Innholdsfortegnelse for April 4, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage by Jeffrey Frank Simon and Schuster, 434 pp., $30.00 As a greenhorn in the White House press corps in 1954, one of the first rules I learned was not to speak truth to strangers about the president’s smile. That smile, so warm, so irresistibly friendly, was part of the genial image that made Dwight Eisenhower a figure admired, in some sense beloved, by millions who knew him only from wartime newspaper photographs and an occasional newsreel shot. The smile made it easy to call him “Ike,” as millions did in those years, and being called “Ike” made him seem like a familiar American folk hero: the “regular guy” who walked with kings but kept the common touch—in the present-day cliché, a…

As bits and pieces of the Obama administration’s legal justifications for its drone attacks trickle out, what is most striking is their deliberate ambiguity. The recent Justice Department “White Paper,” for example, is meant to give the impression that, at least for US citizen targets, the program has been carefully reviewed by lawyers, but it seems written to maximize the program’s latitude.1 That is obviously troubling for people who believe that the United States should conduct its counterterrorism operations in accordance with international law. It also sets a worrying precedent as other governments inevitably develop their own drone programs. What does international human rights and humanitarian law require? Not necessarily abolition of the drone program. Yes, there is something disconcerting about drone operators killing their targets from the comfort and…

It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer’s life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer’s works. In Beethoven’s case, one mustn’t forget that in 1802, the year he was contemplating suicide—as he wrote in an unsent letter to his brothers that came to be known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament”—he also composed the Second Symphony, one of his works that was most positive in spirit, thus showing us that it is of vital importance to separate his music from his personal biography and not to conflate the two. Therefore, I will not aim here to provide an elaborate psychological study of the man Beethoven through an analysis of his works, or vice versa. In fact, although the focus of…

P.G. Wodehouse: A Life in Letters edited by Sophie Ratcliffe Norton, 602 pp., $35.00 1. Two great English writers, both born in 1903 and not so dissimilar in background, stood far apart in their work and their beliefs: George Orwell the socialist agnostic essayist (and novelist) and Evelyn Waugh the conservative Catholic novelist (and essayist). But they knew one another—Waugh visited Orwell in the sanatorium where he was dying—and they admired each other. At the time of his death Orwell was planning an essay on Waugh, with the faintly condescending theme that he was as good a writer as it was now possible to be while holding intolerable opinions, and in 1946 Waugh admiringly reviewed the first collection of Orwell’s essays. A further link between the two was their shared…

Middle C by William H. Gass Knopf, 395 pp., $28.95 In the attic of his college-owned Victorian house, Professor Joseph Skizzen sits surrounded by horror. The walls are all covered with “atrocity pictures, some of them classics,” like the naked girl running along the Vietnamese highway. But there’s also a set of Goya etchings, “in poor reproductions to be sure,” and then Grünewald and Grosz as well as “machine-gunned refugees...photographs of instruments of persuasion...buffalo hunts, seal cubs as they were being clubbed...[and] notable assassinations.” He keeps a pair of scissors in every room of the house, ready to snip any suitably appalling bit from the newspaper, and now has boxes of clippings about executions and rigged elections. Bookshelves hold the Newgate Calendar along with volumes on all forms of “racial…

The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 by Bernard Bailyn Knopf, 614 pp., $35.00 A half-century ago the historian Herbert Butterfield usefully distinguished between “studies” and “stories” as ways of writing about the past. Studies were exercises in analytical scholarship: they presented evidence in the form of arguments that answered carefully defined questions, and were typically static. Stories showed past worlds in motion, as places in which the reader “can never quite guess...what is going to happen next.” Butterfield argued that historical writing, at best, would be Bernard Bailyn, Adams University Professor Emeritus at Harvard, makes a nod to Butterfield in presenting The Barbarous Years as a series of “studies within stories,” analyses of episodes woven into a complex narrative of the seventeenth-century…

So wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, the leading exponent of “judicial restraint,” which holds that unelected judges should not invalidate legislation adopted by the people’s representatives unless it clearly violates the written Constitution, so as not to impose their own “personal views.” But what happens when justices ostensibly committed to this core principle of conservatism confront a long-standing civil rights statute that offends their view that law should be color-blind, even if the world is not? On February 27, 2013, the Supreme Court’s conservative justices appeared ready to abandon all judicial restraint as the Court heard oral argument in Shelby County v. Holder, a case from Alabama challenging the constitutionality of a central provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That provision requires specific states and counties, each with clear records…

To the Editors: Thank you for publishing Jerome Groopman’s review of Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree [NYR, February 7]. I have four additional comments based on half a century of experience with a deaf daughter, her friends, and the schools she attended. The first is that there seems to be a major difference between those born profoundly deaf, as was my daughter, and those who had even minimal hearing for a short time after birth. My experience suggests that this is, at least in part, because the child born deaf takes a considerable time to understand what sound is. In my daughter’s experience, this meant that she missed what appears to be the crucial year or two during which hearing children begin to learn spoken language. While I am…

Everything is filled with you, and everything is filled with me: the towns are full, just as the cemeteries are full of you, all the houses are full of me, all the bodies. I wander down streets losing things I gather up again: parts of my life that have turned up from far away. I wing myself toward agony, I see myself dragging through a doorway, through creation's latent depths. Everything is filled with me: with something yours and memory lost, yet found again, at some other time. A time left behind decidedly black, indelibly red, golden on your body. Pierced by your hair, everything is filled with you, with something I haven't found, but look for among your bones.…

Monsieur Proust’s Library by Anka Muhlstein Other Press, 141 pp., $19.95 Proust was a great reader, as are all his characters. He wrote, “Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature.” Books are often the subject of his characters’ conversations and disputes. Certain authors are associated with the leading characters (Racine is the narrator’s mother’s favorite). Books often influence the themes and even the structure of Remembrance of Things Past (Charlus is obviously a descendant of Balzac’s imperious, mercurial, homosexual master criminal Vautrin). Proust’s style seems to owe a lot to his translations of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies and The Bible of Amiens; his complex syntax and parenthetical interpellations sound more like the great English Victorian…

Oscar Niemeyer by Philip Jodidio Taschen, 96 pp., $9.99 (paper) Architecture of Brazil, 1900–1990 by Hugo Segawa Springer, 266 pp., $119.00 Lessons from Modernism: Environmental Design Considerations in 20th Century Architecture, 1925–1970 an exhibition at the Cooper Union, New York City, January 29–March 16, 2013 1. When Oscar Niemeyer died on December 5, 2012, ten days before his 105th birthday, he was universally regarded as the very last of the twentieth century’s major architectural masters, an astonishing survivor whose most famous accomplishment, Brasília, was the climactic episode of utopian High Modern urbanism. That logistical miracle and social adventure took just three and a half years from conception to completion, yet fell far short of its transformative intentions. It was the most audacious planning scheme in a century that saw…

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks Knopf, 326 pp., $26.95 Oliver Sacks is the scientist-as-artist, a rare species nowadays but one that flourished in the mid-nineteenth century and that almost single-handedly he has kept alive. His sensibility is Victorian in the best meaning of the word: reformist, literary, historical—empirical of course but speculative as well, in the tradition of the grand theorists of that less specialized time. As a neurologist, Sacks is a clinician above all, an unusually close listener to his patients’ symptoms and stories. He prefers to look through a wide-angle lens rather than a microscope. His impulse is to amplify his observations, to look beyond the minute workings of the brain to the varieties of human experience itself, something he has done much to map out in the medical…

Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), Paradise Lost 2: Revelations (2000), Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory (2011) three films directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky HBO, three DVDs, each $26.95–$29.95; boxed set $49.95 West of Memphis a film directed by Amy Berg Sony Pictures, to be released on DVD in August Life After Death by Damien Echols Blue Rider Press, 399 pp., $26.95 In May 1993, Jason Baldwin was a skinny redheaded teenager whose favorite activities were listening to Metallica records and fishing behind the trailer where he lived with his mother. His cat, Charlie, would sit beside him; whenever he caught a fish, he fed it to Charlie. Baldwin was sixteen that year, but he looked no older than twelve. In an interview filmed at…

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald Delacorte, 254 pp., $27.00 In his ill-fated attempt to win a Senate seat in 1858, Abraham Lincoln squared off against the incumbent, Democrat Stephen Douglas, in a series of seven debates that centered on the issue of slavery. Lincoln, of course, was the candidate in favor of equal treatment under the law for the black populace. Here is an excerpt from those debates, in which Lincoln reveals his feelings about black people themselves, aligning himself as much as possible with the political correctness of his time: This doesn’t sound like the man who freed the slaves, but Lincoln didn’t see an inconsistency in advocating for civil rights while holding a belief in white supremacy. As he…

The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine—Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary by Jenny Uglow Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 332 pp., $28.00 In the county of Cumbria far to the north of England, a land of ancient feudings alongside the Scottish border, stands a small stone village church built in 1842. So remarkable is this building that it stops in their tracks almost everyone who sees it. The Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti after visiting St. Mary’s church at Wreay in 1869 described it as a real work of genius, “a most beautiful thing.” A century on, the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner judged it “a most impressive and in some ways amazingly forward-pointing building,” astonishing in its originality. A contemporary British architectural authority, Sir Simon Jenkins, Chairman of…

To the Editors: We are pleased that Helen Epstein took our book, Lead Wars, and the issues that it raises, so seriously [NYR, March 21]. The tragedy of the Kennedy Krieger case is that it is emblematic of a much broader societal failure to protect America’s children. We are particularly gratified that she emphasized two of the major themes of the book: first, that in light of the conservative onslaught of the past three decades and the growing identification of low-level environmental threats as a source of chronic disease and damage, public health has constricted its historic mission of prevention. Second, as we describe, the public health profession’s power emanates from the political and social movements that it is embraced by, and which it embraces, not necessarily from its scientific…

Drawing Surrealism an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 21, 2012–January 6, 2013; and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, January 25–April 21, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition by Leslie Jones, with contributions by Isabelle Dervaux and Susan Laxton Los Angeles County Museum of Art/DelMonico/Prestel, 239 pp., $60.00 “Drawing Surrealism” is an exhibition that puts us in two minds, which befits an art movement that sought the release of unconscious drives. The Morgan Library and Museum’s show, organized with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is one of the few major efforts ever to look at the wide range of drawings, collages, and other kinds of work on paper done both by well-known associates of Surrealism such as Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Max…

Afghanistan from the Cold War Through the War on Terror by Barnett R. Rubin Oxford University Press, 504 pp., $34.95 Talibanistan: Negotiating the Borders Between Terror, Politics, and Religion edited by Peter Bergen with Katherine Tiedemann Oxford University Press, 496 pp., $24.95 (paper) Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973–2012 by Vahid Brown and Don Rassler Columbia University Press, 320 pp., $35.00 A very strange idea has spread in the Western media concerning Afghanistan: that the US military is withdrawing from the country next year, and that the present Afghan war has therefore entered into an “endgame.” The use of these phrases reflects a degree of unconscious wishful thinking that amounts to collective self-delusion. In fact, according a treaty signed by the United States and the Karzai administration, US military…

Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance by Arvind Subramanian Peterson Institute for International Economics, 216 pp., $21.95 (paper) The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy by Edward N. Luttwak Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 310 pp., $26.95 Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 by Odd Arne Westad Basic Books, 515 pp., $32.00 During the turbulent Maoist era from the 1950s to 1970s, China clashed militarily with some of its most important neighbors—India, Vietnam, the Soviet Union—and embarked on disastrous interventions in Indonesia and Africa. But by the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping had put China on a development-first policy, advising the country to “hide its capacities and bide its time.” This wasn’t exactly reassuring—implying that at some point China would reveal its true intentions—but from the…

Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya by Ethan Mordden St. Martin’s, 334 pp., $29.99 Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya is the title Ethan Mordden gives to his new work on these two major twentieth-century musical artists. But the relationship between Weill and Lenya was less a feverish romance than a very practical partnership, not so much a tender love song as one of Weill’s bereft Benares ballads. This is not to suggest that the couple’s feelings for each other were lacking in affection. Their marriage was fostered by deep personal connections and mutual tastes. But Lenya, who enjoyed a brief career as a teenage prostitute, was compulsively unfaithful to Weill throughout their lives together, both with men and with women. She…

1933 a series of sixty-six films released in 1933, at Film Forum, New York City, February 8–March 7, 2013 New York’s Film Forum—one of the most enterprising movie theaters in the city—has been throwing a most elaborate eightieth birthday party, comprising sixty-six feature films, and a wealth of selected extras, from the year 1933—a year elsewhere commemorated by recollections of the ascension to power, in January, of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor, and the swearing-in, in March, of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president in the midst of economic disaster. The disaster had by then spread to the previously invulnerable movie industry, which was beset by bankruptcies and operating mostly in the red. Yet though signposts of unease—a sense of slippery collapse and the apprehension of worse to come—are all…

I wandered into Lit 311 at the beginning of my sophomore year at Cornell in September 1954. It was not that I had any interest in European literature, or any literature. I was just shopping for a class that met on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings so that I wouldn’t have any Saturday classes, and “literature” also filled one of the requirements for graduation. It was officially called “European Literature of the Nineteenth Century,” but unofficially called “Dirty Lit” by the Cornell Daily Sun, since it dealt with adultery in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. The professor was Vladimir Nabokov, an émigré from tsarist Russia. About six feet tall and balding, he stood, with what I took to be an aristocratic bearing, on the stage of the two-hundred-fifty-seat lecture hall…

The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious. They say that though they do not believe in a “personal” god, they nevertheless believe in a “force” in the universe “greater than we are.” They feel an inescapable responsibility to live their lives well, with due respect for the lives of others; they take pride in a life they think well lived and suffer sometimes inconsolable regret at a life they think, in retrospect, wasted. They find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about the vast…

I had no idea why I was so absorbed in James Baldwin’s novel, Giovanni’s Room, but everyone else in the car knew. My father had been driving for so long he gripped the wheel with paper towels. It was 1967 and we were days from Indianapolis on our way to Disney Land. We were actually on Route 66 and I didn’t care. I was thirteen years old and I wasn’t causing trouble, sitting between my two sisters with Baldwin’s novel about a man’s love for another man in my face. I remember my mother glancing back at me. We’d driven through a dust storm a while ago, but I’d missed it. Soon enough I had Another Country, Baldwin’s best seller, stashed away with what I considered porn. I’d not read…