London Review Of Books – October 10, 2024 Preview
Tag Archives: London Review of Books
London Review Of Books – September 26, 2024 Preview
Byzantine Intersectionality: Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages by Roland Betancourt
At the Movies: ‘Only the River Flows’ by Michael Wood
From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I by Susan Doran – Clare Jackson
Kubrick: An Odyssey by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams – David Bromwich
London Review Of Books – August 15, 2024 Preview
Trivialised to Death
Reading Genesis
by Marilynne Robinson.
By James Butler
The first time the man heard God, he uprooted his entire life, though he was very old. Then God appeared to him in person, an event which would embarrass later thinkers. God made the man an impossible promise in the shape of a son. His wife was ninety, and she laughed. When the child arrived, it was hardly unreasonable to think it a miracle. They named the child after the laughter.
Just say it, Henry
The Prefaces
by Henry James, edited by Oliver Herford.
By Colin Burrow
In 1904 Henry James’s agent negotiated with the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a collected edition of his works. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James duly appeared in 1907-9. It presented revised texts of both James’s shorter and longer fiction, with freshly written prefaces to each volume. It didn’t include everything: ‘I want to quietly disown a few things by not thus supremely adopting them,’ as James put it. The ‘disowned’ works included some early gems such as The Europeans. The labour of ‘supremely adopting’ the stuff he still thought worthy was grinding. He worked on the new prefaces, which he described as ‘freely colloquial and even, perhaps, as I may say, confidential’ (though James’s notion of the ‘freely colloquial’ is perhaps not everyone’s) during the years 1905 to 1909. In some respects, the venture was not a success. ‘Vulgarly speaking,’ James said of the New York Edition, ‘it doesn’t sell.’
Different for Girls
By Jean McNicol
A week before the start of the Paris Olympics, Shoko Miyata, the 19-year-old captain of the Japanese women’s gymnastics team, was forced to withdraw from the competition by her national association. She had been reported to the Japan Gymnastics Association for smoking and drinking (on separate occasions, once for each offence). The president of the JGA, Tadashi Fujita, announced that Miyata had been sent home, and bowed deeply.
London Review Of Books – August 1, 2024 Preview
Spanish Fashion in the Age of Velázquez: A Tailor at the Court of Philip IV by Amanda Wunder – Nicola Jennings
The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium by Anthony Kaldellis – Michael Kulikowski
Nato: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance by Sten Rynning
Deterring : A Biography of Nato by Peter AppsNatopolitanism: The Atlantic Alliance since the Cold War edited by Grey Anderson
Everything Is Possible: Anti-fascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism by Joseph Fronczak
On Gaslighting by Kate Abramson
London Review Of Books – July 18, 2024 Preview
The Rise and Fall of Treason in English History by Allen D. Boyer and Mark Nicholls
Stephen Sedley
Poem: ‘Hell’
Rae Armantrout
The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future by Franklin Foer
The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden’s White House by Chris Whipple
The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy after Trump by Alexander Ward
At the William Morris Gallery: On Mingei
Thomas Meaney
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen
The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History by Ned Blackhawk
Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance by Nick Estes
London Review Of Books – June 20, 2024 Preview
Anticipatory Anxiety by William Davies
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
by Jonathan Haidt.
Allen Lane, 385 pp., £25, March, 978 0 241 64766 0
In the 1980s the term ‘anxiety’ was almost eliminated from the lexicon of American psychiatry. The infamous DSM-III (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) took an axe to various legacies of psychoanalysis that had dominated psychiatric thinking in the postwar decades. Among them was a preoccupation with anxiety. Anything and everything could, it seemed, be attributed to anxiety: whether it presented as a specific phobia or a panic attack, a somatic symptom or just a lurking sense of dread, anxiety was at the root. It was this sort of all-purpose explanation, with no apparent scientific rigour or falsifiability, that the authors of DSM-III were trying to root out.
Israel’s Descent by Adam Shatz
When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there.
The State of Israel v. the Jews
by Sylvain Cypel, translated by William Rodarmor.
Other Press, 352 pp., £24, October 2022, 978 1 63542 097 5
The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.
Deux peuples pour un état?: Relire l’histoire du sionisme
by Shlomo Sand.
Seuil, 256 pp., £20, January, 978 2 02 154166 3
Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-78
by Geoffrey Levin.
Yale, 304 pp., £25, February, 978 0 300 26785 3
Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life
by Joshua Leifer.
Dutton, 398 pp., £28.99, August, 978 0 593 18718 0
The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance
by Shaul Magid.
Ayin, 309 pp., £16.99, December 2023, 979 8 9867803 1 3
Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm
edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner.
OR Books, 336 pp., £17.99, Ap
London Review Of Books – June 6, 2024 Preview
Solve, Struggle, Invent
By Rachel Nolan
How Things Fall Apart: What Happened to the Cuban Revolution
by Elizabeth Dore.
The Tribe: Portraits of Cuba
by Carlos Manuel Álvarez, translated by Frank Wynne and Rahul Bery.
In 1968, Fidel Castro invited an American anthropologist called Oscar Lewis to interview Cubans about their lives. Lewis was famous for an oral history project, conducted in a Mexico City slum, which he had turned into a book called The Children of Sánchez (1961). By recounting a poor family’s struggles and hustles, legal and otherwise, Lewis angered the country’s ruling party, which still described itself as ‘revolutionary’. The Mexican Revolution, like the Cuban Revolution after it, wasn’t supposed to have an end date. But after major gains, including redistributing land to landless farmers, it had been ‘interrupted’, as the historian Adolfo Gilly later put it. Lewis exposed the revolution’s unfinished business, and didn’t shy away from discussing the sexual peccadilloes of the poor. The Spanish-language edition of Children of Sánchez was published in 1964, but thanks to a lawsuit claiming the material was ‘obscene and denigrating’, the book wasn’t freely available in Mexico for several years.
Orgasm isn’t my bag
The Freaks Came out to Write: The Definitive History of the ‘Village Voice’, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture
by Tricia Romano.
In the mid-1960s, the Village Vanguard jazz club in Greenwich Village held Monday night speak-outs. At one of them – an evening billed as ‘Art and Politics’ – the Black poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (soon to become Amiri Baraka) held forth, along with the Black saxophonist Archie Shepp and the white painter Larry Rivers. The audience was composed almost entirely of people like me and my friends: white middle-class liberals and radicals, many of whom were veteran civil rights activists. We had trooped into the Vanguard expecting to make common cause with the speakers, but Jones did not look kindly on us. In fact, he quickly told us we weren’t wanted in the civil rights movement, that we were just an interference, only there to make ourselves feel good. Then he pointed his finger and roared: ‘Blood is going to run in the seats of the theatre of revolution, and guess who’s sitting in those seats!’
London Review Of Books – May 9, 2024 Preview
James Meek: Short Cuts
Fara Dabhoiwala: HMS Wager
Sean Jacobs: Festac ’77 Revisited
Francis Gooding: At the Pompidou-Metz
Marion Turner: Medieval Polyglots
Azadeh Moaveni: Women in Wartime
Sheila Fitzpatrick: Gulag Medicine
London Review Of Books – April 4, 2024 Preview
Mary Wellesley – Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Jenni Nuttall
Moshé Machover, James McAuley, Avital Balwit, Brian Vickers, Pat Butcher, Joe Oldaker, Arthur M. Shapiro, Penny Collier, John Potts
Mike Jay – Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep by Kenneth Miller
T.J. Clark – Poem: ‘Clapham in March’
Michael Ledger-Lomas: Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect by John SloanTroubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum by Owen Davies
Michael Hofmann – The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness by Halldór Guðmundsson, translated by Philip Roughton
Brandon Taylor – Is it even good?
London Review Of Books – March 7, 2024 Preview
Death of the Book
By Adam Smyth
Sometimes we ignore a book’s material presence: absorbed, ‘good’ reading is often figured as a forgetting of the material conditions of book, body, room and time, even though these conditions affect how we read. With certain other books it makes no sense to separate text from object.
Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book
by Brian Cummings.
Give your mom a gun
By Geoff Mann
There are seventy million more privately held guns in the US – around four hundred million of them – than there are people. AR-15s comprise about 5 per cent of the total, but it is currently the best-selling rifle in the country.
American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15
by Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson.
Gun Country: Gun Capitalism, Culture and Control in Cold War America
by Andrew C. McKevitt.
Boomers Daily 