Innholdsfortegnelse for November 22, 2012 i The New York Review of Books

Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe Little, Brown, 704 pp., $30.00 The writers of Tom Wolfe’s generation who discovered Miami before him—writers whose careers began in the era of the Cuban Revolution and the Bay of Pigs—described Miami as the nerve center of America’s secret history. In the late 1980s, Joan Didion observed that unofficial meetings at private homes in Coconut Grove and Miami Beach had profound international consequences. Miami, she wrote, was The city had a mythic quality—again, “not a city at all,” but “a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accommodated.” Norman Mailer, writing about the 1968 Republican convention in Miami and the Siege of Chicago, called the city “a steam-pot of miasmas,” its kitschy…

Emancipating Lincoln: The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory by Harold Holzer Harvard University Press, 213 pp., $24.95 Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union by Louis P. Masur Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 358 pp., $29.95 The Long Road to Antietam: How the Civil War Became a Revolution by Richard Slotkin Liveright, 478 pp., $32.95 Rise to Greatness: Abraham Lincoln and America’s Most Perilous Year by David Von Drehle Henry Holt, 466 pp., $30.00 In a Thanksgiving sermon in 1862 at the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, the prominent clergyman Reverend Albert Barnes reflected on the momentous events of that second year of the Civil War. “It has been such a year as our country has never experienced before,” he said, “and will make more…

Let us say that you are a Mexican reporter working for peanuts at a local television station somewhere in the provinces—the state of Durango, for example—and that one day you get a friendly invitation from a powerful drug-trafficking group. Imagine that it is the Zetas, and that thanks to their efforts in your city several dozen people have recently perished in various unspeakable ways, while justice turned a blind eye. Among the dead is one of your colleagues. Now consider the invitation, which is to a press conference to be held punctually on the following Friday, at a not particularly out of the way spot just outside of town. You were, perhaps, considering going instead to a movie? Keep in mind, the invitation notes, that attendance will be taken by…

Arabesqueing beside the bins of plastic hairpins, combs, and bands, neon pink and blue parakeets in pairs delicately fluff and dance. Throughout the long caged days measured out in ebbs and flows— the midday rush, the after-dinner slump, the clumps of the curious— these day-glo birds spend endless hours on each fluorescent vane. To locate mirrors, those mirrors in the photo box in back, teenaged girls rush past the preeners’ constant game of coo and peck. All day long they puff out chests, mock pouches of virility, display leathery, atrophied legs, eye the passersby, and kiss another on the beak. Lip to lip, mother-of-pearl. With fat tongues they hook and speak the language of parakeets. And when asleep, beside coffers piled with pink barrettes, loose netting, aerosols, each feels the…

Astray by Emma Donoghue Little, Brown, 275 pp., $25.99 In the tsunami of family relics that overwhelmed me upon the sale of my parents’ house in Ontario last year were those belonging to my grandmother’s cousin Esther, who died in the year before my birth and was known to us chiefly as the provenance of our family’s Steinway baby grand piano, bequeathed to my infant sister. We were also the inheritors of Esther’s photograph albums (young Esther with her mother in front of a Victorian farmhouse; middle-aged Esther in front of the Taj Mahal, etc.), of her correspondence, and of her framed sketches for the numerous stained-glass windows she designed in collaboration with Yvonne Williams—many of which adorn churches in Toronto, Montreal, and elsewhere to this day. Esther has remained…

The Moscow Bombings of September 1999: Examinations of Russian Terrorist Attacks at the Onset of Vladimir Putin’s Rule by John B. Dunlop Stuttgart: Ibidem, 251 pp., €34.90 (paper) In 2000 Sergei Kovalev, then the widely respected head of the Russian organization Memorial, observed in these pages that the apartment bombings in Russia in September 1999, which killed three hundred people and wounded hundreds of others, “were a crucial moment in the unfolding of our current history. After the first shock passed, it turned out that we were living in an entirely different country....”1 The bombings, it will be recalled, were blamed on Chechen rebels and used as a pretext for Boris Yeltsin’s Kremlin to launch a bloody second war against Chechnya, a republic in the Russian Federation. They also were…

To the Editors: I am grateful to the editors for choosing an economist of such stature as Professor Benjamin M. Friedman of Harvard to review my book Who Stole the American Dream? [“The Oligarchy in America Today,” NYR, October 11]. But his review is inaccurate on two essential points: 1. Professor Friedman misstates, and thereby trivializes, my thesis about the power shift in Washington since the 1970s that has been so devastating to the economic fortunes of the middle class and so lucrative to the nation’s super-rich, including our corporate elite. He says that I ascribe that power shift to a “collusion” by “a group of willful individuals”—a power conspiracy. I did not use that term. Nor did I make that argument. I described how the managerial class, spurred into…

There’s a good chance that fewer than one half of one percent of the country’s voters will determine whether Barack Obama will be able to function effectively as president if his lease on the White House is renewed in the election now finally upon us. These are the ticket-splitters in swing districts, those who after voting for Obama will somehow find it possible to rationalize votes for members of the present Republican majority in the House of Representatives, thus choosing, consciously or unconsciously, to perpetuate the paralysis that has gripped Washington on most big issues. As the marathon enters its final lap with the outcome at the presidential level still in doubt, the chance of the incumbent being elected with his party in the majority in both houses as it…

How to Win an Election: An Ancient Guide for Modern Politicians by Quintus Tullius Cicero, translated from the Latin and with an introduction by Philip Freeman Princeton University Press, 99 pp., $9.95 During the British election campaign in 2010, I was asked by BBC radio to interview Boris Johnson—keen classicist, mayor of London, Tory maverick, and not yet rumored (as he is now) to be aiming to replace David Cameron as prime minister and party leader. Our subject was to be one of the most intriguing works of ancient literature to have survived, the “Handbook on Electioneering” (Commentariolum Petitionis in Latin), a short text said to have been written by Quintus Cicero, advising his more famous brother Marcus on how to run a Roman election campaign, in 64 BCE—who to…

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra Norton, 385 pp., $29.95 “Perhaps the greatest breach in nature,” wrote William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890), is “the breach from one mind to another.” He went on to describe two brothers waking up in the same bed, each reconnecting to the thoughts he had had before falling asleep. Peter may be able to conceive of Paul’s last twilight state of mind—Paul might tell him about it—but he cannot remember or feel it with any of the “warmth and intimacy and immediacy” of his own inner experience. James called this chapter of his book “The Stream of Thought,” specifically defining consciousness as a stream rather than a chain or a train: “It…

In 1947, Stefan Jędrychowski, a Communist veteran, member of the Polish Politburo, and minister in the government, wrote a memo to his colleagues on a subject close to his heart. Somewhat pompously entitled “Notes on Anglo-Saxon Propaganda,” the memo complained, among other things, that British and American news services were more influential in Poland than their Soviet and Polish equivalents, that American films were too warmly reviewed, and that American fashions were too readily available. But above all, Jędrychowski was annoyed by the clout of Polska YMCA, the Polish section of the Young Men’s Christian Association, an organization founded in Warsaw in 1923 and then banned under the German occupation. In April 1945 Polska YMCA had restarted itself with some help from the international YMCA headquarters in Geneva and a…

Thornton Wilder: A Life by Penelope Niven Harper, 832 pp., $39.99 Thornton Niven Wilder, author of seven novels and nine plays, was born in 1897 in Madison, Wisconsin, the grandson of a Presbyterian clergyman, and the son of a government diplomat who later became a newspaper editor. Best known for Our Town, a homespun story of domestic life in a small New England village, he has always been considered a quintessential middle-American writer. But as Penelope Niven’s painstaking new biography, Thornton Wilder: A Life, helps make clear, Wilder, though fiercely loyal to his country, his family, and his wide circle of American friends, was a man with powerful literary ambitions who felt more affinity with European classics and the contemporary avant-garde than with anything in the native canon. Among his…

To the Editors: In his review of Energy for Future Presidents, Bill McKibben failed to disclose his rather severe conflict of interest [NYR, October 11]. In Energy I am properly harsh on his 350 movement, the organization through which Mr. McKibben established his fame and national recognition, an endorsement by Al Gore, and his presumed credentials to review my book. It is certainly in his own best interests and in those of the 350 movement to try to dissuade people from reading what I have to say. In Energy, I point out that according to the IPCC projections (the UN-sponsored agency that formulates the international consensus), most of the increase in the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide will come from the developing world. Indeed, US emissions are currently at their lowest…

To the Editors: Andrew Hacker’s otherwise thoughtful essay on the Pew Research Center’s Trends in American Values study [“Can Romney Get a Majority?,” NYR, September 27] contained an inaccurate parenthetical reference to the relationship between the Pew family and the research center. The Pew Research Center is a subsidiary of the Pew Charitable Trusts, operating independently but ultimately accountable to the Trusts’ board of trustees. Composed of members of the Pew family as well as outside directors, the board proudly maintains the original mission of our founders, using a nonpartisan analytical approach to improve public policy, inform the public, and stimulate civic life. Rebecca Rimel President and CEO The Pew Charitable Trusts Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Andrew Hacker replies: Not only is the Pew Trust nonpartisan: its research on health, environment, and…

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde an exhibition at Tate Britain, London, September 12, 2012–January 13, 2013; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., February 17–May 19, 2013; and the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, June 10–September 30, 2013. Catalog of the exhibition by Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, with contributions by Elizabeth Prettejohn and Diane Waggoner London: Tate Publishing, 256 pp., £24.99 (paper) Two missionaries are fleeing a murderous mob. A Druid priest whips up the frenzy, for we are in ancient, heathen Britain, a land of megaliths and human sacrifice. Racing across the greensward, the natives are just catching up with one chasuble-clad Christian, but the other—and here we enter the picture proper—has sought refuge in the riverbank hut of a convert family. That wooden shack opens up before…

On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson by William Souder Crown, 496 pp., $30.00 Late in the summer of 1962 President John F. Kennedy held a press conference that Rachel Carson’s most recent biographer, William Souder, claims brought “something new” into the world. Amid weighty discussions of Supreme Court justices, Soviet intentions at the UN, and news of increased Soviet shipping to Cuba, the president fielded a rather unusual question about pesticide use and whether government agencies would look into it. He replied: A few weeks later, as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded, Silent Spring began its climb to the top of the New York Times best-seller list. The long fight to control the use of pesticides had begun. There was a significant victory in 1972,…

Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 by Yang Jisheng, translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 629 pp., $35.00 The Great Famine in China, 1958–1962: A Documentary History edited by Zhou Xun Yale University Press, 204 pp., $45.00 Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 by Frank Dikötter Walker, 420 pp., $20.00 (paper) Mubei: Zhongguo liushi niandai dajihuang jiushi [Tombstone: A True History of the Great Famine in China in the 1960s] by Yang Jisheng Hong Kong: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, Volume 1: 636 pp., Volume 2: 1,208 pp., $30.96 Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine by Jasper Becker Holt, 325 pp., $21.99 (paper) Last summer I took a trip to Xinyang, a rural area of wheat fields and tea…

May We Be Forgiven by A.M. Homes Viking, 480 pp., $27.95 A.M. Homes loves crises in suburbia. She begins many of her books in medias res and never lets up. Her dialogue is extremely funny, worthy of a stand-up comic—rapid and raw. The action is unrelenting and endlessly inventive. Just when the reader thinks she can’t top that, she does.  May We Be Forgiven covers a tumultuous year from one Thanksgiving to another. It begins with the narrator clearing the dishes of the many guests for his brother’s wife; she kisses him when they’re alone in the kitchen. A few months later he is in bed with her, wearing his brother’s pajamas. The brother, they believe, is being held in the psychiatric ward of a local hospital after he has…

Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, August 12, 2012–January 7, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition by Ron Magliozzi and Edwin Carels Museum of Modern Art, 64 pp., $24.95 (paper) With his great theme of Americans and their avid encounters with European experience, Henry James might have found the Quay brothers to be updated versions of some of his own characters. Something like a romance with European life and culture, anyway, seems to be at the center of the art of Timothy and Stephen Quay. They are identical twins who were born in 1947, outside Philadelphia, and have lived and worked side by side in London for decades. They are best known for their stop-motion animated…

To the Editors: I just read your review, “The Tragedy of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Hans von Dohnanyi,” by Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern [NYR, October 25]. Their facts about Albrecht Tietze are wrong—he was my father-in-law and he was never a Wehrmacht doctor—he worked in the police hospital on Scharnhorststrasse in Berlin. He never became a Nazi, nor did he ever don a military or police uniform. You can read all about his efforts to save others, including Dohnanyi, in my book A Call for Conscience: Albrecht Tietze’s Opposition to Hitler. He was recognized as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem in December 1971. I’m hoping you will correct this. Robert L. Reynolds Bel Air, Maryland Elisabeth Sifton and Fritz Stern reply: We described Dr. Tietze as “a humane (and…