Innholdsfortegnelse for February 21, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds by Jim Sterba Crown, 343 pp., $26.00 Glancing out the kitchen window one sunny afternoon not long ago, I was startled to see two beautiful red foxes copulating in the garden. It was not the unabashed sexual display that was remarkable. Mating must be routine exercise out there, judging by the frequency with which brand-new rabbits can be seen eating the lawn, but foxes are another matter. This is an in-town garden at a well-trafficked intersection two blocks from the county courthouse, definitely not a fox-friendly location. A single fox doing nothing at all on this turf would be a newsworthy sight; two foxes engaged in propagating the species would seem to border on the unthinkable. Jim…

The Untold History of the United States a book and television series by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick Gallery Books, 750 pp., $30.00; Showtime, ten episodes Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s new book and accompanying ten-part televised documentary have a misleading title. Most if not all of the interpretations that they present in The Untold History of the United States—from the war in the Philippines to the one in Afghanistan—have appeared in revisionist histories of American foreign policy written over the last fifty years. Challenged by early reviewers, Stone and Kuznick have essentially conceded the point about their sources and claimed that what they call the “revisionist narrative” that informs their book has in truth become “the dominant narrative among university-based historians.” The real problem, they say, is that this…

Homeland a television series created by Alex Gansa Showtime, Season One, 4 DVDs, $59.98; Season Two, 4 DVDs, $59.98 (to be released August 27, 2013) One of the intriguing aspects of the gripping and widely praised Showtime drama Homeland, a story about the machinations of CIA counterterrorism analysts and their prey, is that it is fearlessly interested in every kind of madness: the many Shakespearean manifestations—cold revenge, war-induced derangement, outsized professional ambition—as well as the more naturally occurring expressions, such as bipolar disease and simple grief. Homeland ruthlessly pits these psychic states against one another in different permutations and settings, like contestants in The Hunger Games, to see which will win, which will die, which will kill or be killed, which will bond or marry or breed or starve.  Homeland’s…

History in the Making by J.H. Elliott Yale University Press, 249 pp., $26.00 Moved though they are by intellectual curiosity, historians often feel a personal affinity with the subjects they write about. In Britain, Roman Catholic scholars from David Knowles to Eamon Duffy have been drawn to the history of the medieval church and the monastic orders. Wartime experience with the Coldstream Guards in Italy encouraged Sir Michael Howard to turn to military history, just as a nonconformist upbringing helped to make Christopher Hill a historian of Puritanism. Sir Lewis Namier’s studies of the eighteenth-century English aristocracy derived from his fascination with their twentieth-century descendants; and given their political views, it is hardly surprising that E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm should have studied the history of labor movements. Nowadays we…

My father was single-minded to a fault. Painting took absolute priority in his life, and his wife and children—not to mention national events and international disasters—were all secondary. He painted during daylight hours wherever he happened to be. What he did for money remained a mystery, except that we evidently had very little of it and lived in a primitive farm cottage without electricity or running water. For my first five years my father was a distant figure, but at least he was living with us. In 1925, when I was six, my father, carrying his easel and paintbox, rode away on his bicycle and never came home again. For years my mother never mentioned or explained this fact. Later on, my brother Andrew and I would spend ten excruciating…

To the Editors: The film Zero Dark Thirty’s omission of an FBI critique of torture suggests that the writer and director chose not to question the morality, utility, and legality of enhanced interrogation perhaps because they themselves saw no reason to and assumed that moviegoers would agree [Steve Coll, “‘Disturbing’ & ‘Misleading,’” NYR, February 7]. Their film is an unapologetic police procedural of the Dirty Harry school in which CIA operatives torture an Arab who might lead them to Osama bin Laden. To raise moral objections would violate the genre. The film’s heroine, a young CIA agent, grimly oversees this mayhem despite the objections of her superiors that such primitive tactics are wasting their time and hers. True to the ageless formula, she is vindicated when bin Laden is located…

To the Editors: Your readers may be interested to know that this spring’s LIVE from the New York Public Library season, which begins on January 29, features a number of conversations with contributors to The New York Review, including Nathaniel Rich, Anne Carson, and Jim Holt. Other guests, many of whom have been discussed in the Review’s pages, include John Irving, Carlo Ginzburg, Nassim Nicholas Taleb with Daniel Kahneman, Adam Phillips, George Saunders with Dick Cavett, Sandra Day O’Connor, William Gibson, Junot Díaz, Daniel Dennett (with Jim Holt), David Chang, and Toni Morrison. For more information, I invite your readers to visit our website: www.nypl.org/live. Paul Holdengräber Director, LIVE from the NYPL The New York Public Library New York City…

President Obama’s nomination of his top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, to head the Central Intelligence Agency poses a genuine conundrum for those concerned about human rights. On the one hand, Brennan is associated in one way or another with some of the most controversial and troubling aspects of US counterterrorism policies. He is the architect—and principal public defender—of President Obama’s expanded “targeted killing” policy, which has deployed unmanned drones to kill hundreds of suspected terrorists without charge or trial. He was deputy executive director of the CIA between 2001 and 2003, when the agency was engaged in “rendering” terror suspects to secret prisons, where they were “disappeared,” often for years, and subjected to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and physical abuse. In December…

“Monsieur Daumier, Ihre Serie Ist Reizvoll!” Die Stiftung Kames [“Monsieur Daumier, Your Series Is Delightful!” The Kames Collection] an exhibition at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung München in the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, December 6, 2012–February 17, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition by Franziska Butze, Birgitta Heid, Christien Melzer, Silke Reiter, Alexander Roob, and Andreas Strobl Munich/Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 360 pp., €35.00 The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich has a remarkable new acquisition: over three thousand lithographs and thirty woodcuts by Honoré Daumier produced between 1833 and 1872, the politically and socially stormy decades in France between the reign of the Citizen King Louis Philippe and the Third Republic. In adding them to the more than seven hundred Daumier lithographs and woodcuts already in its possession, the museum now has the…

The Classical Tradition edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 1,067 pp., $49.95 1. Over a thousand pages in length, with some five hundred articles surveying the survival, transmission, and reception of the cultures of Greek and Roman antiquity, The Classical Tradition is a low-cost Wunderkammer, a vast cabinet of curiosities. Take the entry on the asterisk: you learn that this ubiquitous critical sign, named from the Greek for “small star,” originated in Ptolemaic Alexandria, where the great textual scholar Aristophanes of Byzantium and his student Aristarchus of Samothrace used them to mark repeated lines in the Iliad and Odyssey. Several centuries later the prolific (and self-mutilated) Christian theologian Origen began to employ asterisks in a different way, to signal the omission…

The Life of Objects by Susanna Moore Knopf, 240 pp., $25.00 In a brief acknowledgment at the end of The Life of Objects, Susanna Moore explains that the impulse to write her novel arose during her stay at the American Academy in Berlin in 2006. In a radio interview at the time of publication, she further explained that her protagonist’s Irish origins were not unlike those of her own grandmother. Such details may seem extraneous to the hermetic, almost mystical aura of her beautiful novel, and yet they provide some background to a story that runs the risk of apparent groundlessness. Why should a contemporary American, of all people, write yet another fiction about World War II? As I, too, discovered during a recent year in that city, it is…

On Politics: A History of Political Thought Book One: Herodotus to Machiavelli Book Two: Hobbes to the Present by Alan Ryan Liveright, two volumes, 1,114 pp., $75.00 The Making of Modern Liberalism by Alan Ryan Princeton University Press, 670 pp., $39.50 What do we need to know about Bartolus of Sassoferrato? Most of us have never heard of him, but in his time—he was born in 1313 in the Marche region of Italy—Bartolus was famous as a political thinker. Though he roamed between Italian cities like Bologna, Pisa, and Perugia, Bartolus confronted a world still haunted by the idea—in fact, two ideas—of universal empire: the empire of Western Christendom, under the God-given authority of the pope, and the Holy Roman Empire, under the authority of someone who was supposedly the…

To the Editors: I find it odd that the recent correspondence in The New York Review concerning the existence/nonexistence of God has been conducted as if this subject were something new [Letters, November 8, 2012, December 6, 2012, and January 10, 2013]. For proof of His existence, ESP and individual cosmic sentiments or intuition (sensus divinitatis) have been proposed, and the existence of evil is cited as evidence of His nonexistence (which has been an argument in Western philosophy since the time of Socrates). Surely no scientific demonstration of God’s existence is available, the evidence in the matter being (literally) infinite and therefore invulnerable to scientific generalization. Nor, for the same reason, is God’s nonexistence scientifically provable. In modern terms, the proposition that God exists can neither be scientifically demonstrated…

I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen by Sylvie Simmons Ecco, 570 pp., $27.99 1. Leonard Cohen’s songs mix the sleazy and the sacred in ways that break down both categories. This music, delivered in Cohen’s nasal non-voice, often played on cheap synthesizers, shoddily produced, sometimes badly recorded and unreliably distributed, nevertheless finds unlikely access to words like “holy,” “saint,” and “prayer” as though to transcend its origins in the gut and the loins. Cohen has attracted many disciples and inspired many conversions. He is one of the most beloved figures in modern pop, but everyone who listens to Cohen feels he has bailed him out of impending obscurity. He is a kind of permanent alternative to whatever it is you’ve been listening to: I came to him after…

In 1993, approaching my sixtieth birthday, I started to experience a curious phenomenon—the spontaneous, unsolicited rising of early memories into my mind, memories that had lain dormant for upward of fifty years. Not merely memories, but frames of mind, thoughts, atmospheres, and passions associated with them—memories, especially, of my boyhood in London before World War II. Moved by these, I wrote two short memoirs, one about the grand science museums in South Kensington, which were so much more important than school to me when I was growing up; the other about Humphry Davy, an early-nineteenth-century chemist who had been a hero of mine in those far-off days, and whose vividly described experiments excited me and inspired me to emulation. I think a more general autobiographical impulse was stimulated, rather than…

At 2 AM on March 15, 1988, I received a phone call from my mother in Winter Park, Florida, telling me that my father, who was dying of prostate cancer, had taken a pistol from his bedside table and shot himself, preferring to die instantly from the bullet instead of slowly from cancer. He had undergone a series of treatments over several years that held the disease at bay, but now there were no more treatments to be had, and he was rapidly becoming incapacitated. A man of almost obsessive independence, he was unwilling to become helpless and die by inches. Since then, I’ve often thought about the loneliness of his last few moments as he mustered the courage to shoot himself. My mother was sleeping in the next room,…

The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond Viking, 499 pp., $36.00 Thank goodness for being WEIRD—for living in a Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic world rather than in prehistory. Otherwise life might be an endless round of tribal warfare and diarrhea. I might have to strangle my sister if her husband died and kill my newborn baby if it looked on the weak side, although I could probably leave that task to its mother. How lovely to be WEIRD: to have the prospect of death by heart attack or cancer, to breathe polluted air, and to live in crowded cities full of lonely old people and maladjusted children. Although there are advantages, we have paid a heavy price for choosing to leave…

The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate by Robert D. Kaplan Random House, 403 pp., $28.00 When maps were introduced into Ottoman schools in the 1860s, conservative Muslims—people we would now call Salafists—were so outraged that they ripped them off classroom walls and threw them down the latrines. Though Muslim geographers such as Muhammad al-Idrisi (1099–1166) had produced serviceable maps, they were not widely available and for most of Ottoman history the spatial configuration of territory in two dimensions had been largely restricted to military specialists. The images available to the sultan’s subjects and to others pondering his domains were for the most part verbal, with reference to imprecise formulas such as Memaliki Mahrusi Shahane—“divinely protected imperial possessions.” The imaginary—the…

To the Editors: For readers who have noted that my review of the “Late Raphael” exhibition [NYR, January 10] refers to the “apocalyptic beasts” in Raphael’s The Vision of Ezekiel and that the caption to the tapestry version of that painting on page 63 identifies them as “symbols of the evangelists”: the beasts in Raphael’s painting are straight out of Ezekiel 1. Medieval artists assimilated them to the four evangelists. Raphael was working with Hebrew texts in the second decade of the sixteenth century with the help of his friend Egidio da Viterbo, who read Hebrew well, and because Raphael painted the prophet Isaiah in Egidio’s church of Sant’Agostino circa 1512, I assume that this Ezekiel is likewise a meditation on the Hebrew Bible. But meanings are layered in early-sixteenth-century…