Innholdsfortegnelse for March 10, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

On the morning of Thursday, January 7, French President Francois Hollande made his way in the rain to the Paris police headquarters on the Ile de la Cite, just two months after the coordinated Islamist attacks of November 13, 2015, that killed 130 people and wounded over 350 at the Bataclan concert hall and several restaurants and cafes. He was there to commemorate the anniversary of last January’s terrorist operation that left dead twelve people at the offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, one policewoman near a Jewish school in a Parisian suburb, and four others in a kosher market near the Porte de Vincennes. The commemoration was not about moving on. Hollande thanked the police and fire departments for their sacrifices in the fight against terrorism, and explained…

It is a publishing phenomenon, for which some of us who are authors have cause to be grateful, that seventy years after the conclusion of World War II, works about the conflict enjoy a popularity second only to cookbooks. This is unsurprising, because it was the greatest event in human history, a saga that offers narratives about a collision between the forces of good and evil much less nuanced—apparently so, at least, to unsophisticated readers—than the modern struggle between militant Islam and the West. New publications fall into disparate categories. The first is that of sentimental, shamelessly nationalistic titles such as The Greatest Generation (2004) and Flags of Our Fathers (2000), which achieve huge sales but contribute little to historiography. I recall a US Army veteran saying about Stephen Ambrose’s…

1. In country after country across Europe, the Syrian refugee crisis has put intense pressure on the political establishment. In Poland, voters have brought to power a right- wing party whose leader, Jarosław Kaczy􀄸ski, warns that migrants are bringing “dangerous diseases” and “various types of parasites” to Europe; in France, in December, only a last- minute alliance between the Socialists and the conservatives prevented the far- right National Front from triumphing in regional elections. Even Germany, which took in more than a million asylum- seekers in 2015, has been forced to pull back in the face of a growing revolt from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s own party and the recent New Year’s attacks on women in Cologne, allegedly by groups of men of North African origin. And then there is Denmark.…

The Death of Cancer by Vincent T. DeVita Jr. and Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 324 pp., $28.00 In his valedictory State of the Union address this January, President Obama endorsed Vice President Biden’s proposal of last October that the US needed something like a “moonshot” to cure cancer. “Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done,” Obama said. “For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the families that we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.” The loved one I lost was my mother. At the age of sixty- seven, she developed breast cancer. She openly told family and friends of her diagnosis, and what followed: surgery, to remove the breast mass and adjacent…

The White Road: Journey into an Obsession by Edmund de Waal. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 401 pp., $27.00 The White Road is a large and singular literary object, a book with no obvious prototype. Edmund de Waal has put forward its 401 pages on the strength of two credentials. The runaway success of The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), an account of his Jewish ancestors in nineteenth-century Paris and twentieth-century Vienna, made de Waal known far beyond his native England as an intimate and lyrical writer with a sophisticated grasp of cultural history. But the preceding twenty-four years of his career had been devoted to pottery, in which art his favored material has been porcelain. That precious white substance is what his new book in some sense addresses. In what…

Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe by Lisa Randall. Ecco, 412 pp., $29.99 The notion that there is more to the world than we can see was probably hardwired into our ancestors’ consciousness by natural selection. Only those in the African savannah who suspected that behind the rustling branches might lie a predator likely survived long enough to pass on their genetic information. In any case, as our mental facilities evolved further the notion of hidden realities became more formalized when human tribal groups created religions to help them make sense of the world around them, provide solace for the inequities of nature, and ultimately deal with their own mortality. Hidden realities continued to dominate thinking as early religious myth gave way to more refined…

The Polar Express a film directed by Robert Zemeckis Anomalisa a film directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson On the Suffering of the World by Arthur Schopenhauer, translated from the German by R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin, 208 pp., $7.98 (e-book) On a wintry afternoon, alone with the kids, I visited the Central Park Zoo. It’s not a very big place, just zoo- sized, and after seeing the animals, we found ourselves lining up to enter the little movie theater to watch something called The Polar Express 4-D Experience. A Christmasthemed spin-off from the 2004 movie, it employs the same “performance capture” animation technique, familiar from video games, in which an actor’s movements are turned into computer- generated images. “Hero Boy”—the original protagonist—is still only about ten years old. We…

Killing Reagan: The Violent Assault That Changed a Presidency by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard. Henry Holt, 306 pp., $30.0 Ronald Reagan by Jacob Weisberg. Times Books, 185 pp., $25.00 The Republican presidential candidate debates, which have shown non-Republicans just how factionalized the party is and how many possible meanings of the term “conservative” there are, have produced one point of general agreement among the many contenders: Ronald Reagan was a great president. For a committed Republican audience, Reagan stands first of all for victory. Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush all lost elections during their careers. If you don’t count presidential primaries, Reagan retired from politics undefeated: he had two substantial wins in the California governor’s races of 1966 and 1970, and two landslides—…

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer. Doubleday, 449 pp., $29.95 In 2011, a blogger impersonating billionaire David Koch got through the switchboard at the Wisconsin State Capitol and was connected to Governor Scott Walker, who took time out from battling with the union protesters besieging Madison to truckle before what he thought was the great man. The recording of their conversation is a hard- to- listen- to blend of obsequiousness and braggadocio; at one point the faux Koch urges Walker to “bring a baseball bat” to negotiations with the state’s lawmakers. “I have one in my office; you’d be happy with that,” Walker says. “I got a Slugger with my name on it.” “I tell you what, Scott:…

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. Crown, 418 pp., $28.00 1. Seeking distraction one winter afternoon, a Milwaukee boy takes to some old- fashioned mischief and hurls snowballs at passing cars. A driver gives chase and kicks in the door of the house where the boy lives with his mother and younger brother. The landlord puts the family out. Thus begins an odyssey that in Matthew Desmond’s gripping and important book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, exposes the harrowing world of the ten million or so low- income households that pay half or more of their income for rent and utilities, a long- overlooked population whose numbers have recently soared. The mother, Arleen, finds a house she likes, and it consumes only…

A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories by Lucia Berlin, edited and with an introduction by Stephen Emerson, and with a foreword by Lydia Davis. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 403 pp., $26.00 What I hope to do is, by the use of intricate detail, to make this woman so believable you can’t help but feel for her. —Lucia Berlin, “Point of View” In “Point of View,” Lucia Berlin’s most complexly imagined short story, a female writer confides in us, her readers, her intentions in writing a story, which will turn out to be not quite the story she intends to tell us, or, indeed, the story we finally absorb, with a belated pang of emotion at the final line. We are told by Berlin’s fictitious writer that she prefers to…