Table of Contents - January 24, 1980 | The New York Review of Books

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Contents

January 24, 1980 • Volume 26, Number 21 & 22

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Clifford Geertz

Sociosexology

The Evolution of Human Sexuality by Donald Symons
Virgil Thomson

A Good Writer

Janet Flanner’s World: Uncollected Writings 1932-1975 edited by Irving Drutman, introduction by William Shawn

The Cubical City by Janet Flanner

An American in Paris by Janet Flanner

Pétain: The Old Man of France by Janet Flanner

Men and Monuments by Janet Flanner

Paris Journal: Vol. I, 1944-1965 by Janet Flanner, edited by William Shawn

Paris Journal: Vol. II, 1965-1971 by Janet Flanner, edited by William Shawn

Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939 by Janet Flanner, edited by Irving Drutman

London Was Yesterday, 1934-1939 by Janet Flanner, edited by Irving Drutman
Robert Craft

Notes from the Composer

Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich as related to and edited by Solomon Volkov, translated by Antonina W. Bouis

Prokofiev by Prokofiev: A Composer’s Memoir edited by David H. Appel, translated by Guy Daniels

O I.F. Stravinskom y ego Blizkikh by Kseniya Iur'evna Stravinskaya
Thomas Sheehan

Paris: Moses and Polytheism

Barbarism with a Human Face by Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated by George Holoch

Le testament de Dieu by Bernard-Henri Lévy

Les idées à l’endroit by Alain de Benoist

Vu de droite by Alain de Benoist
Millicent Bell

The Education of Clover Adams

Clover by Otto Friedrich
Abram Tertz,
William E. Harkins

Beasts and Men

Faithful Ruslan: The Story of a Guard Dog by Georgi Vladimov, translated by Michael Glenny
William Shawcross

The End of Cambodia?
Frederick Seidel

Homage to Cicero (poem)
V.S. Pritchett

Shredded Novels

In Between the Sheets and Other Stories by Ian McEwan

From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant
James Joll

The Old Diplomacy

The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations, 1875-1890 by George F. Kennan
Denis Donoghue

Sign Language

As We Know by John Ashbery
Quentin Skinner

Duellist

Reappraisals in History: New Views on History and Society in Early Modern Europe by J.H. Hexter

On Historians: Reappraisals of Some of the Masters of Modern History by J.H. Hexter
Phyllis Grosskurth

The Sad Years

The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume V: 1932-1935 edited by Nigel Nicolson, edited by Joanne Trautmann

The Wise Virgins: A Story of Words, Opinions and a few Emotions by Leonard Woolf
Michael Wood

The Claims of Mischief

The Buenos Aires Affair by Manuel Puig, translated by Suzanne Jill Levine

Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig, translated by Thomas Colchie

In Evil Hour by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa

The Cubs and Other Stories by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Gregory Kolovakos and Ronald Christ

Captain Pantoja and the Special Service by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Gregory Kolovakos and Ronald Christ
Stephen Jay Gould

The Middle Way

Advice to a Young Scientist by P.B. Medawar

LETTERS

Contributors

Millicent Bell is Professor of English Emerita at Boston University. She is the author of Meaning in Henry James and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. (May 1998)

Robert Craft is a conductor and writer. Craft’s close working friendship with Igor Stravinsky is the subject of his memoir, An Improbable Life. In 2002 he was awarded the International Prix du Disque at the Cannes Music Festival.

Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) was an anthropologist. Widely recognized as the most influential American anthropologist of the twentieth century, Geertz championed the role of symbols in the creation and interpretation of social meaning. His many books include Peddlers and Princes: Social Development and Economic Change in Two Indonesian Towns and Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics.

Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was a British critic and literary theorist. Born on the Isle of Man, he taught at University College London, Cambridge, Columbia and Harvard. Adapted from a series of lectures given at Bryn Mawr College, Kermode’s Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction remains one of the most influential works of twentieth-century literary criticism.

Leszek Kołakowski was professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw until March 1968 when he was formally expelled for political reasons. He was later a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He was the author of several books, including Main Currents in Marxism. The article in this issue will appear in the collection of essays Is God Happy?, to be published in February by Basic Books. He died in 2009. (December 2012)

Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was a novelist, essayist, and critic. Her political and social commentary, literary essays, and drama criticism appeared in magazines such as Partisan Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books, and were collected in On the Contrary (1961), Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles 1937-1962 (1963), The Writing on the Wall (1970), Ideas and the Novel (1980), and Occasional Prose (1985). Her novels include The Company She Keeps (1942), The Oasis (1949), The Groves of Academe (1952), A Charmed Life (1955), The Group (1963), Birds of America (1971), and Cannibals and Missionaries (1979). She was the author of three works of autobiography, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957), How I Grew (1987), and the unfinished Intellectual Memoirs (1992), and two travel books about Italy, Venice Observed (1956) and The Stones of Florence (1959). Her essays on the Vietnam War were collected in The Seventeenth Degree (1974); her essays on Watergate were collected in The Mask of State (1974).

Quentin Skinner is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University. His most recent books are Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes and Liberty Before Liberalism. (November 2000)

Jean Starobinski is Professor Emeritus of French literature at the University of Geneva. Blessings in Disguise and Largesse are among his works in English. A translation of his recent Action et réaction is to appear later this year. (May 2003)

Charles Taylor was recently awarded the 2007 Templeton Prize. He is Professor of Law and Philosophy at Northwestern and Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Philosophy at McGill. His books include Hegel and The Ethics of Authenticity. (April 2007)

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) was an American geologist, biologist and historian of science. He taught at Harvard, where he was named Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, and at NYU. His last book was Punctuated Equilibrium.

Denis Donoghue is University Professor at New York University, where he holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Letters. His works include The Practice of Reading, Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot, and The American Classics.

James Wolcott is the cultural critic for Vanity Fair.

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) was an art critic and television writer. In the award-winning documentary series, The Shock of The New, Hughes recounted the development of modern art since the Impressionists; in The Fatal Shore, he explored the history of his native Australia. Hughes’s memoir, Things I Didn’t Know, was published in 2006.

James Joll (1936–2011) was a British historian. His books include The Origins of the First World War and Europe Since 1870.

V.S. Pritchett (1900–1997) was a British essayist, novelist and short story writer. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the The Christian Science Monitorand as a literary critic forNew Statesman. In 1968 Pritchett was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire; he was knighted in 1975. His body of work includes many collections of short stories, in addition to travelogues, reviews, literary biographies and novels.

Frederick Seidel’s new book of poems is Nice Weather. (May 2013)

William Shawcross is the author of several books on Cambodia. (December 1996)

Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) was a composer and critic. He collaborated extensively with Gertrude Stein, who wrote the libretti for his operas Four Saints in Three Actsand The Mother of Us All. In 1988 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.

Thomas Sheehan is Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University. (December 2001)

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917–2007) was an American historian and social critic. He served as adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His Journals: 1952– 2000 were published in 2007.

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton. His books include Literature and the Taste of Knowledge and Yeats and Violence