Today in The New York Review of Books: Adam Hochschild remembers the Bundists; Prudence Peiffer advances New York’s 1960s avant-garde; David Wheatley reads contemporary Scottish poetry; a poem by Dan Chiasson; and, from the archives, Arlene Croce on Fred Astaire.
Adam Hochschild
A Dream of a Socialist Commonwealth
Molly Crabapple’s history of the Bund recovers an egalitarian, secular, cosmopolitan vision of Jewish identity and political life that was lost in the horrors of the twentieth century.
Prudence Peiffer
Don’t Call It Entertainment
In Everthing Is Now, J. Hoberman chronicles a radical avant-garde’s attempts to jostle New York City out of its postwar complacency and moral retrenchment.
David Wheatley
Against Nostalgia
In their poems and essays, Kathleen Jamie and Peter Davidson transcend Scottish sentimentalism and find new points of entry into their shared past.
The Peepers
Hungry to gain
on quiet and night
and cold and rain
we pixelate
we complicate
our veins are antifreeze…
Free from the Archives
Fred Astaire was born 127 years ago today. In the Review’s April 5, 2012, issue, Arlene Croce wrote about his more than seventy-year career. From some of the earliest sound films to one of his final public performances, on The Dick Cavett Show, Astaire was an innovator in dance, film, and music. As Croce argues, “any way he cared to entertain us was the right way”
Arlene Croce
They’re the Top
As with all great dancers, Astaire’s technique was an expression of his imagination. It was the braiding of swing rhythms together with his personal tap technique (which had to have been an extension of his drumming, or vice versa) that made him the great and unique dancer that he was. But as a film phenomenon he was twice as great.
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His Moo Was Refined
What can explain The Story of Ferdinand’s remarkable appeal in its own moment—and its enduring popularity today?
Mark O’Connell
London’s Brutal Underground
In Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling, an ordinary boy’s deadly obsession with the ultrarich reveals deeper corruption at the heart of modern London.
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