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

Capital by John Lanchester Norton, 527 pp., $26.95 (to be published in paperback in May) When I moved to London for graduate school back in the early 1980s, the city felt as if it existed for just about every purpose other than for people to make money in it. Everyone was either on the dole or on strike, or about to be—and not just working-class people. No one appeared, or wanted to appear, all that interested in what they did for a living, except for the taxi drivers, who were better than those in the US. In the middle of any work day an extraordinary number of grown-ups looked as if they had just gotten out of bed. Nothing functioned properly; everything that wasn’t broken was about to fall apart.…

After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead by Alan S. Blinder Penguin, 476 pp., $29.95 Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main Street from Wall Street and Wall Street from Itself by Sheila Bair Free Press, 415 pp., $26.99 Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street by Neil Barofsky Free Press, 270 pp., $26.00 Two years ago, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner praised the widely criticized $700 billion bank bailout of late 2008—known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP—as “perhaps the most maligned yet most effective government program in recent memory.” By late 2010, losses to the government had turned out to be far lower than many feared. Since then, the Treasury has been repaid…

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We…

The Robert Lehman Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art/Princeton University Press; fifteen volumes I. Italian Painting by John Pope-Hennessy, assisted by Laurence B. Kanter 331 pp. (1987; out of print) II. Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Paintings by Charles Sterling, Maryan W. Ainsworth, Charles Talbot, Martha Wolff, Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Jonathan Brown, and John Hayes 245 pp., $130.00 III. Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Painting by Richard R. Brettell, Paul Hayes Tucker, and Natalie H. Lee 466 pp., $130.00 IV. Illuminations by Sandra Hindman, Mirella Levi d’Ancona, Pia Palladino, and Maria Francesca Saffiotti 240 pp., $145.00 V. Italian Fifteenth- to Seventeenth-Century Drawings by Anna Forlani Tempesti 388 pp. (1991; out of print) VI. Italian Eighteenth-Century Drawings by James B. Shaw and George Knox 261 pp. (1987; out of print) VII. Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Drawings by…

All In: The Education of General David Petraeus by Paula Broadwell, with Vernon Loeb Penguin, 394 pp., $29.95 The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War by Fred Kaplan Simon and Schuster, 418 pp., $28.00 The Fourth Star: Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe Three Rivers, 330 pp., $16.00 (paper) The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today by Thomas E. Ricks Penguin, 558 pp., $32.95 Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse Metropolitan, 370 pp., $30.00 Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam by Lewis Sorley Mariner, 395 pp., $15.95 (paper) The American Military and the Lessons of Vietnam: A Study…

The Question of Machiavelli Isaiah Berlin ...What has been shown by Machiavelli, who is often (like Nietzsche) congratulated for tearing off hypocritical masks, brutally revealing the truth, and so on, is not that men profess one thing and do another (although no doubt he shows this too) but that when they assume that the two ideals are compatible, or perhaps are even one and the same ideal, and do not allow this assumption to be questioned, they are guilty of bad faith (as the existentialists call it, or of “false consciousness,” to use a Marxist formula) which their actual behavior exhibits. Machiavelli calls the bluff not just of official morality—the hypocrisies of ordinary life—but of one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition, the belief in the ultimate…

Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism by Sarah Conly Cambridge University Press, 206 pp., $95.00 1. In the United States, as in many other countries, obesity is a serious problem. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to do something about it. Influenced by many experts, he believes that soda is a contributing factor to increasing obesity rates and that large portion sizes are making the problem worse. In 2012, he proposed to ban the sale of sweetened drinks in containers larger than sixteen ounces at restaurants, delis, theaters, stadiums, and food courts. The New York City Board of Health approved the ban. Many people were outraged by what they saw as an egregious illustration of the nanny state in action. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to choose a large bottle of…

The Round House by Louise Erdrich Harper, 321 pp., $27.99 Dense with meaning, both symbolic and literal, the first scene of Louise Erdrich’s fourteenth novel, the National Book Award–winning The Round House, involves an arduous attempt at the pruning of small trees that have “attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.” Only seedlings with very few leaves, the tiny predators have nonetheless managed to squeeze through cracks in shingles and into a wall: “I thought it was a wonder the treelets had persisted through a North Dakota winter.” The foundations of the Coutts household are under assault from without; father and son will unite to protect it, but belatedly, and incompletely. The narrator Joe, thirteen years old at this time, in 1988, continues to “pry at the hidden rootlings” after…

Can genes be patented? This spring, the Supreme Court will hear a case that may well decide the question, and the consequences for American biomedicine could be huge.1 Over three years ago, in May 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Public Patent Foundation (PPF) filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York seeking to overturn the patents on DNA isolated from two human genes.2 Called BRCA1 and BRCA2, the genes significantly increase a woman’s risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The main defendant was the Myriad Genetics Corporation, a biotechnology firm in Utah that controls the patents—and is legally entitled for the life of the patent (now twenty years) to exclude all others from using these genes in breast cancer…

Batman: Death by Design by Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor DC Comics, 112 pp., $24.99 One reason I’ve never been a fan of graphic novels is because a central aspect of literature for me has always been imagining what the things I’m reading about look like. I can tell you in great detail about not only the lush Parisian interiors of Jean Des Esseintes—an easy task, what with all the detail Huysmans gives us about the decadent duke’s taste in decor—but also the brave little Chinese-themed party that Carol Kennicott throws to brighten life in drab Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and the original Homer Simpson’s “queer” Irish–Spanish–New England cottage in LA’s Pinyon Canyon. Considering my specialization in architecture, I’m not surprised that the first graphic novel to thoroughly engage, not to…

To the Editors: The heart of John Searle’s criticism in his review of Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist [NYR, January 10] is that while information depends on an external observer, consciousness is ontologically subjective and observer-independent. That is to say, experience exists as an absolute fact, not relative to an observer: as recognized by Descartes, je pense donc je suis is an undeniable certainty. Instead, the information of Claude Shannon’s theory of communication is always observer-relative: signals are communicated over a channel more or less efficiently, but their meaning is in the eye of the beholder, not in the signals themselves. So, thinks Searle, a theory with the word “information” in it, like the integrated information theory (IIT) discussed in Confessions, cannot possibly begin to explain consciousness. Except for…

Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy by Douglas Smith Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pp., $30.00 When I was studying Russian at a British army language school in the 1950s, most of my teachers were Russian émigrés who had fled the Bolshevik Revolution. To a provincial like me they seemed a strange and exotic bunch. One bohemian used to walk around in a billowing duffel coat and baggy corduroys, with a long, ivory cigarette holder projecting skyward from his mouth. Another, with the stiff bearing of a former officer, was impeccably dressed in a suit and tie and invariably carried a gold-topped cane in one hand. A third was known to conduct some of his classes while lying down, or on hot days would speak from outside…

The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid edited by John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 570 pp., $39.95 1. On a train from Washington in March 1862, Nathaniel Hawthorne looked toward the Virginia shore of the Potomac River, occupied by Union troops, and “beheld the little town of Harper’s Ferry, gathered about the base of a round hill and climbing up its steep acclivity.” Hawthorne had returned two years earlier from diplomatic postings in Europe—he was in London at the time of John Brown’s midnight raid on Harpers Ferry on October 16, 1859—and he detected an unexpected resemblance between the picturesque town perched on the Virginia hillside and “the Etruscan cities which I have seen among the Apennines.” Hawthorne glanced at the ruins…

Now All Roads Lead to France: A Life of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis Norton, 388 pp., $29.95 Although the English poet Edward Thomas was born in 1878, Now All Roads Lead to France opens in 1913, when Thomas (already a widely published writer of prose) was thirty-five. A year later, encouraged by Robert Frost (then living in England), he wrote his first poems since his undergraduate days. On April 9, 1917, he was killed at the front in France. He is better known in England (with its appreciation of the poets of World War I) than in the United States. This new biography, written by the young English poet and Faber editor Matthew Hollis, was originally published by Faber in 2011 to considerable acclaim; the present book is a…

Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point by Subhankar Banerjee Seven Stories, 550 pp., $35.95 (to be published in paperback this summer) Like deserts, frozen places offer timelessness. When I was traveling in northeastern Siberia some years ago I saw gulag camps that had closed down in the 1950s, after Stalin’s death. The watchtowers, the barracks, the barbed wire, the fence lines where the guard dogs used to run—all had survived in amazingly good shape in their almost-year-round deep freeze. While working in Newfoundland on a story about icebergs, I learned that core samples of ice from Greenland’s glaciers, the source of many icebergs, provide scientists with data on global climates and atmospheres going back more than a hundred thousand years. Bubbles in glacial ice from two millennia ago contain…

To the Editors: Avishai Margalit errs in his book review essay [“Palestine: How Bad, & Good, Was British Rule?,” NYR, February 7]. He writes that the League of Nations Mandate over Palestine conferred on Britain was to prepare the country “to be a ‘national home for the Jews,’ without ‘impairing the civil and religious rights of the indigenous Arab people.’” That is quite wrong as the Mandate decision does not include the phrase “indigenous Arab people.” The phrase that actually appears is: “nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” Arabs, as such, are not mentioned. Political rights were the prerogative of the Jewish people. Residency rights, religious rights, personal liberty rights were to be assured. But nothing more than…