Innholdsfortegnelse for April 25, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

The Digital Public Library of America, to be launched on April 18, is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge. How is that possible? In order to answer that question, I would like to describe the first steps and immediate future of the DPLA. But before going into detail, I think it important to stand back and take a broad view of how such an ambitious undertaking fits into the development of what we commonly call an information society. Speaking broadly, the DPLA represents the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism. The utopian tendency marked the Republic at its birth, for the United States…

The Civil War and American Art an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., November 16, 2012–April 28, 2013, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, May 21–September 2, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition by Eleanor Jones Harvey. Smithsonian American Art Museum/Yale University Press, 316 pp., $65.00 Taken simply as an exhibition of paintings and photographs, the works that make up “The Civil War and American Art,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, form a muffled and somehow scattered, even numbing, display. In pictures that date from 1852 to 1877 but were mostly made during the war years, we see soldiers in camp, battlefields after the fighting, with dead infantrymen remaining to be buried, and the fortifications around the port of Charleston, South Carolina. There are…

Umbrella by Will Self Grove, 397 pp., $25.00 A strange thing happened last October after the ceremony to announce the winner of Britain’s most coveted fiction prize, the Man Booker. A stock photograph of the nominees, posed in front of the sponsor’s logo, holding their books and wearing the forced smile of solitary authors obliged to sparkle like movie stars at a premiere, went viral on the Internet. Five of the authors, including the eventual winner Hilary Mantel, are dutifully standing in a line, with the covers of their novels delicately poised in front of their chests, just as the publishers’ publicists have, no doubt, instructed. Looming behind them, however, is the immensely tall Will Self. Not content to tower physically above his rivals, he is holding his novel, Umbrella,…

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammen Norton, 587 pp., $28.95 For better or worse, Homo sapiens has become the most abundant large mammal ever to roam the planet. We have spread into nearly every conceivable terrestrial habitat. We have increased our fertility and decreased our mortality. We have reengineered ecosystems and food webs and disinterred fossil stores to produce our calories and condition our dwellings. We are seven billion strong, growing at a rate of 70 million people a year. As E.O. Wilson, both an entomologist and a conservationist, put it, “When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass [i.e., the mass of the living organism] of any large animal species that ever…

It was an anecdote he liked to tell. In 1944, while working at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., Isaiah Berlin was called back to London on short notice, and it happened that the only plane available to take him was a loud, uncomfortable military bomber. Because the cabin wasn’t pressurized he had to wear an oxygen mask that kept him from speaking. And there were no lights, either, so he couldn’t read. It was a long flight. He joked afterward, “one was therefore reduced to a most terrible thing—to having to think.” While airborne, the story went, he had a small epiphany. In the 1930s he had taught philosophy at Oxford, happily, with his likeminded friends Stuart Hampshire, J.L. Austin, and A.J. Ayer. Logical positivism had just come into…

Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright Knopf, 430 pp., $28.95 Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape by Jenna Miscavige Hill, with Lisa Pulitzer William Morrow, 404 pp., $27.99 Not to be read home alone on a stormy night: Going Clear, Lawrence Wright’s scary book about Scientology and its influence, with its accounts of vindictive lawyers and apostate captives confined in the “Hole,” a building that held dozens of people at a time. It’s a true horror story, the most comprehensive among a number of books published on the subject in the past few years, many of them personal accounts by people who have managed to escape or were evicted from the clutches of a group they came to feel…

To the Editors: We thank Professor Walter Kaiser for his generous review of “Piero della Francesca in America” at the Frick Collection [NYR, March 21]. This exhibition features six paintings from Piero’s altarpiece for the Sansepolcro church of Sant’Agostino, and the reviewer rightly calls attention to the foundational scholarship of Millard Meiss, who in 1941 first attempted to reconstruct the celebrated polyptych from its surviving fragments. Today, many outstanding questions remain. Principal among these is the subject of the lost central painting: Did it depict the Virgin and Child Enthroned or the Coronation of the Virgin? No evidence of the missing panel survives. Piero’s four saints that accompanied it (Augustine, Michael Archangel, John the Evangelist, and Nicholas of Tolentino) are first recorded together in 1680, after the altarpiece was dismantled,…

To the Editors: I always find the writings of Garry Wills enlightening, scholarly, and humane. But I winced when, speaking of Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale,” he refers to “the twisted art of Chaucer” [“Catholics and Jews: The Great Change,” NYR, March 21]. A number of critics have quite plausibly argued that the tale exhibits the bloody-minded anti-Semitism of its speaker, a not-too-clever would-be aristocrat with an excessively sentimental solicitude for mice and other small creatures, a penchant for clean cups and the precise nasal intoning of the liturgy, a highly rhetorical expression of compassion for a murdered Christian child, but no compassion for the slaughtered inhabitants of an entire Jewish ghetto. Chaucer’s art in this tale isn’t twisted, but rather succeeds brilliantly in rendering the twisted affective piety of a certain…

Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 306 pp., $26.00 Let’s just, right away, recognize how prescient this charming, terrifying, comic novel of apocalyptic manners is. Nathaniel Rich wrote Odds Against Tomorrow well before Hurricane Sandy and its surge crashed onto the isle of Manhattan, well before the streets were flooded and the subways drowned, only the Goldman Sachs building sparkling above the darkened avenues. Years before the cold weeks without heat or electricity or transportation, Rich described a city engulfed first by greed, then by water. In one of the best and spookiest parts of the book, Mitchell Zukor, the young protagonist, paddles a painted canoe he bought in an art gallery through a Manhattan whose fate is only a slight exaggeration of the city’s fate…

House of Earth by Woody Guthrie, edited and introduced by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp Infinitum Nihil/Harper, 234 pp., $25.99 Fifty years ago and more, while a student at Rice University in Houston, I was exploring the music room at Fondren Library. I put a 78-rpm record on the turntable and heard this: The “little city” was probably Pampa, Texas, where, at the time, half my family lived. Eight of my uncles, three of my aunts, and cousins innumerable either faced down that storm or ran from it. (You can see it now in Ken Burns’s excellent documentary The Dust Bowl.1) Working-class families throughout the Great Plains, nearly broken by the prolonged drought and Great Depression of the 1930s, could hardly believe what they saw: tons and tons of black…

Everyone knows the ongoing case of Free Speech vs. the Communist Party of China. We pay too little attention, by contrast, to the struggle for freedom of expression in the free or partly free countries of South and Southeast Asia. Their controversies may be more fragmented and incremental than the often frontal confrontation with party-state censorship in China, but the implications for global freedom of expression in the Internet age are almost as large. These countries do, after all, include India, which is the world’s largest democracy, its second-largest emerging economy, and, given China’s aging population, will in the foreseeable future become its most populous country. India, by itself, has the potential to be a swing state in the worldwide debate about the terms and limits of freedom of expression.…

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid Riverhead, 228 pp., $26.95 Five Star Billionaire by Tash Aw London: Fourth Estate, 434 pp., £18.99 (to be published in the US by Spiegel and Grau in July) Beggar’s Feast by Randy Boyagoda Pintail, 321 pp., $16.00 (paper) “Let some people get rich first,” the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping proclaimed a generation ago, inaugurating a strange new phase in his country’s—and the world’s—history. It now seems clear that nowhere has capitalism’s promise to create wealth been affirmed more forcefully than in post–World War II Asia. By now we have all heard about the rise of China and India as economic powers. But as early as the late 1960s, the rates of economic growth in South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan,…

China Hand: An Autobiography by John Paton Davies Jr. University of Pennsylvania Press, 351 pp., $34.95 1. In the 1950s, the late John King Fairbank, the dean of modern China studies at Harvard, used to tell us graduate students a joke about the allegation that a group of red-leaning foreign service officers and academics—the four Johns—had “lost” China: John Paton Davies, John Stewart Service, John Carter Vincent, and John King Fairbank himself. What the McCarthyites had forgotten, Fairbank said, was to finger the fifth “John”: John Kai-shek.1 Fairbank was the “John” I knew best. When I heard the joke, the topic was still raw for Fairbank, who had had to testify before Senator Pat McCarran’s Subcommittee on Internal Security and before a Pentagon loyalty-security board (in the latter case to…

At the end of his (wonderful) review of my book, Nature Wars,* Russell Baker notes the idea of professional sharpshooters training local hunters to cull overabundant deer, and communities offsetting costs by selling the venison at local farmers’ markets. He then quotes me as saying it’s a good idea “but it probably won’t happen anytime soon.” Understanding why is important. Selling wild game is illegal in the US. None of the “wild game” on today’s restaurant menus is wild. Every bit of it is farm-raised, for good reason. Ending the commercial sale of wildlife for food, fur, and feathers was at the foundation of conservation movement efforts to stop the uncontrolled slaughter of wild animals and birds a century ago. What replaced this market hunting became known as the North…

To the Editors: There are many things I might quarrel with—and some I would applaud—in Dan Chiasson’s essay on Leonard Cohen [“The ‘Stoned Gallantry’ of Leonard Cohen,” NYR, February 21]. But just to stick to the opening section for now, the “most famous lyrics” of “his most famous song,” as the article calls them, speak not of the “holy dark” but the “holy dove.” Cohen is more than capable of singing about the “holy dark,” no doubt, but the dove is a recurrent and central image in his work, not least because he once called his supporting band “The Army.” Perhaps a poet who’s been publishing for forty-seven years deserves a slightly closer reading? Pico Iyer Nara, Japan Dan Chiasson replies: I’d misheard those lyrics for years, it seems. I’m…

Act of Congress: How America’s Essential Institution Works, and How It Doesn’t by Robert G. Kaiser Knopf, 417 pp., $27.95 It seems a different era already, those days in 2009 and 2010 when Barack Obama and his large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress were passing major pieces of legislation. And it was a different era—as we have seen since the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives after the 2010 elections. Since then, legislation of any significance has been nearly impossible to come by. The official record shows the passage of 283 laws by the 112th Congress, which sat from January 2011 to January 2013. It sounds like an impressive number, but in fact most of these were technical or quite narrow in scope. At most there…

L’Héritage de Vichy: Ces 100 mesures toujours en vigueur [The Heritage of Vichy: One Hundred Measures That Are Still in Force] by Cécile Desprairies, with a preface by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie Paris: Armand Colin, 237 pp., €27.50 (paper) L’Héritage de Vichy is an unconventional work—more a catalog of curiosities than a regular book. It advances a strong claim: that contemporary France still bears today many traces of the Vichy regime that governed under German occupation from 1940 to 1944. Cécile Desprairies proceeds item by item—vaccination, for example, or television—showing for each one, aided by contemporary photos and texts, what its situation was in 1939, how Vichy dealt with it, and what part of Vichy’s actions remained in effect after 1944. She offers, however, only the sketchiest general analysis of…

The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates Ecco, 669 pp., $27.99 Two thirds of the way through The Accursed, a woman who has been rusticated, against her will, from civilized Princeton, New Jersey, to a dilapidated and eerie manse in the wilds of Pennsylvania observes, “We are like people in a gothic novel.” It’s a funny line, if not for the overburdened wife who delivers it then certainly for the reader who has been thinking the same thing for the last four hundred pages. Yet it’s not merely a throwaway joke, a knowing authorial wink at the audience. As frequently happens in this expertly crafted novel, a moment of levity is being used to distract and disarm us, so that we are doubly appalled by the scene of grisly mayhem that…

The Lives of Margaret Fuller by John Matteson Norton, 510 pp., $32.95 Margaret Fuller: A New American Life by Megan Marshall Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 474 pp., $30.00 In a letter to James Freeman Clarke in 1833 Margaret Fuller declared, “All biographies...make me sick at heart and make it hard to realize that there is a Heaven.” Our age shows no such distaste. We clamor for biographies, believing that the lives of our thinkers, statesmen, artists, and scientists hold the secret to their contributions to culture. In this we are deluded. The aspirations that lie behind a person’s achievements transcend the sum of days that makes up a life. Judged by its inner incentive, every life is a failure. Ever since Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Channing, and James Freeman Clarke published…

The Cambridge History of Musical Performance edited by Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell Cambridge University Press, 906 pp., $190.00 Such, in a pre-recording era, was the power of live performance as chronicled by Hector Berlioz in his Memoirs (1870). He would nonetheless have been stupefied at the prospect of a plump volume devoted to a history of performance.* Such, in a pre-recording era, was the power of live performance as chronicled by Hector Berlioz in his Memoirs (1870). He would nonetheless have been stupefied at the prospect of a plump volume devoted to a history of performance. Indeed, so might we. In a time of shrinking resources, many university presses are cutting back. But not Cambridge University Press—at least in the field of music. A decade ago it launched the…

To the Editors: Contrary to what General Petraeus—and, apparently, Thomas Powers [“Warrior Petraeus,” NYR, March 7]—seem to believe, it was not the lack of a good strategy that caused the French defeat in Indochina, and later, ours. It was the lack of a sense of history. (Shortly afterward, the French tried to apply “the lessons of Indochina” to their Algerian colony, with disastrous results.) To think that a people who had been struggling against colonial rule for over a century would ever rally around their colonizers and the puppet government they had set up was absurd. From the Vietnamese point of view, the Americans simply replaced the French. Afghanistan is a different story, but not completely different. It is hard to see why Afghans would rally around an utterly corrupt,…

To the Editors: In his revealing review of Sarah Conly’s Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism [NYR, March 7], Cass Sunstein seems to agree that not all things in life should be available to people in a democratic society simply because they want to have them. But he also overlooks an important element in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which he uses as a foundation for his own libertarian version of paternalism or what he prefers to call “nudges” in another context. While it is true that Mill’s work provided the most important and powerful justification for human freedom, his argument from harm (simplified as “do what you will as long as you harm no one but yourself”) provides the undergirding for Mill’s chapter on thought and opinion. Sunstein does not…