• print • June/July/Aug 2012

    Sweet Violence

    WHEN A RETROSPECTIVE as significant as Croatian artist Sanja Iveković’s “Sweet Violence” doesn’t travel at all, a comprehensive catalogue becomes all the more important. Fortunately, this eponymous summary of the show—which New York’s MoMA featured this past winter—delivers the crucial political and cultural background behind Iveković’s work. The lead essay, by the show’s curator, Roxana Marcoci, details Iveković’s native art scene before, during, and after Croatia’s post-Communist transition, providing context for the ideas and stories that inform the past four decades of the artist’s

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    The Brittle Decade: Visualizing Japan in the 1930s

    IN THE TWENTY-TWO YEARS between the day the 1923 Kanto earthquake razed Tokyo and the months in which American bombers demolished it anew, modernity arrived in Japan. Ushered in by the creeping popularity of Western fashions, the rise of mass communication and transit, and the Europeanizing of urban public life, the “brittle years” of the early 1930s marked an uneasy encounter between Japanese traditionalism and Western cosmopolitanism, and nowhere did the attendant anxieties play out more than in the modan garu—Japan’s “modern girl.” The equivalent of the ’20s-era flapper, modan garus dressed

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    Mannequin

    ALTHOUGH SCULPTED FROM PLASTIC instead of marble, mass-produced, and typically equipped with both arms, store-window mannequins share an aesthetic as well as a sociological lineage with the Venus de Milo. Depictions of feminine beauty whose aspect and proportion proffer benchmark ideals have been around a long time—no doubt many Athenian women in 100 BC compared themselves with Alexandros of Antioch’s handiwork, as do contemporary Americans with the shiny simulacra draped in the latest styles. Still, shopwindow dummies are hardly built for the ages; their machined uniformity highlights by

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    The Lyndon Symphonies

    Near the end of this thick volume, the fourth in his celebrated saga of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Robert A. Caro describes the War on Poverty as the most sincere and boldest initiative of a normally cynical and utterly practical politician. It did not matter that LBJ’s advisers warned him the plan to uplift the nation’s forty to fifty million poor would gain him no additional votes in the next election. “That’s my kind of program,” the new president insisted just a day after he took office in late November 1963. “I’ll find money for it one way or another.”

    As was typical of the man, a personal

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    In a Big Country

    The presidential election of 1964 unfolds across a few colorless pages in Joshua B. Freeman’s American Empire, pitting a candidate who embraced “expansive state action” to “improve the quality of life” against a guy who opposed “the expanded functions the state had taken on during the previous three decades.” Circling back later, when the story has moved on to 1966, Freeman notes that some actor in California is still hanging around. Behold the elaborate flatness of this sentence: “Reagan, a one-time New Deal Democrat who over the years had moved to the right, came to national attention as a

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    The Pall of Fame

    Tom Bissell’s new essay collection, Magic Hours, opens—in what can be taken as a challenge or a gesture of self-justification—with “Unflowered Aloes,” his 2000 meditation on the tenuousness of literary immortality. Why do some works survive, Bissell asks, while others are lost to posterity? The reader may note that this is a book of previously published magazine work, rescued from the recycling bin and bound in a volume as Essays on Creators and Creation.

    “Unflowered Aloes” is certainly worthy of an ISBN number. Bissell wrote it, he explains in his author’s note, as “a twenty-five year old

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    The Devil’s Backbone

    Last summer I was having coffee with a Spanish writer at a café in an upscale Madrid neighborhood just off the bustling Avenida Concha Espina. The thoroughfare is named after an insignificant twentieth-century author who supported Francisco Franco. As my colleague explained with a slight grimace, civic spaces like these were part of the legacy of Francoism, cosmetic but telling. Middling literati such as Espina are memorialized at well-trafficked hubs, while their more accomplished counterparts who ran afoul of Franco’s regime have had their names consigned to remote side streets.

    The enmities

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    Dropping Science

    At its best, intellectual history is less the history of ideas than the history of thinking and of the social and cultural contexts in which thinking occurs—contexts that shape thinking and are, in turn, shaped by it. Joel Isaac’s Working Knowledge is intellectual history at its best.

    Isaac’s subject is the development of several of the human sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, history of science) at Harvard University between 1920 and 1960. But as Isaac makes clear, this is more than a story of disciplinary expansion; as the social sciences took root at America’s most prestigious

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    The Body Electric

    Readers are not created equal. Frances Ferguson observed, rather dolorously, that the “reader can only read the texts that say what he already knows,” but let’s be frank: There are gifted—or maybe just thirstier—readers among us who, by dint of stamina or plain need, won’t be stymied by boredom, offense, incomprehension. There are varsity readers, and then there is Maureen N. McLane, a poet, professor, and prizewinning critic. To read McLane is to be reminded that the brain may be an organ, but the mind is a muscle. Hers is a roving, amphibious intelligence; she’s at home in the essay and the

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    I Me Mime

    “Originally I intended to write a book about Harpo’s relation to history and literature,” remarks Wayne Koestenbaum on the first page of his fittingly zany, aphoristic, and meandering study of the great mime of Marx Brothers fame. “A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hegel. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Marx. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Stein. A tiny chapter on Harpo and Hitler.” That idea didn’t stick. Plan B, we are told, was a novella, The Pillow Book of Harpo Marx: “The narrator, Harpo, was a queer Jewish masseur who lived in Variety Springs, New York, and whose grandparents had starred in vaudeville

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    The Left-Facing Page

    While abstract ideas of “power” and “politics” are catnip to contemporary literary figures, the actual exercise of political power in the American electoral process tends to be their analytic kryptonite. But things were not ever thus. Michael Szalay’s fascinating new book, Hip Figures, reminds us of a time, not long ago, when literary intellectuals set great store by mainstream political parties, and vice versa. Szalay’s book focuses on the postwar era—a high-water mark, he contends, for the mutual influence of mainstream politics and American fiction. “In the decades following the Second World

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  • print • June/July/Aug 2012

    Map Quest

    Hali Felt’s quite wonderful new book disqualifies itself as a true biography for a reason that will jar any reader who feels protective of the traditional rules of nonfiction writing. Simply put, parts of it are fictional. There are several key moments in this absorbing account of the life and career of marine cartographer Marie Tharp when Felt, a first-time book author with a flowing and vivid prose style, invents scenes to fill out otherwise sizable gaps in Tharp’s life story: “I want to give [Marie’s] story a little palpable emotion, even if it isn’t hers, to try to keep her whole, a little

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