Plus: St. Augustine; Kavalier and Clay at the Met; Guy Davenport; Niagara Falls
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Sarah Roy looks at Gaza’s future; Josephine Quinn studies St. Augustine’s African theology; Geoffrey O’Brien reviews the Met opera’s adaptation of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; Wyatt Mason writes to Guy Davenport; a poem by April Bernard; and, from the archives, the not-so-sublime Niagara Falls. The most influential plans for rebuilding Gaza start from the premise that Palestinians have no right to determine their future. How did Saint Augustine’s African origins and his life among Christians there shape his theology? Mason Bates’s operatic adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay condenses the encyclopedic novel into a story about two outsiders caught between the harsh reality of World War II and their success as creators of a comic book superhero. The correspondence of Guy Davenport is a syllabus for the twentieth century. Free from the ArchivesOn October 24, 1901, Annie Edson Taylor—celebrating her sixty-third birthday—became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, having two days earlier tested the stunt with a cat, who survived the plunge. In the Review’s January 9, 1997, issue, Henry Allen wrote about the Falls and their descent from vaunted site of sublime nature—“the greatest curiosity in the known world,” as the Duke de La Rochefoucauld Liancourt said in 1796—to, beginning with the opening of the Erie Canal two hundred years ago today, tourist trap, wedding destination, “a disappointing and vulgar resort.” “The standard joke, sometimes attributed to Mark Twain, came to be that the second biggest disappointment for an American bride was Niagara Falls, a line that may have been a corruption of Oscar Wilde’s line that ‘Niagara will survive any criticism of mine. I must say, however, that it is the first disappointment in the married life of many Americans who spend their honeymoon there.’” Special Offer
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