Innholdsfortegnelse for December 6, 2012 i The New York Review of Books

Interventions: A Life in War and Peace by Kofi Annan with Nader Mousavizadeh Penguin, 383 pp., $36.00 How do we explain Kofi Annan’s enduring moral prestige? The puzzle is that it has survived failures, both his own and those of the institution he served for fifty years.1 Personal charisma is only part of the story. In addition to his charm, of which there is plenty, there is the authority that comes from experience. Few people have spent so much time around negotiating tables with thugs, warlords, and dictators. He has made himself the world’s emissary to the dark side. To these often dire negotiations, he brought a soothing temperament that became second nature early in his Ghanaian childhood. His father, Henry Reginald Annan, lived across two worlds, as a senior…

George Bellows an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., June 10–October 8, 2012; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, November 14, 2012–February 18, 2013; and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, March 16–June 9, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Charles Brock National Gallery of Art/Metropolitan Museum of Art/Royal Academy of Arts/Prestel, 335 pp.,$60.00; $40.00 (paper) Within a year of George Bellows’ s sudden death, in 1925, at age forty-two—from complications from a ruptured appendix—Sherwood Anderson, writing in Vanity Fair, put his finger on a salient quality of the realist painter’s work. Looking at some of the artist’s last pictures, which were large and vaguely anachronistic double portraits, Anderson implied that the point Bellows was making with them wasn’t altogether clear, but had he…

Camille Corot: Natur und Traum [Camille Corot: Nature and Dream] an exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, Germany, September 29, 2012–January 6, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition by Michael Clarke, Alexander Eiling, Maike Hohn, Rena M. Hoisington, Nathalie Michel-Szelechowska, Norbert Miller, Ulrich Mosch, Astrid Reuter, Dorit Schäfer, Arlette Sérullaz, Margret Stuffmann, Kerstin Thomas, and Gérard de Wallens Heidelberg: Kehrer, 487 pp., €45.00 (paper) Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification in 1989–1990, the cultural climate of Western Europe has undergone a considerable change. Nowhere is the drop in temperature more noticeable than in the relationship between France and Germany. The aesthetic and social fascination that French literature, art, cinema—indeed, the whole French way of life—exerted upon the western half of divided Germany during the postwar years has…

Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations by Norman Davies Viking, 830 pp., $40.00 The publication of the British historian Norman Davies’s account of the “vanished kingdoms” of Europe fits this moment of concern about American political decline, plutocracy, and installation of permanent war, as well as pervasive skepticism about the European Union’s future. He is interested in how nations begin, but also in how they disappear. He describes Europe as it was when European civilization took its original form and American civilization was unimaginable. He illustrates the reality that history promises only change, not progress. All is passage, and the future can be worse than what has already gone, and is only sometimes better, which is not as commonly assumed. Davies’s account of Europe’s origins teaches…

At the opening ceremony of the new Queens Family Courthouse in February 2003, New York State Chief Judge Judith Kaye said, The governmental press release that quotes Kaye goes on to praise the building’s “beautiful five-story atrium” and to conjecture that “waiting areas with exterior views and maximum exposure to natural light should make the long waiting periods less stressful to families.” A non-architectural solution to the problem of chronic lateness was evidently never contemplated. Long waiting periods are a fundamental, almost sacred part of the legal system, indispensable to the administration of justice. Accordingly, the architectural firms of Pei Cobb Freed and Gruzen Samton took it as one of their highest priorities—perhaps the highest priority of all—to make the corridors where people wait interminably as pleasant as possible. In…

To the Editors: I enjoyed Fintan O’Toole’s review of my book, James Joyce: A New Biography [NYR, October 25]. However, at the outset he makes a logical error that leads him to misconstrue what I have written about Joyce transforming his youthful passion for religion into a commitment to art, and being prepared to suffer for it. Against this, O’Toole argues that “his share of human suffering” had nothing to do with his art, and he was perfectly willing to enjoy the comfortable life, courtesy of the openhanded Harriet Shaw Weaver. But I never said otherwise. What I said was that it was art to which he had committed himself, not suffering. Even though he liked to compare himself to enlightenment martyrs like Giordano Bruno, this self-image owes as much…

The following is drawn from a lecture given at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City earlier this year. Written before the current election, it addresses in part the winner, whoever he may be. Americans have long been eager consumers and home owners. But there is no doubt we collectively overdid it during the years leading up to the financial and economic crisis of 2008. The personal savings rate dropped close to zero. Mortgage indebtedness grew to new (and ultimately unsustainable) heights. All that occurred as real income for average American households rose little if at all. That’s not supposed to happen in a growing, productive economy. High consumption maintained at the expense of saving and increasing indebtedness simply could not be sustained…

Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt Penguin, 359 pp., $17.00 (paper) The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt Arcade, 290 pp., $14.95 Big Breasts and Wide Hips by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt Arcade, 532 pp., $17.95 (paper) Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt Arcade, 540 pp., $16.95 (paper) On October 11 Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2012 will go to the fifty-seven-year-old Chinese writer Guan Moye, better known as Mo Yan, a pen name that means “don’t talk.” (The name is said to have originated in advice his parents…

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt Pantheon, 419 pp., $28.95 Dignity: Its History and Meaning by Michael Rosen Harvard University Press, 176 pp., $21.95 1. Human beings want to understand themselves, and in our time such understanding is pursued on a wide front by the biological, psychological, and social sciences. One of the questions presented by these forms of self-understanding is how to connect them with the actual lives all of us continue to lead, using the faculties and engaging in the activities and relations that are described by scientific theories. An important example is the universal human phenomenon of morality. Even if we come to accept descriptive theories of the different forms of morality based on evolutionary biology, neuroscience, or…

In an upstate New York diner, a teenager high on “reefer” tries to shoot a pen from his friend’s hand, and ends up putting a hole in a coffee urn, sending a stream of hot coffee sailing toward the window. In the library of a decaying old mansion, a middle-aged man shakes open his father’s books and watches dollar bills rain to the ground. At a Canadian carnival, a boy and a mangy old bear cling together on a roller coaster, soaring and dipping. And in a remote African village, a massive, heartsick, inarticulate American prays for rain in a language he doesn’t understand—and the rain comes. With a novel as full of surreal tableaux as Henderson the Rain King, that careens from continent to continent and from the ridiculous…

To the Editors: Thomas Nagel writes that “whether atheists or theists are right depends on facts about reality that neither of them can prove” [“A Philosopher Defends Religion,” Letters, NYR, November 8]. This is not quite right: it depends on what kind of theists we have to do with. We can, for example, know with certainty that the Christian God does not exist as standardly defined: a being who is omniscient, omnipotent, and wholly benevolent. The proof lies in the world, which is full of extraordinary suffering. If someone claims to have a sensus divinitatis that picks up a Christian God, they are deluded. It may be added that genuine belief in such a God, however rare, is profoundly immoral: it shows contempt for the reality of human suffering, or…

To the Editors: Though Jonathan Galassi mentions George Kay in passing as editor of the Penguin Book of Italian Verse, which served Robert Lowell as a trot for his Imitations, he neglects to mention Kay’s extensive verse translations of Eugenio Montale [“The Great Montale in English,” NYR, November 8]. First published in 1964 by Edinburgh University Press as Poesie/Poems in a strikingly designed bilingual edition, they were republished in 1969 as a Penguin Selected Poems. Kay, who benefited from Montale’s advice, intended his translations to be “faithful mirrors,” hoping “that they [would] pass the reader back to the originals.” In this he was largely successful, and the familiarity of British poets with Montale referred to by Galassi owes a lot to Kay. John Stathatos Kythera, Greece Jonathan Galassi replies: John…

Legacy: A Genetic History of the Jewish People by Harry Ostrer Oxford University Press, 264 pp., $24.95 The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology by Nadia Abu El-Haj University of Chicago Press, 311 pp., $35.00 The question of ancestry has been of human concern in virtually all cultures and over all times of which we have any knowledge. Whether it be a story about the origin of a particular tribe or nation and its subsequent mixture with other groups, or curiosity about a family history, there is always the implication that we understand ourselves better if we know our ancestors and that we, within ourselves, reflect properties that have come to us by an unbroken line from past generations. As treasurer of the Marlboro…

The Richard Burton Diaries edited by Chris Williams Yale University Press, 693 pp., $35.00 On the face of it, it is not much of a tragedy. A young classical actor promises greatness but is diverted from his path by the lure of easy money and vulgar fame. He ends up in unhappy affluence with his nervy, high-maintenance wife, his great voice now marinated in alcohol. Yet Eugene O’Neill made one of the great twentieth-century tragedies from such a figure: James Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Richard Burton would have made a great James Tyrone, and the public, which had become used to reading his private life into his performances, would have flocked to see him. Like O’Neill’s father James, the model for James Tyrone, Burton was a dark-haired…

Freud’s Sister by Goce Smilevski, translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer Penguin, 266 pp., $16.00 (paper) Like the fine mist of poison gas that hisses into the Nazi death chamber at Terezín at the terrifying conclusion of Freud’s Sister, obliterating the carefully preserved memories that comprise the novel, an air of paralyzing melancholia pervades virtually each page of this meditative work of fiction by a Macedonian writer born in 1975, whose appropriation of the private life of Freud’s youngest sister Adolfina and of the Holocaust generally is bold and unexpected. This is Smilevski’s third novel, and since it is a joint portrait of Adolfina Freud and her oldest sibling Sigmund, it dares to provide a kind of shadow biography of Freud that is highly critical of the “great…

A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States by Geoffrey C. Ward Knopf, 418 pp., $28.95 1. Did the notoriously lavish displays of the Gilded Age, which showed off the advantages of wealth on a hitherto unimaginable scale, inspire criminal behavior on the part of some of those unlucky enough to have to work for an honest living? Willa Cather seems to have thought so. Her classic short story “Paul’s Case,” first published in 1905, plays on at least two meanings of the word “case.” Subtitled “A Study in Temperament,” it is a psychological case study of a high school misfit in modest circumstances who longs to indulge…

To the Editors: I very much enjoyed the book review of The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House by Edward Klein written by Kwame Anthony Appiah [NYR, November 8], in which Appiah questions the truth of Klein’s assertion that Obama “never called the people who had brought him to the dance.” I was personally called by Klein during his research on this book and was asked to corroborate this claim. I told Klein that it was surely not true because I knew friends and neighbors who had supported Obama and were subsequently invited to the White House on a number of occasions. Not surprisingly, Klein seems not to have used his discussion with me in his writing. Kwame Anthony Appiah is quite correct in his doubt about this claim.…

To the Editors: In his review of my book, On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson [NYR, November 22], Tim Flannery claims that I misused the word “abysmal” in a discussion of early attempts to measure the deep ocean using sounding lines. Flannery believes the word I wanted “was abyssal.” He is incorrect. “Abysmal” refers to something that is like an abyss—such as the open ocean beyond the shallow continental shelf. It can also mean “unfathomable,” a perfectly literal description of the unknown and seemingly unknowable depth of the ocean that had not yielded to the usual sounding methods of the early nineteenth century. It is exactly the word I wanted. “Abyssal,” on the other hand, usually has a more particular meaning pertaining to biologic or…