Home//The New York Review of Books/August 16, 2018/In This Issue
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018CONTRIBUTORSCHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. He is the author of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival. IAN BOSTRIDGE is an opera singer and a song recitalist. He is the author of Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession and Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650–1750. JASON DEPARLE is a reporter for The New York Times. His book on global immigration will be published next year. ARIEL DORFMAN, an emeritus professor of literature at Duke University, is the author of numerous books, including the play Death and the Maiden, the book of essays Homeland Security Ate My Speech, and the novel Darwin’s Ghosts. He served as a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende’s Chief of Staff in 1973. DEBORAH EISENBERG’s…3 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Hail to the ChiefSoon, according to a June report in The Washington Post, the moment of truth will arrive. Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the president, his administration, and his campaign, will deliver his verdict on whether Donald Trump obstructed justice. On the larger and more complicated question of his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, Mueller may take longer to issue a second report. But it is widely expected in Washington—which has been wrong about such matters before—that a first report, on obstruction, will drop before Labor Day. Assuming it happens, it will follow shortly after Mueller’s July 13 indictment of twelve Russian military intelligence officers. Those indictments have to do with the larger collusion story, and they suggest that more indictments might well be on the way. Even as Trump gave…19 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Jesus Rex PoloniaeArriving in Warsaw, I am told that Jesus Christ was recently enthroned as king of Poland. On state television, the country’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, declares: “Vox populi, vox dei!” Polish populism in a Latin nutshell. The voice of the people is the voice of God, and he, the leader who interprets the will of the people, must therefore also be doing the will of God.The next day, I take a train to the northeastern city of Białystok, at the heart of a region that returns strong majorities for Kaczyński’s nationalist populist Law and Justice party (PiS). As we rattle through sunlit forests, a chatty lady explains that she boarded the train in Kraków very early this morning, having flown in from Lourdes, where she and her husband run…19 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Trump’s Chaver in JerusalemBibi:The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer.Basic Books, 423 pp., $32.00Perhaps it’s now impossible to read any political biography without thinking of Donald Trump. The forty-fifth president of the United States looms so large in the global imagination that the impulse to measure all other politicians against him has become almost involuntary. But in the case of Benjamin Netanyahu, the grounds for comparison are stronger than most.Anshel Pfeffer, a prolific correspondent for both Ha’aretz and The Economist, has written a detailed, revealing, and shrewd biography of Netanyahu that is packed with fascinating insights, yet the word many readers might find themselves mentally scribbling in the margins repeatedly is “Trump.” Pfeffer describes a man raised in elite institutions but nevertheless consumed by hatred of an elite from…18 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Jesus Rex PoloniaeArriving in Warsaw, I am told that Jesus Christ was recently enthroned as king of Poland. On state television, the country’s de facto leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, declares: “Vox populi, vox dei!” Polish populism in a Latin nutshell. The voice of the people is the voice of God, and he, the leader who interprets the will of the people, must therefore also be doing the will of God. The next day, I take a train to the northeastern city of Białystok, at the heart of a region that returns strong majorities for Kaczyński’s nationalist populist Law and Justice party (PiS). As we rattle through sunlit forests, a chatty lady explains that she boarded the train in Kraków very early this morning, having flown in from Lourdes, where she and her husband…19 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Coffins and JukeboxesAmerican Witness:The Art and Life of Robert Frank by R. J. Smith.Da Capo, 327 pp., $35.00Robert Frank: Film Works edited by Laura Israel.Steidl, one book, two booklets, and eight DVDs, $175.00The Lines of My Hand by Robert Frank.Steidl, 102 pp., $35.00 (paper)“If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here,” James Agee remarked at the start of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his landmark collaborative study, with the photographer Walker Evans, of three tenant families in Depression-era Alabama. “It would be photographs,” Agee insisted; “the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement.” Agee couldn’t relinquish words so easily. When his original plan for a…15 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Killing by HungerRed Famine:Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum.Doubleday, 461 pp., $35.00On December 14, 1932, Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, the former as head of the Communist Party, the latter as premier of the Soviet government, signed a decree titled “On the Procurement of Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Region.” The country was in the midst of a food crisis that had already caused widespread hunger, but the decree was not concerned with the famine. Its purpose was to mobilize party cadres to continue extracting grain from the countryside so that, among other things, it could be sold abroad to pay for Soviet industrialization. Procurement quotas were not being fulfilled, and the collectivization of agriculture was in trouble, as were the reputation of Stalin and his team…16 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018’Scuse Me While I Kiss the SkyHow to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan. Penguin, 465 pp., $28.00 Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin. Vintage, 308 pp., $16.00 (paper) In 1938 Albert Hofmann, a chemist at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, created a series of new compounds from lysergic acid. One of them, later marketed as Hydergine, showed great potential for the treatment of cerebral arteriosclerosis. Another salt, the diethylamide (LSD), he put to one side, but he had “a peculiar presentiment,” as he put it in his memoir LSD: My Problem Child (1980), “that this substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations.” In 1943 he prepared a fresh batch of LSD. In the…17 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Singapore ShamThere are two possibilities: either President Trump was as ignorant after his June 12 meeting with Kim Jong-un about what North Korea has in mind when it pledges “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” as he was in March when he brushed aside warnings from his aides and rushed to accept Kim’s invitation to meet. This would mean that in the intervening three months he learned nothing about the past quarter-century of failed efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear program and genuinely believes he accomplished something in Singapore. Or the president knows that he got nothing. In that case, when he bragged on his way home that “this should have been done years ago” and later tweeted “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he was simply…10 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Coffins and JukeboxesAmerican Witness: The Art and Life of Robert Frank by R. J. Smith. Da Capo, 327 pp., $35.00 Robert Frank: Film Works edited by Laura Israel. Steidl, one book, two booklets, and eight DVDs, $175.00 The Lines of My Hand by Robert Frank. Steidl, 102 pp., $35.00 (paper) “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here,” James Agee remarked at the start of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his landmark collaborative study, with the photographer Walker Evans, of three tenant families in Depression-era Alabama. “It would be photographs,” Agee insisted; “the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and excrement.” Agee couldn’t relinquish words so…15 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018The Queen of RueKudos by Rachel Cusk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 232 pp., $26.00 In introductory studio art classes students are often assigned a negative-space drawing—that is, they are asked to draw everything surrounding a figure, filling up the page, until the blank shape of the figure emerges. This has been Rachel Cusk’s technique in her last trio of novels—a trio referred to appropriately as the Outline trilogy—and it is a little puzzling that more people haven’t thought to write novels in this manner before. Perhaps we go to fiction for the solitary inner life of one character and her actions against the confining tenets and structures of her society (though Cusk’s trilogy manages this as well) rather than for everything surrounding her—in this case, linked and paraphrased soliloquies of secondary, even tertiary,…13 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Killing by HungerRed Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anne Applebaum. Doubleday, 461 pp., $35.00 On December 14, 1932, Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, the former as head of the Communist Party, the latter as premier of the Soviet government, signed a decree titled “On the Procurement of Grain in Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and the Western Region.” The country was in the midst of a food crisis that had already caused widespread hunger, but the decree was not concerned with the famine. Its purpose was to mobilize party cadres to continue extracting grain from the countryside so that, among other things, it could be sold abroad to pay for Soviet industrialization. Procurement quotas were not being fulfilled, and the collectivization of agriculture was in trouble, as were the reputation of Stalin…15 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018The ‘Witch Hunters’The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies by Michael V. Hayden. Penguin, 292 pp., $28.00 A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey. Flatiron, 290 pp., $29.99 Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence by James R. Clapper, with Trey Brown. Viking, 424 pp., $30.00 1. To Donald Trump it seems as though the “Deep State” has arisen from the depths of the dismal swamp of Washington to torment him. He sees a cabal of his political enemies—foremost the men who have led the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency—as a cryptocracy operating under the cover of the constitutionally established government, an immense conspiracy, a dark force seeking to destroy him. The president…16 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018The Universal EyeObsession:Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York City, July 3–October 7, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition by Sabine Rewald and James Dempsey. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 132 pp., $25.00 (distributed by Yale University Press)The Psychology of an Art Writer by Vernon Lee.David Zwirner, 135 pp., $12.95 (paper)The English writer Clive Bell called it “significant form.” Later generations of artists, critics, and historians, rejecting Bell’s elegant coinage, favored “formalism,” a more clinical term for more clinical times. Whatever the nomenclature, a conviction that the power of the visual arts is grounded in lines, shapes, colors, and compositions rather than in representations, symbols, and narratives held sway for more than a hundred years, beginning in the days of Walter Pater…21 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Chile: Now More Than EverA museum dedicated to memory and human rights was on nobody’s agenda when the Chilean people managed, after almost seventeen years of dictatorship, to restore democracy to their country in 1990. More urgent tasks awaited. A military government led by General Augusto Pinochet had ruled Chile since the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in 1973. Throughout its years in power, Pinochet’s government not only engaged in gross violations of human rights—mass executions, torture, exile, imprisonment without trial, raids on shantytowns where the men were rounded up and stripped naked in the rain while the women and children watched—but also systematically suppressed evidence of its crimes. This was done so effectively that, by 1990, over 40 percent of the population still fervently supported the outgoing regime and believed that…16 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018After the Gold RushDawson City: Frozen Time a documentary film written and directed by Bill Morrison It’s estimated that all copies of about 75 percent of silent films have perished, taking with them heaven knows how much memory of an era. In 1978 a significant portion of that memory was recovered by chance when a Pentecostal minister with a backhoe unearthed the last known remnants of 372 silent films from the 1910s and 1920s, as he was excavating a lot behind Diamond Tooth Gertie’s, a gambling hall in the Yukon’s Dawson City. Just how those films came to turn up there is the question that initiates Bill Morrison’s astounding Dawson City: Frozen Time. Dawson City: Frozen Time is nominally a documentary—it is a documentary—but describing it as a doc umentary is something like…11 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018CONTRIBUTORSCHRISTOPHER BENFEY is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke. He is the author of Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival.IAN BOSTRIDGE is an opera singer and a song recitalist. He is the author of Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession and Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650–1750.JASON DEPARLE is a reporter for The New York Times. His book on global immigration will be published next year.ARIEL DORFMAN, an emeritus professor of literature at Duke University, is the author of numerous books, including the play Death and the Maiden, the book of essays Homeland Security Ate My Speech, and the novel Darwin’s Ghosts. He served as a cultural adviser to President Salvador Allende’s Chief of Staff in 1973.DEBORAH EISENBERG’s fifth collection of short…3 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Family SecretsMy baby’s headstone stands taller than everyone else’s. I mean this literally—it is a great, solid slab of Hornton stone that dwarfs the surrounding memorials in the graveyard in an almost embarrassing way, given his tiny dates: June 19th–20th, 1996. There is a practical reason for this mismatch. When my partner and I bought the plot, we learned that each eight-by-two-and-a-half-foot patch of earth could accommodate two and a half people. Better leave room to write in ourselves, we thought. Why waste the space? And I was rather comforted by the notion that I knew where I was headed in the end. But my partner and I are no longer together, and now when I think of the headstone I imagine my parents’ names inscribed below my son’s, and their…21 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Family SecretsMy baby’s headstone stands taller than everyone else’s. I mean this literally—it is a great, solid slab of Hornton stone that dwarfs the surrounding memorials in the graveyard in an almost embarrassing way, given his tiny dates: June 19th–20th, 1996. There is a practical reason for this mismatch. When my partner and I bought the plot, we learned that each eight-by-two-and-a-half-foot patch of earth could accommodate two and a half people. Better leave room to write in ourselves, we thought. Why waste the space? And I was rather comforted by the notion that I knew where I was headed in the end. But my partner and I are no longer together, and now when I think of the headstone I imagine my parents’ names inscribed below my son’s, and their…21 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Japan DeconstructedThe Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature by John Whittier Treat.University of Chicago Press, 401 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper)Donald Keene’s magnum opus, fifteen years in the writing, was A History of Japanese Literature in four immense volumes, an account of the entire national literature from the eighth-century creation chronicles to Mishima Yukio in the 1960s. Anyone who has spent his professional life sweating and cursing over Japanese texts is awestruck by the quantity of Japanese writing Keene managed to absorb—he was a Herculean reader. Detractors complain that he was more descriptive than critical, but that is a cavil designed to reduce him to life size.John Treat, in his introduction to The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature, derogates Keene for precisely what others say his work lacks: his…17 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Crying Out LoudSinging in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London Between the World Wars by Laura Tunbridge. University of Chicago Press, 239 pp., $55.00 The late-eighteenth-century cult of sensibility unleashed a torrent of weeping all over Europe. Chatterton handkerchiefs, printed in red or blue, flooded the market, depicting the distressed teenage poet in his garret; the suicide in 1770 of this literary prodigy and forger was later encoded into Romantic myth by Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, published four years after Thomas Chatterton’s death and a smash hit, pushed crying to its erotic limit. Reading Klopstock together, Werther and his beloved but off-limits Charlotte touch (barely) and weep. “By releasing his tears without constraint,” Roland Barthes wrote, Werther “follows the order of the…16 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Loving AssassinsThe Tyrant-Slayers of Ancient Athens: A Tale of Two Statues by Vincent Azoulay, translated from the French by Janet Lloyd, with a foreword by Paul Cartledge. Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $35.00 The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece by Robin Osborne. Princeton University Press, 285 pp., $49.95 In 514 BC the city of Athens, then under the control of the tyrant Hippias, witnessed a daring assassination, the first known political murder in European history. A pair of male lovers, the older named Aristogiton and the younger Harmodius, plotted to kill Hippias at the Panathenaic procession, a public ritual instituted by Peisistratus, Hippias’s father and the city’s previous ruler. But when Harmodius and Aristogiton saw their target in conversation with someone who knew about their…14 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Singapore ShamThere are two possibilities: either President Trump was as ignorant after his June 12 meeting with Kim Jong-un about what North Korea has in mind when it pledges “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” as he was in March when he brushed aside warnings from his aides and rushed to accept Kim’s invitation to meet. This would mean that in the intervening three months he learned nothing about the past quarter-century of failed efforts to stop North Korea’s nuclear program and genuinely believes he accomplished something in Singapore.Or the president knows that he got nothing. In that case, when he bragged on his way home that “this should have been done years ago” and later tweeted “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea,” he was simply being…11 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018California BurningWildfire: On the Front Lines with Station 8 by Heather Hansen. Mountaineers Books, 302 pp., $24.95 Firestorm: How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future by Edward Struzik. Island Press, 257 pp., $30.00 Burning Planet: The Story of Fire Through Time by Andrew C. Scott. Oxford University Press, 231 pp., $27.95 On the northwestern edge of Los Angeles, where I grew up, the wildfires came in late summer. We lived in a new subdivision, and behind our house were the hills, golden and parched. We would hose down the wood-shingled roof as fire crews bivouacked in our street. Our neighborhood never burned, but others did. In the Bel Air fire of 1961, nearly five hundred homes burned, including those of Burt Lancaster and Zsa Zsa Gabor. We were all living in the…18 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Trump’s Chaver in JerusalemBibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshel Pfeffer. Basic Books, 423 pp., $32.00 Perhaps it’s now impossible to read any political biography without thinking of Donald Trump. The forty-fifth president of the United States looms so large in the global imagination that the impulse to measure all other politicians against him has become almost involuntary. But in the case of Benjamin Netanyahu, the grounds for comparison are stronger than most. Anshel Pfeffer, a prolific correspondent for both Ha’aretz and The Economist, has written a detailed, revealing, and shrewd biography of Netanyahu that is packed with fascinating insights, yet the word many readers might find themselves mentally scribbling in the margins repeatedly is “Trump.” Pfeffer describes a man raised in elite institutions but nevertheless consumed by hatred…17 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018The ‘Witch Hunters’The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies by Michael V. Hayden.Penguin, 292 pp., $28.00A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership by James Comey.Flatiron, 290 pp., $29.99Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence by James R. Clapper, with Trey Brown.Viking, 424 pp., $30.001. To Donald Trump it seems as though the “Deep State” has arisen from the depths of the dismal swamp of Washington to torment him. He sees a cabal of his political enemies—foremost the men who have led the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency—as a cryptocracy operating under the cover of the constitutionally established government, an immense conspiracy, a dark force seeking to destroy him. The president awakens to tweet thunderbolts against it…17 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Comic NoirThe Château by Paul Goldberg. Picador, 376 pp., $26.00The Yid by Paul Goldberg. Picador, 307 pp., $16.00 (paper)Paul Goldberg’s first novel, The Yid (2016), was an antic masterpiece: a screwball comedy about the assassination of Josef Stalin and a romp through the Soviet anti-Semitic purges of 1953. The Doctors’ Plot had already been announced by newspapers, show trials had begun, and rumors of a pogrom to finish Hitler’s work were everywhere. Black Marias, the paddy wagons of the secret police, roamed the snowy streets:At night, Moscow is the czardom of black cats and Black Marias. The former dart between snowbanks in search of mice and companionship. The latter emerge from the improbably tall, castle-like gates of Lubyanka, to return laden with enemies of the people.Into this deadly Moscow winter Goldberg…14 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Musical LinesTerry Winters: Facts and Fictions an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City, April 6–August 12, 2018.Catalog of the exhibition with contributions by Claire Gilman, Peter Cole, and Rachel Kushner. The Drawing Center, 153 pp., $20.00 (paper)There’s a Nichols and May routine from the early 1960s about a high-strung worrier of a mother who’s going to the hospital for some tests. Her grown son asks her over the phone what the doctors intend to do. She tells him, “Well, they’ll X-ray my nerves.”That bit came to mind walking through the exhibition “Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions” at the Drawing Center. In drawing, one feels the nervous system at work. It is where the connections between the hand and the brain, between thought and action, and between action and reaction…12 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018After the Gold RushDawson City: Frozen Time a documentary film written and directed by Bill MorrisonIt’s estimated that all copies of about 75 percent of silent films have perished, taking with them heaven knows how much memory of an era. In 1978 a significant portion of that memory was recovered by chance when a Pentecostal minister with a backhoe unearthed the last known remnants of 372 silent films from the 1910s and 1920s, as he was excavating a lot behind Diamond Tooth Gertie’s, a gambling hall in the Yukon’s Dawson City. Just how those films came to turn up there is the question that initiates Bill Morrison’s astounding Dawson City: Frozen Time.Dawson City: Frozen Time is nominally a documentary—it is a documentary—but describing it as a doc umentary is something like describing Ulysses…11 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Ma’am’s Life and LovesNinety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 423 pp., $28.00When HRH The Princess Margaret was born in 1930, she was fourth in line to the British throne. In 1936, she moved up two notches after Edward VIII, her fool of an uncle, bolted and was succeeded by her father, making her big sister the heir and she herself the spare. She outranked her uncles, aunts, cousins, and any playmate, except for that big sister. All but a handful of adults dropped either a nod or a curtsy upon her entrances and exits. King George VI said that while Princess Elizabeth was his pride, Princess Margaret was his joy. No one would ever love her performances as much as her father, the sovereign. Her hash was settled.The…12 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Comic NoirThe Château by Paul Goldberg. Picador, 376 pp., $26.00 The Yid by Paul Goldberg. Picador, 307 pp., $16.00 (paper) Paul Goldberg’s first novel, The Yid (2016), was an antic masterpiece: a screwball comedy about the assassination of Josef Stalin and a romp through the Soviet anti-Semitic purges of 1953. The Doctors’ Plot had already been announced by newspapers, show trials had begun, and rumors of a pogrom to finish Hitler’s work were everywhere. Black Marias, the paddy wagons of the secret police, roamed the snowy streets: At night, Moscow is the czardom of black cats and Black Marias. The former dart between snowbanks in search of mice and companionship. The latter emerge from the improbably tall, castle-like gates of Lubyanka, to return laden with enemies of the people. Into this…13 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Musical LinesTerry Winters: Facts and Fictions an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City, April 6–August 12, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition with contributions by Claire Gilman, Peter Cole, and Rachel Kushner. The Drawing Center, 153 pp., $20.00 (paper) There’s a Nichols and May routine from the early 1960s about a high-strung worrier of a mother who’s going to the hospital for some tests. Her grown son asks her over the phone what the doctors intend to do. She tells him, “Well, they’ll X-ray my nerves.” That bit came to mind walking through the exhibition “Terry Winters: Facts and Fictions” at the Drawing Center. In drawing, one feels the nervous system at work. It is where the connections between the hand and the brain, between thought and action, and between…11 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVALSEPTEMBER 10-17, 2018 2018 FESTIVAL DAY AUTHORS AND PARTICIPANTS Melissa Albert Alexander Chee Dhonielle Clayton Jennifer Egan Eve L. Ewing Nuruddin Farah Liana Finck Linda Greenhouse Pete Hamill Terrance Hayes A.M. Homes Michael Imperioli Justina Ireland N.K. Jemisin Maureen Johnson Tayari Jones Donika Kelly Nicole Krauss Hari Kunzru Michael Kupperman Laura Lippman Malinda Lo Terry McMillan Ibtihaj Muhammad Neel Mukherjee Audrey Niffenegger Gregory Pardlo Ed Piskor April Ryan David Small Amber Tamblyn Dubravka Ugresic Luis Alberto Urrea Jen Wang Renee Watson Simon Winchester Jenny Xie Dave Zirin and many others! BOOKEND EVENTS SEPTEMBER 10-17 CITYWIDE A week-long literary adventure through all five Boroughs! BKBF curated Bookend events take place throughout the city -- literary trivia, booksto-movies screenings, performances, discussion and more in unique locations that include clubs, ferries, cemeteries, bookstores…1 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Moon Over KoreaMoon Jae-in eui Unmyeong [The Destiny of Moon Jae-in] by Moon Jae-in. Seoul: Bookpal, 488 pp., W 15,000 In Singapore on June 12, as Donald Trump vigorously shook hands with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the man behind this improbable meeting leaned forward in his chair and smiled. South Korean president Moon Jae-in, just thirteen months into his five-year term, had helped arrange the first-ever summit between an American president and the leader of North Korea. Yet Moon was careful to keep a respectful distance. He watched on a television monitor in the Blue House, the presidential compound in Seoul. It was, however symbolic, a goal he had pursued over two decades in politics, and it brought him a step closer to healing familial and national wounds. Moon is a child…15 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018The Universal EyeObsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York City, July 3–October 7, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition by Sabine Rewald and James Dempsey. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 132 pp., $25.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) The Psychology of an Art Writer by Vernon Lee. David Zwirner, 135 pp., $12.95 (paper) The English writer Clive Bell called it “significant form.” Later generations of artists, critics, and historians, rejecting Bell’s elegant coinage, favored “formalism,” a more clinical term for more clinical times. Whatever the nomenclature, a conviction that the power of the visual arts is grounded in lines, shapes, colors, and compositions rather than in representations, symbols, and narratives held sway for more than a hundred years, beginning in the…21 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Hail to the ChiefSoon, according to a June report in The Washington Post, the moment of truth will arrive. Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the president, his administration, and his campaign, will deliver his verdict on whether Donald Trump obstructed justice.On the larger and more complicated question of his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, Mueller may take longer to issue a second report. But it is widely expected in Washington—which has been wrong about such matters before—that a first report, on obstruction, will drop before Labor Day. Assuming it happens, it will follow shortly after Mueller’s July 13 indictment of twelve Russian military intelligence officers. Those indictments have to do with the larger collusion story, and they suggest that more indictments might well be on the way. Even as Trump gave Putin…19 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Crying Out LoudSinging in the Age of Anxiety:Lieder Performances in New York and London Between the World Wars by Laura Tunbridge.University of Chicago Press, 239 pp., $55.00The late-eighteenth-century cult of sensibility unleashed a torrent of weeping all over Europe. Chatterton handkerchiefs, printed in red or blue, flooded the market, depicting the distressed teenage poet in his garret; the suicide in 1770 of this literary prodigy and forger was later encoded into Romantic myth by Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley. Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, published four years after Thomas Chatterton’s death and a smash hit, pushed crying to its erotic limit. Reading Klopstock together, Werther and his beloved but off-limits Charlotte touch (barely) and weep. “By releasing his tears without constraint,” Roland Barthes wrote, Werther “follows the order of the amorous body, which…17 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Loving AssassinsThe Tyrant-Slayers of Ancient Athens: A Tale of Two Statues by Vincent Azoulay, translated from the French by Janet Lloyd, with a foreword by Paul Cartledge.Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $35.00The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece by Robin Osborne.Princeton University Press, 285 pp., $49.95In 514 BC the city of Athens, then under the control of the tyrant Hippias, witnessed a daring assassination, the first known political murder in European history. A pair of male lovers, the older named Aristogiton and the younger Harmodius, plotted to kill Hippias at the Panathenaic procession, a public ritual instituted by Peisistratus, Hippias’s father and the city’s previous ruler. But when Harmodius and Aristogiton saw their target in conversation with someone who knew about their plot, they assumed they…15 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018California BurningWildfire:On the Front Lines with Station 8 by Heather Hansen.Mountaineers Books, 302 pp., $24.95Firestorm:How Wildfire Will Shape Our Future by Edward Struzik.Island Press, 257 pp., $30.00Burning Planet:The Story of Fire Through Time by Andrew C. Scott.Oxford University Press, 231 pp., $27.95On the northwestern edge of Los Angeles, where I grew up, the wildfires came in late summer. We lived in a new subdivision, and behind our house were the hills, golden and parched. We would hose down the wood-shingled roof as fire crews bivouacked in our street. Our neighborhood never burned, but others did. In the Bel Air fire of 1961, nearly five hundred homes burned, including those of Burt Lancaster and Zsa Zsa Gabor. We were all living in the “wildland-urban interface,” as it is now called. More subdivisions…18 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018’Scuse Me While I Kiss the SkyHow to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan.Penguin, 465 pp., $28.00Trip:Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change by Tao Lin.Vintage, 308 pp., $16.00 (paper)In 1938 Albert Hofmann, a chemist at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, created a series of new compounds from lysergic acid. One of them, later marketed as Hydergine, showed great potential for the treatment of cerebral arteriosclerosis. Another salt, the diethylamide (LSD), he put to one side, but he had “a peculiar presentiment,” as he put it in his memoir LSD: My Problem Child (1980), “that this substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations.”In 1943 he prepared a fresh batch of LSD. In the final process of its crystallization, he…18 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018GHOST SHIPThose blessed momentsthat pretendThey’ll stay with us forever—Soon gone,without a fare-thee-well.What’s the rush?I heard myself say.You have the rightto remain silent,The night told meas I sat in bedHatching planson how to hold the nextCaptive in my head.I recall a window thrown openone summer dayOn a grand view of the bayand a cloud in all that blueAs pale as the horseDeath likes to ride.Always happy to shoot the breeze,that lone cloudWas telling meas it drifted out to sea,Toward someship on the horizon,That had alreadyset sailAnd was about to vanishout of sight,On the way to some portand countryWithout name.A ghost ship,Most surely,but mine all the same.…1 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Japan DeconstructedThe Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature by John Whittier Treat. University of Chicago Press, 401 pp., $105.00; $35.00 (paper) Donald Keene’s magnum opus, fifteen years in the writing, was A History of Japanese Literature in four immense volumes, an account of the entire national literature from the eighth-century creation chronicles to Mishima Yukio in the 1960s. Anyone who has spent his professional life sweating and cursing over Japanese texts is awestruck by the quantity of Japanese writing Keene managed to absorb—he was a Herculean reader. Detractors complain that he was more descriptive than critical, but that is a cavil designed to reduce him to life size. John Treat, in his introduction to The Rise and Fall of Modern Japanese Literature, derogates Keene for precisely what others say his…17 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018The Queen of RueKudos by Rachel Cusk.Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 232 pp., $26.00In introductory studio art classes students are often assigned a negative-space drawing—that is, they are asked to draw everything surrounding a figure, filling up the page, until the blank shape of the figure emerges. This has been Rachel Cusk’s technique in her last trio of novels—a trio referred to appropriately as the Outline trilogy—and it is a little puzzling that more people haven’t thought to write novels in this manner before. Perhaps we go to fiction for the solitary inner life of one character and her actions against the confining tenets and structures of her society (though Cusk’s trilogy manages this as well) rather than for everything surrounding her—in this case, linked and paraphrased soliloquies of secondary, even tertiary, characters upstaging…14 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Miracle in BolognaIl Cinema Ritrovato a film festival in Bologna, Italy, June 23–July 1, 2018To roam at will among films lost, films never seen, films quite likely not even known by you to exist, day after day among spectators all animated by a common attentiveness and palpable curiosity, as if nothing existed outside the parallel world of cinema: for some of us that might be the most irresistible escape of all, a plunge not into oblivion but into all the corridors of memory, lit by a thousand cameras. In early summer of each year Bologna becomes the site of such a collective immersion. On July 1, Il Cinema Ritrovato wrapped up its thirty-second edizione, in which during nine days more than five hundred films (of lengths ranging from a minute to many…10 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018GHOST SHIPThose blessed momentsthat pretendThey’ll stay with us forever—Soon gone,without a fare-thee-well.What’s the rush?I heard myself say. You have the rightto remain silent,The night told meas I sat in bedHatching planson how to hold the nextCaptive in my head. I recall a window thrown openone summer dayOn a grand view of the bayand a cloud in all that blueAs pale as the horseDeath likes to ride. Always happy to shoot the breeze,that lone cloudWas telling meas it drifted out to sea,Toward someship on the horizon, That had alreadyset sailAnd was about to vanishout of sight,On the way to some portand countryWithout name. A ghost ship,Most surely,but mine all the same.…1 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Chile: Now More Than EverA museum dedicated to memory and human rights was on nobody’s agenda when the Chilean people managed, after almost seventeen years of dictatorship, to restore democracy to their country in 1990. More urgent tasks awaited. A military government led by General Augusto Pinochet had ruled Chile since the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, was overthrown in 1973. Throughout its years in power, Pinochet’s government not only engaged in gross violations of human rights—mass executions, torture, exile, imprisonment without trial, raids on shantytowns where the men were rounded up and stripped naked in the rain while the women and children watched—but also systematically suppressed evidence of its crimes. This was done so effectively that, by 1990, over 40 percent of the population still fervently supported the outgoing regime and believed that…17 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018The Big MeltBrave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North by Mark C. Serreze.Princeton University Press, 255 pp., $24.95Extreme Conservation: Life at the Edges of the World by Joel Berger.University of Chicago Press, 376 pp., $30.00Since 1980, computer models have been predicting that a rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide will cause the Arctic to warm twice as fast as areas at lower latitudes, putting it at high risk from climate change. But as Mark Serreze explains in Brave New Arctic, until the 2000s many scientists working in the Arctic, including himself, were having a tough time finding conclusive evidence that humans were having an impact on the region’s climate.Serreze is now director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), based at the University of Colorado at…15 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018BROOKLYN BOOK FESTIVALSEPTEMBER 10-17, 20182018 FESTIVAL DAY AUTHORS AND PARTICIPANTSMelissa Albert Alexander Chee Dhonielle Clayton Jennifer Egan Eve L. Ewing Nuruddin Farah Liana Finck Linda Greenhouse Pete Hamill Terrance Hayes A.M. Homes Michael Imperioli Justina Ireland N.K. Jemisin Maureen Johnson Tayari Jones Donika Kelly Nicole Krauss Hari Kunzru Michael Kupperman Laura Lippman Malinda Lo Terry McMillan Ibtihaj Muhammad Neel Mukherjee Audrey Niffenegger Gregory Pardlo Ed Piskor April Ryan David Small Amber Tamblyn Dubravka Ugresic Luis Alberto Urrea Jen Wang Renee WatsonSimon Winchester Jenny Xie Dave Zirin and many others!BOOKEND EVENTSSEPTEMBER 10-17CITYWIDEA week-long literary adventure through all five Boroughs!BKBF curated Bookend events take place throughout the city -- literary trivia, booksto-movies screenings, performances, discussion and more in unique locations that include clubs, ferries, cemeteries, bookstores and parks.FESTIVAL DAYSATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 16BROOKLYN BOROUGH HALL AND…1 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Miracle in BolognaIl Cinema Ritrovato a film festival in Bologna, Italy, June 23–July 1, 2018 To roam at will among films lost, films never seen, films quite likely not even known by you to exist, day after day among spectators all animated by a common attentiveness and palpable curiosity, as if nothing existed outside the parallel world of cinema: for some of us that might be the most irresistible escape of all, a plunge not into oblivion but into all the corridors of memory, lit by a thousand cameras. In early summer of each year Bologna becomes the site of such a collective immersion. On July 1, Il Cinema Ritrovato wrapped up its thirty-second edizione, in which during nine days more than five hundred films (of lengths ranging from a minute to…10 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Moon Over KoreaMoon Jae-in eui Unmyeong [The Destiny of Moon Jae-in] by Moon Jae-in.Seoul: Bookpal, 488 pp., W 15,000In Singapore on June 12, as Donald Trump vigorously shook hands with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, the man behind this improbable meeting leaned forward in his chair and smiled. South Korean president Moon Jae-in, just thirteen months into his five-year term, had helped arrange the first-ever summit between an American president and the leader of North Korea. Yet Moon was careful to keep a respectful distance. He watched on a television monitor in the Blue House, the presidential compound in Seoul. It was, however symbolic, a goal he had pursued over two decades in politics, and it brought him a step closer to healing familial and national wounds. Moon is a child of the…16 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018LETTERSMORE CAKE?To the Editors:Given David Cole’s long-standing involvement in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it is odd and a little disturbing that he avoids even mentioning core issues of the case in his recent piece, “This Takes the Cake” [NYR, July 19]. Cole never once mentions the issue of compelled speech. As Cole describes it, the case hinged on whether Masterpiece Cakeshop’s proprietor, Jack Phillips, had a right to refuse to sell a product (a cake) to a same-sex couple, and whether Phillips and his defenders could legitimately find a “right to discriminate” in the First Amendment. In Cole’s reading of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “general rule,” the provision of equal access to goods and services plainly required Phillips to sell the wedding cake to the…11 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018The Big MeltBrave New Arctic: The Untold Story of the Melting North by Mark C. Serreze. Princeton University Press, 255 pp., $24.95 Extreme Conservation: Life at the Edges of the World by Joel Berger. University of Chicago Press, 376 pp., $30.00 Since 1980, computer models have been predicting that a rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide will cause the Arctic to warm twice as fast as areas at lower latitudes, putting it at high risk from climate change. But as Mark Serreze explains in Brave New Arctic, until the 2000s many scientists working in the Arctic, including himself, were having a tough time finding conclusive evidence that humans were having an impact on the region’s climate. Serreze is now director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), based at…14 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018Ma’am’s Life and LovesNinety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 423 pp., $28.00 When HRH The Princess Margaret was born in 1930, she was fourth in line to the British throne. In 1936, she moved up two notches after Edward VIII, her fool of an uncle, bolted and was succeeded by her father, making her big sister the heir and she herself the spare. She outranked her uncles, aunts, cousins, and any playmate, except for that big sister. All but a handful of adults dropped either a nod or a curtsy upon her entrances and exits. King George VI said that while Princess Elizabeth was his pride, Princess Margaret was his joy. No one would ever love her performances as much as her father, the sovereign. Her hash…12 min
The New York Review of Books|August 16, 2018LETTERSMORE CAKE? To the Editors: Given David Cole’s long-standing involvement in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, it is odd and a little disturbing that he avoids even mentioning core issues of the case in his recent piece, “This Takes the Cake” [NYR, July 19]. Cole never once mentions the issue of compelled speech. As Cole describes it, the case hinged on whether Masterpiece Cakeshop’s proprietor, Jack Phillips, had a right to refuse to sell a product (a cake) to a same-sex couple, and whether Phillips and his defenders could legitimately find a “right to discriminate” in the First Amendment. In Cole’s reading of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s “general rule,” the provision of equal access to goods and services plainly required Phillips to sell the wedding cake…11 min
