237 pp., $60.00 When I entered the first-floor galleries of the Broad in Los Angeles in June, I found that I’d been transported to a residential street in Camden, New Jersey, where the open door of a yellow clapboard townhouse beckoned. Crossing the threshold, I arrived in a living room—a pair of living rooms, actually, presented side by side. The first was all 1970s: moody lighting illuminated a cozy wood-paneled room lush with house plants and furnishings…

Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud by Stephen Greenblatt and Adam Phillips. Yale University Press, 218 pp., $28.00 Shakespeare in Bloomsbury by Marjorie Garber. Yale University Press, 392 pp., $35.00 Early in Second Chances, his collaboration with the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips, Stephen Greenblatt gives a frankly personal account of the way his life has been divided: teaching and living in California, then at Harvard; a change from an academic writing style to one more tuned to a general audience; two marriages; and two versions of his name, Steve in his old life and Stephen in his present one. (There was a third version, Stevie, when he was a child.) This introduces his study of the way characters in Shakespeare are presented with second chances in life, and what happens…

Choose Love a film written by Josann McGibbon and directed by Stuart McDonald Her Story a video game written and directed by Sam Barlow. Sam Barlow, $9.99 Telling Lies a video game written and directed by Sam Barlow and cowritten by Amelia Gray. Annapurna Interactive, $19.99 Immortality a video game written and directed by Sam Barlow and cowritten by Barry Gifford, Amelia Gray, and Allan Scott. Half Mermaid Productions, $19.99 Choose Love, Netflix’s recent “interactive rom-com,” is a special kind of terrible—the kind that sticks, that spreads darkly in the mind, demanding answers. Every scene is lit like a mall, every set decorated like a WeWork; the characters are formed by adding a hairdo to a tone of voice—the heroine, a recording engineer and aspiring singer-songwriter named Cami Conway, is…

No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers by Robert Lighthizer. Broadside, 364 pp., $32.00 Chaos Under Heaven: America, China, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century by Josh Rogin. Mariner, 372 pp., $18.99 (paper) Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World by Rana Foroohar. Crown, 373 pp., $30.00; $18.99 (paper) When Donald Trump became president in 2017, he made a radical break with the free trade ideology that had defined US foreign economic policy since the end of World War II. At the core of this shift was a particular hostility to China, chiming with Trump’s general nativism. His sharpest instrument was a set of tariffs that eventually rose to 25 percent on most Chinese imports. President Biden, to the dismay of…

“Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” wonders Daniel Deronda, watching Gwendolen Harleth at the roulette table. The face of Iris Murdoch, as it appears on the books that have shaped her afterlife, inspires the same question. Here she is with her square jaw, pug nose, and Joan of Arc haircut on the cover of Peter Conradi’s hagiography, Iris Murdoch: A Life (2001), looking sidelong at the reader with her elsewhere eyes; here she is again, reticent and remote on the first two volumes of John Bayley’s Iris Trilogy, Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (1998) and Iris and the Friends (1999); and again, with the reserve of a postulant nun, on the front of A.N. Wilson’s Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her (2003). Murdoch photographs are less a likeness than…

Andrew O’Hagan It is a sad feature of the ego that it will always seek pleasure in the wrong places. Now and again, voters will crave the approval and the leniency of the thing which despises them, and that is how a felonious bigot gets to be president. To millions of decent people who might judge better when it comes to their children, Trump’s menace is not a bar to his attraction but is rather a part of it, and so, for reasons too deep for tears, his manifold hatreds have proved more inviting than repugnant to a proportion of the electorate. It is an aspect of Trump’s cruel magic that he so readily invites the communion of people who find they can express in company what they might otherwise…

Fear Factories: Arguments About Innocent Creatures and Merciless People by Matthew Scully. Arezzo, 302 pp., $18.99 (paper) Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat. Yale University Press, 312 pp., $26.95 (paper) Truth and Transparency: Undercover Investigations in the Twenty-First Century by Alan K. Chen and Justin Marceau. Cambridge University Press, 277 pp., $105.00; $34.99 (paper) Americans love inexpensive meat. Many think it would be a terrible fate to be deprived of cheap diner bacon and drive-through burgers. For over a century the meat industry has catered to and cultivated this taste, mass-producing beef, pork, and chicken in ways that permit efficiencies of scale—but necessitate inhumane treatment of the animals. These creatures are warehoused like objects and herded along fear-ridden assembly lines to certain death.…

The historian Rashid Khalidi has, for many years, been a preeminent Arab-American intellectual and among the most vocal critics of America’s involvement in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In the aftermath of the armed incursion by Hamas and other militant groups on Israeli territory on October 7 last year, and of the ongoing Israeli military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon that followed, Khalidi and his work have only increased in relevance. His book The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020), which frames the history of Palestinian dispossession as a settler-colonial project dependent on elite support in the West, has been a fixture on the New York Times bestseller list for much of the past year. Khalidi was born in New York City, where his Palestinian father was a member…

Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy by Alex Mar. Penguin Press, 368 pp., $28.00 When you find yourself living in a cell for more than twenty-three years because you killed a man, and you recently filed a clemency petition looking for mercy, it’s challenging to read a book about a battle between the two opposing ideals that consume you: punishment and forgiveness. But this tension is at the center of Alex Mar’s Seventy Times Seven: A True Story of Murder and Mercy, which tells the grim saga of the murder, in 1985, of an elderly midwestern Bible teacher named Ruth Pelke by a fifteen-year-old named Paula Cooper, who was subsequently sentenced to death. Bill Pelke, Ruth’s grandson, eventually forgave Paula and made fighting the death penalty…

Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past by Omer Bartov. Yale University Press, 376 pp., $30.00 Who could find Buczacz—also written Butschatsch, or Buchach in transliteration from Cyrillic—on a map?1 The nondescript town in what is today western Ukraine has never boasted more than 16,000 inhabitants. Omer Bartov in Tales from the Borderlands writes of its “hideous mishmash of structures piled together in a beautiful valley.” Worse than hideous have been the annals of Buczacz in the comparatively recent past. Bartov has devoted a quarter-century of research to the place and written a pair of books about its history, which present a pair of interlocking themes, different facets of the same developments. After Anatomy of a Genocide, which concentrated on actual events, Tales from the Borderlands presents…