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

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil Viking, 336 pp., $27.95 According to Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil is an So he is a computer engineer specializing in word recognition technology, with a side interest in bold predictions about future machines. He is not a professional neuroscientist or psychologist or philosopher. Yet here we have a book purporting to reveal—no less—“the secret of human thought.” Kurzweil is going to tell us, in no uncertain terms, “how to create a mind”: that is to say, he has a grand theory of the human mind, in which its secrets will be finally revealed. These are strong claims indeed, and one looks forward eagerly to learning what this new theory will look like. Perhaps at first one feels…

The town of Konna lies along the eastern bank of the Niger River in central Mali, a semi-desert, speckled with thorn trees, that turns vibrantly green during the brief summer rains. For nearly a year, since rebel Tuaregs—the nomadic Berber people who live in the interior Sahara region of North Africa—and Islamic militants seized control of northern Mali, this settlement of 20,000 marked the limit of government-held territory. Five hundred troops in pickup trucks with mounted machine guns stood guard in the bush just north of the town. Beyond lay empty scrubland and a paved road to Timbuktu and Gao, the two main population centers under the jihadists’ control. On Wednesday night, January 9, forty pickup trucks filled with Islamist fighters and heavy weaponry descended on Konna. Taken by surprise,…

La Folie Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso, translated from the Italian by Alastair McEwen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 337 pp., $35.00 “Il faut être absolument moderne,” wrote Rimbaud, but for Baudelaire, his immediate predecessor in the dissenting chair of French poetry, the matter was considerably more fraught. Roberto Calasso remarks that he “abhorred the new that the world was throwing up in abundance all around him, yet the new was both the host and demon indispensable to what he wrote.” After all, “the modern was everything Baudelaire had come across.” Jules Laforgue, another of his heirs, drew up an impressive list of his firsts: In his notes Laforgue listed Baudelaire’s attributes: “cat, Hindu, Yankee, Episcopal alchemist”—“Yankee” to mean “excessive.” And yet, Calasso points out, “All his poetry seems translated from Latin.…

Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children by Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner University of California Press/ Milbank Memorial Fund, 298 pp., $34.95 (to be published in April) 1. In December 1993, a slum landlord in Baltimore named Lawrence Polakoff rented an apartment to a twenty-one-year-old single mother and her three-year-old son, Max.1 A few days after they moved in, Max’s mother was invited to participate in a research study comparing how well different home renovation methods protected children from lead poisoning, which is still a major problem endangering the health of millions of American children, many of them poor. Congress had banned the sale of interior lead paint in 1978, but it remained on the walls of millions of homes nationwide, and there was…

Around 1990 Daniel Halpern wrote to invite me to contribute to a translation project that he was beginning to assemble, asking a number of contemporary poets to translate two cantos each of Dante’s Inferno. I told him that I had said for years that there were degrees in the impossibility of translating poetry, and that Dante, the real, unique life of Dante’s Commedia, could not be conjured into English. Dan did not take that for an answer, but said, “Take a while to consider.” Then he baited the hook by saying, “If you did decide to do it, which cantos would you choose?” As I pondered Dan’s question, I thought of a passage in the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno, which I had read, in translation, when I was eighteen,…

The spectacle of the Republicans, like teenagers longing to be invited to the prom, floundering about in search of more popularity with American voters, would be comical if it didn’t reflect a near collapse of a workable political system. The Republicans are angry. They had firmly believed that the voters wouldn’t possibly reelect Barack Obama for a second term and that they would retake the Senate. Erroneous polling assumptions fueled their dreams of controlling both of the elected branches, giving them power to reverse most or all of Obama’s policies and impose their own philosophy on the economy. Exhilarated going into election night, they were totally unprepared for the thumping loss they sustained. That left them in a state of shock, and sensing that somehow they had been had. As…

To the Editors: The review of three recent books on Saudi Arabia by Hugh Eakin injects the contention by Dr. Robert Vitalis that Aramco “brutally exploited” its Saudi workers in the decades after World War II [“Will Saudi Arabia Ever Change?” NYR, January 10]. This assertion cannot go unchallenged. In the years following the signing of a concession agreement in 1933, many thousands of Saudis joined the company, attracted by regular wages, health care, and training. Saudi merchants were, in fact, critical of this development since they could offer nothing comparable. Following World War II, there were strikes by Saudi workers but the unrest was generated by the real and significant difference in living conditions between American and Saudi employees. There were no claims of actual exploitation—denying just wages to…

After the iron curtain descended, what Winston Churchill in 1946 could still call the “famous cities” of Eastern Europe came to seem oriental and mysterious. East and West became different worlds, divided by military alliances, economic systems, and ideologies. Those who sought ways through and around the iron curtain had to rely on ideas that preceded and might outlast the geopolitical division, and conversations that would in the meantime seem enlightening on both sides. The Polish thinker Krzysztof Michalski, who died on February 11 in Vienna, was one of the few who found such ways, and he became one of the architects of the Europe that emerged after the end of communism. Born in Warsaw, he devoted his life to the risky proposition that philosophical discussion, in the right setting,…

On the Road a film directed by Walter Salles The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac by Joyce Johnson Viking, 489 pp., $32.95 Jack Kerouac was turned on by the cinema and he fancied himself as Jean Gabin in The Lower Depths. The Renoir film, adapted from the play by Maxim Gorky, was showing one evening in 1940 at the Apollo Theatre in Times Square and the young Columbia footballer sat in the balcony and felt moved by the image of the sainted figure who emerges out of despair. In time to come, Kerouac the writer would appear as a pioneer fixated on the journey west, but it was another direction, the journey down, that really captured him. If we accept Yeats’s notion that the imagination…

Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War by Frank Costigliola Princeton University Press, 533 pp., $35.00 What was once Roosevelt Square (in Hungarian: Roosevelt tér) near the left-bank entrance to the glorious old Chain Bridge across the Danube River in Budapest has been recently renamed. Following its dedication, in 1947, by a freshly democratic city council to the memory of the great statesman who had done so much to help defeat fascism, Roosevelt Square survived the Communist takeover, the Stalinist tyranny, the 1956 anti-Soviet uprising, the Communist revenge, Goulash Communism, and the 1989 triumph of parliamentary democracy. But in the spring of 2011, a newly elected right-leaning city council removed the president’s name from the square. All through the turbulent years from 1948 to 1989, while…

Poems 1962–2012 by Louise Glück Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 634 pp., $40.00 Louise Glück’s poems tend to start up close: there is no scene-setting, no “driving to the interior” (Elizabeth Bishop’s phrase). Instead a voice addresses you from somewhere very nearby. You might find yourself, for example, in the middle of an argument. The tone is detached, frequently angry, sometimes ironic, always austere. Over fifty years and through eleven collections, her work reads like a journal, albeit one that is refined and refined to its essence. A Glück poem is determined to wrest meaning from circumstance, to force a pattern over the chaos of a lived life. (She writes, in her introduction to The Best American Poetry 1993, “poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the…

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French Penguin, 260 pp., $26.00; $16.00 (paper) An ordinary winter evening in the Legation Quarter of Peking, where foreign embassies and consulates were located, January 7, 1937. Cold. The heavy sound of Japanese armored cars, out on patrol down the busy shopping streets that flank the Forbidden City. (Japan would occupy the city seven months later.) The martial sounds and the crowds seem not to distract a couple of teenage girls as they make their plans to go skating for an hour or so, under the arc lights of the newly constructed French ice rink. They leave open the question of where they might meet later in the evening. There are…

To the Editors: In his error-riddled review of our Untold History of the United States book and ten-part Showtime documentary film series [NYR, February 21], Sean Wilentz accuses us of “cherry-picking,” a pejorative term for selecting which facts to include and which to exclude from one’s narrative. This, at least, is a process with which Wilentz is quite familiar. On January 28, Efraín Ríos Montt, the former dictator of Guatemala, was indicted on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for his brutal 1980s massacres of Guatemalan peasants. In December 1982, in the village of Dos Erres, the Guatemalan army slaughtered 160 people, swinging sixty-five children by their feet and smashing their heads against the rocks. Just the previous day, Ronald Reagan had complained that Ríos Montt had gotten a…

On Not Prosecuting Civil Disobedience How should the government deal with those who disobey the draft laws out of conscience? Many people think the answer is obvious: the government must prosecute the dissenters, and if they are convicted it must punish them. Some people reach this conclusion easily, because they hold the mindless view that conscientious disobedience is the same as lawlessness. They think that the dissenters are anarchists who must be punished before their corruption spreads. Many lawyers and intellectuals come to the same conclusion, however, on what looks like a more sophisticated argument. They recognize that disobedience to law may be morally justified, but they insist that it cannot be legally justified, and they think that it follows from this truism that the law must be enforced.... But…

Piero della Francesca in America an exhibition at the Frick Collection, New York City, February 12–May 19, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition by Nathaniel Silver, with essays by James R. Banker and Machtelt Israëls, and an appendix by Giacomo Guazzini and Elena Squillantini Frick Collection, 149 pp., $27.50 (paper) Why is Piero della Francesca so different from other quattrocento artists? The longer one contemplates his work, the more imperative that question becomes. It haunts the viewer of the current exhibition at the Frick Collection, where more paintings by Piero are brought together in one room than anywhere except in Arezzo. The seven paintings in this exhibition, four of which belong to the Frick, are not the very greatest of Piero’s works, but they exemplify much of his achievement. Four of…

The Lion Sleeps Tonight and Other Stories of Africa by Rian Malan Grove, 317 pp., $25.00 Late on the night of June 17, 1992, a formation of armed Zulu men emerged from a migrant labor barracks in the Vaal Triangle, south of Johannesburg. Bearing spears, machetes, clubs, and the odd submachine gun, and fortified by traditional battle magic, the war party descended on the little township of Boipatong and began a house-to-house slaughter. The men were soldiers of the largely Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party, wreaking vengeance on a town loyal to the rival African National Congress. The death toll would reach forty-nine men, women, and children, making it the gravest in a line of modern South African massacres. In The Lion Sleeps Tonight, a selection of his magazine work, Rian…

What’s a Dog For? The Surprising History, Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Man’s Best Friend by John Homans Penguin, 258 pp., $25.95 The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout by Jill Abramson
 St. Martin’s Griffin, 242 pp., $14.99 (paper) Not more than a few paragraphs into her winsome account of raising a golden retriever puppy named Scout, based on the column she wrote for the newspaper she runs, New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson inadvertently answers the title question of John Homans’s What’s a Dog For? It’s the first time she has set eyes on her new dog, which has caused Abramson to reflect on her old dog, a grouchy West Highland terrier named Buddy: “I was madly in love and forgave Buddy all his sins,” she writes.…

From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 by John Connelly Harvard University Press, 376 pp., $35.00 The history of Christian viciousness toward Jews is too grotesque for credence. As a character in a James McCourt novel says, in a very different context, “I can’t believe her!... So I won’t.” Some Catholics at the Second Vatican Council said that the charge of deicide against the Jews was so silly it should not be dignified with a refutation. John Connelly in his book From Enemy to Brother writes that the American Jesuit John Courtney Murray actually claimed that he had not heard the charge until he was forty. In the same way, deniers of anti-black prejudice in America forget that there was slavery, or say it…

And Bid Him Sing: A Biography of Countée Cullen by Charles Molesworth University of Chicago Press, 288 pp., $30.00 A generous selection of Longfellow’s poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy, is available from the Library of America; a scanned edition of James Russell Lowell’s poems is ready for your Kindle; and Honor Moore makes her case for Amy Lowell in the American Poets Project series. But we don’t read these poets anymore, not really. Some people read Edna St. Vincent Millay still, but probably most would be convinced by Edmund Wilson’s portrait of her as a romantic figure who by the 1940s had outlived her moment of outrageousness. There are a multitude of reasons why a writer goes out of fashion, which isn’t always the same as being forgotten. Longfellow, these…

To the Editors: Oliver Sacks is evidently unaware that Freud’s retrospective reports that his patients in the mid-1890s “gave him accounts of having been sexually seduced or abused in childhood” have been refuted by a number of scholars in recent decades [“Speak, Memory,” NYR, February 21]. Freud’s 1896 theory of the etiology of hysteria and obsessional neurosis was predicated on the notion that his patients had unconscious memories of experiences of sexual abuse in early childhood, and at the time he stated that “before they come for analysis the patients know nothing about these [conjectured] scenes,” and indeed during the course of their treatment “assure me emphatically of their unbelief.” As he wrote, “The [sexual] scenes must be present as unconscious memories; only so long as, and in so far…