Innholdsfortegnelse for February 25, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

NEAL ASCHERSON is the author of The Struggles for Poland, Black Sea, and Stone Voices: The Search for Scotland. He is an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. JOHN ASHBERY ’s most recent collection of poems is Breezeway. ANNE CARSON is a poet who was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek, sometimes at NYU. She will publish a collection of prose and poetry, Float, in October. CHRISTIAN CARYL is a Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute and the editor of Foreign Policy’s Democracy Lab website. His latest book is Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the Twenty-first Century. ARLENE CROCE is the former dance critic for The New Yorker and the author of The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book. ELIZABETH DREW is a…

Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance by Robert Gildea. Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 593 pp., $35.00 Histoire de la Résistance, 1940–1945 by Olivier Wieviorka. Paris: Perrin, 575 pp., €25.00 (paper) (A translation by Jane Marie Todd, The French Resistance, will be published by Harvard University Press in April 2016.) The French Resistance cuts a wide swath in the public imagination, and not only in France. Books and films have planted indelible images of derailed trains and makeshift airstrips at midnight. These images reveal only a tiny part of the fluctuating, diverse, squabbling world of the French Resistance. Encompassing its whole range of activities is a challenge. In addition to sabotage, these activities included carrying two bamboo fishing poles (deux gaules— a visual pun signifying…

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. Vintage, 500 pp., $16.95 (paper) The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker. Penguin, 802 pp., $20.00 (paper) Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil by Paul Bloom. Broadway, 273 pp., $15.00 (paper) The Power of Ideals: The Real Story of Moral Choice by William Damon and Anne Colby. Oxford University Press, 217 pp., $29.95 Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them by Joshua Greene. Penguin, 422 pp., $18.00 (paper) Report to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association: Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture by David H. Hoffman and others. 542 pp.,…

BYTING THE To the Editors: Regarding Sue Halpern’s review of books about Steve Jobs [NYR, February 11]: I had one, albeit long- distance, encounter with Steve Jobs. I had come to the conclusion that the Apple logo with the bite out of the apple was a “pun.” A byte in computer lingo is eight bits, where a bit is one on–off unit of information. Things are often coded in bytes. So I asked Walter Isaacson, the author of Steve Jobs, to ask Jobs himself. He replied as follows: I asked Steve Jobs this, and also about my daughter’s belief (shared by others) that the bitten apple was an homage to Turing. I have a graph about it in the intro of the book and a little bit more in the…

Making a Murderer a Netflix documentary series directed by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos Wisconsin is probably the most beautiful of the midwestern farm states. Its often dramatic terrain, replete with unglaciated driftless areas, borders not just the Mississippi River but two great inland seas whose opposite shores are so far away they cannot be glimpsed standing at water’s edge. The world across the waves looks distant to nonexistent, and the oceanic lakes stretch and disappear into haze and sky, though one can take a ferry out of a town called Manitowoc and in four hours get to Michigan. Amid this somewhat lonely serenity, there are the mythic shipwrecks, blizzards, tornadoes, vagaries of agricultural life, industrial boom and bust, and a burgeoning prison economy; all have contributed to a local…

Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War by Ian Buruma. Penguin, 305 pp., $27.00 Some eighteen years ago, Ian Buruma wrote a wise but melancholy review about Anne Frank—or rather about the merciless vendetta that had settled over the dramatized version of her diary.* In it, he suggested that no side in that controversy was exclusively right, neither those led by her father, Otto, who presented her “message” as a universal plea on behalf of all suffering humanity everywhere, nor the followers of Meyer Levin, the author of an unpublished play based on the diary, who protested that there was a conspiracy to drain it of its centrally Jewish concern. Buruma disliked the acrid, even paranoid tone of the Levin school, but he was not convinced by the…

Les Pêcheurs de Perles [The Pearl Fishers] an opera by Georges Bizet, produced by Penny Woolcock, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, December 31, 2015– February 4, 2016 “It’s a B- opera,” a voice purred sardonically in the row behind me at the Met, making a small puncture mark in what felt otherwise like general warm enthusiasm following a performance of Georges Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles. The speaker had a point. If a B- opera is something like a B- movie, then The Pearl Fishers has some of the same characteristics—brevity, spareness (four solo voices and a chorus carry the whole show), and rapid exposition— and is built around a libretto whose central elements might call to mind a Hollywood second feature along the lines of Bird of…

What to say of the entirety. The entirety should be smaller. Small enough to say something about. Humans. What if the guy you’re hanging up by his thumbs already has a razorplague of painapples roaming his chest inside. Do you regard that as his own fault? Do you really need to make it worse? Do you think of yourself as a well-loved person? Of course these are separate questions. Like dead salmon and coppermine tailings, separate. So these separations, this anesthesia, we should ponder a bit. Humans. What can you control? Wrong question. Can you treat everything as an emergency without losing the reality of time, which continues to drip, laughtear by laughtear? Where to start? Start in the middle (and why?) so as not to end up there, where…

I Ching: The Book of Change translated from the Chinese by David Hinton. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 136 pp., $20.00 I Ching (Yijing): The Book of Change translated from the Chinese with an introduction and commentary by John Minford. Viking, 855 pp., $39.95 The I Ching has served for thousands of years as a philosophical taxonomy of the universe, a guide to an ethical life, a manual for rulers, and an oracle of one’s personal future and the future of the state. It was an organizing principle or authoritative proof for literary and arts criticism, cartography, medicine, and many of the sciences, and it generated endless Confucian, Taoist, Buddhist, and, later, even Christian commentaries, and competing schools of thought within those traditions. In China and in East Asia, it has…

My favorite big slum was the matter if you need to be. It had a rhythm all its own. You’re the driver. Let’s wait a second, and get moving. Don’t get any on it. Was I ever! Refrigerate after opening. I do so want not to be alone, not after eleven o’clock at night . . . The ship breaks up . . . You look nice, giving away like that. I’ll buy you this and buy you that: a closer look, a nice warm bed to hide under in the event that . . . His majesty is indisposed, steals the show as quite collectible, adding insult to injury, touching but often hilarious. God and I had a good laugh over that one. We lived in a suburban rumor…

Strawberry Hill and Horace Walpole: Essential Guide by John Iddon. Scala, 48 pp., $9.95 (paper) Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castle by Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi. London: Frances Lincoln, 160 pp. (2007) The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence edited by W. S. Lewis and others, 48 volumes; available online at www.library.yale.edu/walpole/col lections/digital_collection_corr.html Place-making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill by Marion Harney. Ashgate, 308 pp., $149.95 Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill edited by Michael Snodin. Yale University Press, 356 pp. (2009) Horace Walpole’s Description of the Villa at Strawberry-Hill: A Facsimile of the Copy Extra-illustrated for Charles Bedford in the Collection of Lord Waldegrave of North Hill with an introduction by William Waldegrave. London: Roxburghe Club (2010) Houghton Revisited: The Walpole Masterpieces from Catherine the Great’s Hermitage…

To the Editors: Steven Weinberg suggests, in “Eye on the Present—The Whig History of Science” [NYR, December 17, 2015], that historians of science may be permitted to view the past in terms of modern knowledge (called “whig history”), whereas others may not. This is because in science, we know who in the past was “right,” and who was “wrong,” whereas in religion, politics, and other sociological areas, ultimate truths based upon scientific methodology and mathematical applications can never be decided. But is this really true of science? Before the understanding of atomic energy and radioactivity, could a historian of science in the early 1900s declare that Lord Kelvin was wrong in his mathematical calculation of the age of the earth based upon thermodynamic laws as 100 million years, as many…