Innholdsfortegnelse for February 7, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

Zero Dark Thirty a film directed by Kathryn Bigelow It is not unusual for filmmakers to try to inject authenticity into a movie's first frames by flashing onscreen words such as "based on real events." Yet the language chosen by the makers of Zero Dark Thirty to preface their film about events leading to the death of Osama bin Laden is distinctively journalistic: "Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events." As those words fade, "September 11, 2001" appears against a black screen and we hear genuine emergency calls made by victims of al-Qaeda's attack on the World Trade Center. One caller describes flames spreading around her and says that she is "burning up"; she pleads against death and then her voice disappears. Before any actor speaks a single fictional…

Following you westward along the steep ridge trail in January, I step in your snow-crisped tracks on oak and beech leaf parchment. The waterfall careers down among umbers and blacks of ice-filigreed rock past tattered moss, polishing the shale cliff to a dark gloss. Old mountains, these, wearing and worn. Through tree trunks, the edge of the gorge appears, and the opposite ridge bristling with spruce and thorn, and beyond, the valley, and the reservoir’s tarnished sheen, and still farther, hills gathering bluish weight as the sky pales. Through many seasons now, I’ve followed you along this path. With your camera, you’ve snapped thousands of scenes, and I’ve sketched the view from the look-out boulder to the opposite ledge wrapped in ice, or greenly fringed. But how to…

The first dive to a depth of a thousand feet was made in 1962 by Hannes Keller, an ebullient twenty-eight-year-old Swiss mathematician who wore half-rimmed glasses and drank a bottle of Coca-Cola each morning for breakfast. With that dive Keller broke a record he had set himself one year earlier, when he briefly descended to 728 feet. How he performed these dives without killing himself was a closely guarded secret. At the time, it was widely believed that no human being could safely dive to depths beyond three hundred feet. That was because, beginning at a depth of one hundred feet, a diver breathing fresh air starts to lose his mind. This condition, nitrogen narcosis, is also known as the Martini Effect, because the diver feels as if he has…

Silent House by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Robert Finn Knopf, 334 pp., $26.95 What does it mean to write “on the eve” fiction? In the first place, it means situating a novel’s characters in a wider landscape that is in social and political movement. There is, usually, nothing they can do to arrest or reverse these changes. They stand as outlines against a sky that is growing darker as a day of some kind draws to its end. (Fiction—or at least first-class fiction—in which “the eve” is presaging a dawn of bliss and fulfillment is rare indeed.) Everything that the characters do, or dream of, or fail to do is suffused with this awareness that the times have lost conviction, that proclamations of moral certainty have dried…

Japanese literature is often about nothing happening, because Japanese life is, too. There are few emphases in spoken Japanese—the aim is to remain as level, even as neutral, as possible—and in a classic work like The Tale of Genji, as one recent translator has it, “The more intense the emotion, the more regular the meter.” As in the old-fashioned England in which I grew up—though more unforgivingly so—an individual’s job in public Japan is to keep his private concerns and feelings to himself and to present a surface that gives little away. That the relation of surface to depth is uncertain is part of the point; it offers a degree of protection and lets you be yourself. The fewer words are spoken, the easier it is to believe you’re standing…

To the Editors: Janet Malcolm's series on Michelle Malakova and what has happened to her was terrifying [NYR, November 22, December 6, and December 20, 2012]. Here is an entire social service net that should be helping this girl—and what most of them seem to be doing is following a frightening path of self-interest. Lawyers and the judge seem to be operating outside the best interest of the young girl. I hope the articles have sparked a flame of critical inquiry into the levels of the judicial systems involved. Edward Burns New York City…

The Chopin Touch Charles Rosen How Chopin played the piano, though a puzzling question, is not beyond all conjecture. For almost the last hundred years, we have been given an image of the past by records and tapes, but that specious patent from oblivion is generally misleading and always distorted—and subtle distortions are the most difficult to compensate for (no recording will adjust to the acoustics of your living room as a live performer would). Before recording, we have only uncertain memories, twisted by time and prejudice, inaccurately set down, and letters or reviews, dusty, crumbling, and not to be trusted.... As a pianist, Chopin was largely self-taught (his only teachers were a composer and a violinist); he also did not like to practice, as letters from his father tell…

Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon Scribner, 962 pp., $37.50 In 1981, I completed my fellowship training in blood diseases and cancer, and took a junior faculty position at the University of California, Los Angeles. During that first year at UCLA, a young man was hospitalized with a rare form of pneumonia caused by Pneumocystis carinii. He died despite the most intensive measures. Not long after his death, more men struggling to breathe were diagnosed with this infection; others sought care for an unusual colitis, cytomegalovirus inflaming their bowel, and still more for high fevers and wasting from an avian microbe akin to tuberculosis. Then several arrived with red and purple tumors that grew to distort the face, swell the limbs, and…

Visual Art in the Oslo Opera House edited by Jørn Mortensen Press, 160 pp., $60.00 (paper) “A House to Die In” an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, September 25–November 18, 2012 1. Despite the persistent image of the architect as a heroic loner erecting monumental edifices through sheer force of will, the building art has always been a highly cooperative enterprise. Although the parti (basic organizing principle) of a design may sometimes be the product of one intelligence, the realization of a structure of even moderate complexity depends on a broad range of expertise seldom encompassed by any individual, no matter how singularly gifted. As an artistic endeavor, present-day architecture most closely resembles filmmaking, in which the prime creative mover, the director—even the most visionary of…

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of the Realm, 1940–1965 by William Manchester and Paul Reid Little, Brown, 1,182 pp., $40.00 A Daughter’s Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill’s Youngest Child by Mary Soames Random House, 356 pp., $28.00 1. But what did happen to the bust in the White House—or was it busts? One of the subplots to last year’s often dispiriting presidential election campaign was the fate of a bronze bust of a foreign politician born 138 years ago. As The New York Times reported, “the question of whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will occupy the White House has been overshadowed at times by the question of whether Winston Churchill will do so.” According to some accounts, a bust of Churchill has been at the White…

A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 US Invasion of Mexico by Amy S. Greenberg Knopf, 344 pp., $30.00 “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico,” said Ulysses S. Grant in 1879, more than thirty years after he had fought in that war as a young lieutenant. As he was dying of cancer in 1885, Grant re- asserted that the American war against Mexico was “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Like the adventure in Iraq more than a century later, it was a war of choice, not of necessity, a war of aggression that expanded the size of the United States by nearly one quarter and…

1. One turns to many sources to understand the character of Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president. There are his longtime fellow members in the Muslim Brotherhood, with whom he served time in Hosni Mubarak’s prison cells. (“He is steadfast, and pragmatic.”) There are his aides and advisers. (“He is a very careful listener,” “he is meticulous.”) There are his critics in the judiciary and the opposition parties. (“He is politically inept,” “he has the traits of a Pharaoh.”) There are the thousands of men and women who have taken to the streets against him. (“He is a puppet of the Brotherhood.”) And there are the ordinary people whose lives, quite by chance, have come to overlap with his. (A watermelon seller on a corner near his house told me this…

To the Editors: Tim Flannery in his review of the biography of Rachel Carson makes one mistake and that concerns pesticide use reduction in Canada [“A Heroine in Defense of Nature,” NYR, November 22, 2012]. The first Canadian province to ban the “cosmetic” use of specified pesticides and herbicides—i.e., for gardens and flowers, and not for commercial crops—was not Ontario (2009) but Quebec (2006). This was the result of grassroots activity at the local, municipal level and it was backed by a national organization, the Campaign for Pesticide Reduction (CPR!), of which a leading sponsor (surprisingly perhaps) was the Canadian Labour Congress. The ban was backed by the Canadian Cancer Society, the first of many moves in the direction of cancer prevention, versus cancer treatment and research. Quebec’s move to…

Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James Vintage, 514 pp., $15.95 (paper) “Touching yourself” was strictly forbidden in the Parks family. My father was an evangelical clergyman, my mother his zealous helper. The hand mustn’t stray below the belt, because such pleasures were always accompanied by evil, lascivious thoughts. Yet as Dusty Springfield memorably sang in “Son of a Preacher Man,” “being good isn’t always easy, no matter how hard I try,” and at thirteen for this son of a preacher man it was impossible. To get around the conflict—the sexual imperative and the fear of falling into sin—I would imagine going through the entire Anglican marriage ceremony with whatever girl was the object of my desire before allowing the hand to move to its inevitable destination; in this way,…

Representative Steve LaTourette of Ohio, a Republican, from his state’s very northeasternmost corner up by Lake Erie and Pennsylvania, is loyal to Speaker John Boehner, his fellow Ohioan, and—by today’s standards—a moderate conservative who has made his disdain for those to his right clear. He’s called members of the Tea Party “knuckle-draggers...that hate taxes.” In December, when the Speaker lacked the votes in his own House Republican caucus to support his “Plan B,” a proposal to limit tax increases sharply, after negotiations with the White House had broken down, LaTourette chalked the failure up to “the same forty, fifty chuckleheads that all year...have screwed this place up.” First elected in 1994, LaTourette came in with the Gingrich Revolution and was seen as a conservative in that era; but time and…

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False by Thomas Nagel Oxford University Press, 130 pp., $24.95 1. The history of science is partly the history of an idea that is by now so familiar that it no longer astounds: the universe, including our own existence, can be explained by the interactions of little bits of matter. We scientists are in the business of discovering the laws that characterize this matter. We do so, to some extent at least, by a kind of reduction. The stuff of biology, for instance, can be reduced to chemistry and the stuff of chemistry can be reduced to physics. Thomas Nagel has never been at ease with this view. Nagel, University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New…

Out of Palestine: The Making of Modern Israel by Hadara Lazar Atlas & Co., 290 pp., $25.95 The British rule over Palestine lasted roughly thirty years, from 1917 until 1948. In a country that has three thousand years of recorded history, thirty years is a tiny fraction. If we conceive of three thousand years on a scale of one day, the period of British rule takes barely eight minutes. In comparison, Turkish Ottoman rule over Palestine, which lasted four hundred years, takes an hour and forty minutes. Yet the influence of these thirty years was deep and wide-ranging.1 Under British rule, Palestine became a political unit, not a marginal province of something else. The British made Jerusalem the capital city of Palestine; they introduced the idea of professional civil service,…

To the Editors: I was flattered and pleased to see a review of my book, The Physics of Wall Street, in The New York Review [January 10]. However, Andrew Hacker’s characterization of the views in the book strike me as wide of the mark. If I may, I would like to offer a few clarifications. Hacker says my “one big idea” is that “insights that are commonplace in physics...are useful in studying virtually anything.” But the abbreviated quotation obscures the point I am trying to make in this passage. What I say is that “if physicists have been successful at improving our understanding of finance, it is because they have approached problems in a novel way, using methodological insights that are commonplace in physics (and engineering) and which are useful…

To the Editors: On February 6, 2013, at 6:00 pm, the Center for Public Scholarship at The New School will host a University in Exile event, "The Future of the Rule of Law and Human Rights in China," featuring Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist lawyer, recently permitted to leave China, in conversation with Jerome A. Cohen, Professor of Law and codirector of the US-Asia Law Institute at New York University School of Law, who was active in securing his release. To register or for more information, visit www.newschool.edu/cps/events. Arien Mack Professor of Psychology The New School for Social Research New York City…