Plus: Iranian News; Indian Prints; Altoon Sultan; Thoreau
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Today in The New York Review of Books: Julia Preston crosses the border at El Paso; Nahid Siamdoust watches Iranian news; Andrew Raftery marvels at Indian printmaking; Joe Bucciero looks at Altoon Sultan’s Vermont paintings; a poem by Laura Kolbe; and, from the archives, Leo Marx on Henry David Thoreau.
A history of five families in El Paso reveals the city’s significance as a bellwether of America’s immigration policy.
The Iranian state’s repression of homegrown media has produced an information environment ripe for manipulation by the right.
Two forceful exhibitions have shown how Indian artists and presses met the cultural upheaval of the nineteenth century with lithographic prints that rendered Hindu gods more approachable and helped to galvanize national identity.
The Vermont-based painter Altoon Sultan makes small tempera paintings of farm equipment that hover between realism and abstraction.
Free from the Archives
Henry David Thoreau was born 209 years ago today. In the Review’s July 15, 1999, issue, Leo Marx wrote about “The Full Thoreau”—synthesizing the environmentalism, poeticism, political radicalism, and pastoralism that made the Sage of Walden into “the patron saint of ecocentrism.”
“In the 1990s, with the vast expansion of the commercial spirit in America, Thoreau’s inspired contempt for the shallowness of a money-fixated culture helps to explain—and even to extend—Walden’s enduring pertinence. Less obvious, however, is the degree to which the essential pastoral contrast between the two ways of life heightens its political power. The continuous juxtaposition of the ‘mean and sneaking’ ways of his Concord neighbors with the simplified life he lives ‘closer’ to nature, and the question that juxtaposition raises—where does nature end and culture begin?—account for much of Walden’s capacity to enlist its readers in the defense of the environment.”
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