Innholdsfortegnelse for May 9, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

Before Anthony Lewis—who died on March 25—began covering the Supreme Court for The New York Times in 1955, there were, of course, journalists who reported on legal decisions. But Lewis, who attended Harvard Law School as a journalism fellow in 1956 and went on to teach both there and at the Columbia Journalism School, created something different: a new approach to legal journalism. He combined sophisticated legal analysis with an unparalleled ability to write in plain, lucid English, translating the Court’s decisions, explaining their implications, and assessing their significance for a broad readership. Since then, many have followed along a similar path: Linda Greenhouse, Nina Totenberg, Dahlia Lithwick, Lyle Denniston, Joan Biskupic, Jeffrey Toobin, David Savage, Lincoln Caplan, and Adam Liptak, to name just a few. They all owe something to…

The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud Knopf, 253 pp., $25.95 One common tactic of totalitarian regimes is the designation of certain ethnic, economic, or religious groups as “nonpersons” or “former persons.” These unfortunate individuals are then automatically deprived of the rights of citizenship; they can be fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, mistreated, and in some cases even murdered with impunity. Today a similar though far less violent process seems to be occurring spontaneously in so-called advanced democratic societies. What is known as “the celebrity culture” now separates us into a privileged minority who are recognized as fully and triumphantly human, and a majority who are not. This division partially overlaps with, but is not identical to, the more widely publicized split between the very rich (sometimes called…

Spartacus by Aldo Schiavone, translated from the Italian by Jeremy Carden Harvard University Press, 177 pp., $19.95 In the entrance hall of a fairly ordinary house in ancient Pompeii, buried beneath layers of later paint, are the faint traces of an intriguing sketch of two men fighting on horseback (see illustrration on page 20). They are named in captions above their heads, written in Oscan—one of the early languages of South Italy that was eventually wiped out by the Latin of the Romans. The name of one is scarcely legible, but probably says “Felix the Pompeian” (or “Lucky from Pompeii”). The other reads clearly, in Oscan, “Spartaks,” which in Latin would be “Spartacus”—a name best known to us from the slave and gladiator who in the late 70s BC led…

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life by Jonathan Sperber Liveright, 648 pp., $35.00 In many ways, Jonathan Sperber suggests, Marx was “a backward-looking figure,” whose vision of the future was modeled on conditions quite different from any that prevail today: Sperber’s aim is to present Marx as he actually was—a nineteenth-century thinker engaged with the ideas and events of his time. If you see Marx in this way, many of the disputes that raged around his legacy in the past century will seem unprofitable, even irrelevant. Claiming that Marx was in some way “intellectually responsible” for twentieth-century communism will appear thoroughly misguided; but so will the defense of Marx as a radical democrat, since both views “project back onto the nineteenth century controversies of later times.” Certainly Marx understood crucial features…

Harvard Square by André Aciman Norton, 292 pp., $25.95 “For a child in love with maps and engravings,” Baudelaire wrote in “Le Voyage,” “the universe is equal to his vast appetite./Ah, how the world is great by lamplight!/Through the eyes of memory the world is small.”* That is not how it has usually been in the work of André Aciman. His lost childhood, lovingly and subtly evoked in his memoir Out of Egypt (1994), far from diminishing over time, only grew richer in color and texture and more desirable. Aciman’s large family, Jews of Turkish and Italian origin established since 1905 in Alexandria, had prospered in their Egypt, their eccentric members leading lives of charmed privilege. As described by Aciman, their world invites comparison with that of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria…

Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism by John Calvert Columbia University Press, 377 pp., $29.50 (distributed by Oxford University Press, which will publish a new edition in the fall) Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual by James Toth Oxford University Press, 382 pp., $35.00 Few men have contributed so strongly to the tenor of modern political Islam as Sayyid Qutb, who died in 1966. Fastidious and shy in person, the Egyptian intellectual made an unlikely Savonarola figure. Yet his prolific writings, whose passion resonated amid the anti-imperialist ferment of the 1950s, grew increasingly strident in championing Islam as the cure to every ill of his age. Qutb’s peculiar fusion of romantic socialism with Muslim neopuritanism struck a chord that echoes loudly to this…

To the Editor: In his review of John Stauffer and Zoe Trodd’s book The Tribunal [NYR, March 7], Christopher Benfey resurrects the John Brown of old-time history books—murderous, inept, politically marginal, probably insane—while ignoring the findings of several recent biographers and historians. Curiously, Benfey devotes a sizable amount of his review to discussing Hawthorne, a masterly writer but a political doughface who had virtually nothing useful to say about John Brown or slavery (Hawthorne’s signing a petition against the Fugitive Slave Law was a standard gesture made by thousands at the time). As for Melville, also mentioned in Benfey’s review, his elliptical portraits of slavery in works like Moby-Dick and “The Meteor” add little to the political debate other than underscoring its complexity. On the other hand, Emerson and Thoreau…

To the Editors: In his recent review [“It’s For Your Own Good!” NYR, March 7], Cass Sunstein claims that recent empirical studies undermine John Stuart Mill’s Principle of Harm, also known as his Principle of Liberty. He is wrong about this. Mill’s principle says in part: This is not an empirical principle; it makes no empirical prediction and hence none that can be falsified by empirical findings; nor does it presuppose that people always or even generally make wise choices about their lives. As Sunstein points out, one of Mill’s arguments for his principle is that individuals are in a better position than government officials or other outsiders to know what is good for them. This is not a good argument. Even apart from exceptions that Mill allowed for, involving…

You'll see cows grazing in a field And perhaps a chicken or a turtle Crossing the road in their sweet time, And a small lake where a boy once Threw a girl in who couldn't swim, And many large maple and oak trees Offering ample shade to lie in, Their branches to hang yourself from, Should you so desire, Some lazy afternoon or evening When something tells the birds to hush, And the one streetlight in the village To keep a few moths company And the large old house put up for sale With some of its windows broken.…

Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, September 25, 2012–January 20, 2013; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 26–May 27, 2013; and the Art Institute of Chicago, June 26–September 22, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Gloria Groom Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 335 pp., $65.00; $40.00 (paper) To walk into the first few rooms of the exhibition “Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity,” now at the Metropolitan Museum, is to allow oneself to be immersed in the sweetness of life in the Belle Époque. On the walls, one finds a ravishing woman in pink, painted by Mary Cassatt (Woman with a Pearl Necklace in a Loge), who smiles at the spectacle that surrounds her and also, one might say, at herself; a…

Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study by George E. Vaillant Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 457 pp., $27.95 In 1938, Dr. Arlen V. Bock, professor of hygiene and chief of Harvard’s student health services, launched a study of 268 Harvard sophomores (all male, of course), selected as the best and the brightest in the classes of 1939 through 1944. The study was meant to last for fifteen to twenty years, and answer the question of what defines the best health possible, something it was assumed this highly privileged group would exemplify. Financial support came from William T. Grant, owner of a chain of “dime” stores, who had a narrower aim—to find out what makes a good store manager. Despite the original intention to end the study after…

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows a film directed by Guy Ritchie Sherlock a television series on the BBC created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat Elementary a television series on CBS created by Robert Doherty The Perils of Sherlock Holmes by Loren D. Estleman Tyrus Books/F+M Media, 208 pp., $24.95 The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz Little, Brown, 294 pp., $27.95 Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles by Kim Newman 467 pp., $14.95 (paper) Garment of Shadows by Laurie R. King Bantam, 288 pp., $26.00 A Study in Sherlock: Stories Inspired by the Holmes Canon edited by Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger Random House, 385 pp., $15.00 (paper) The Game's Afoot (or Holmes for the Holidays) a play by Ken Ludwig, directed…

The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe by Marci Shore Crown, 370 pp., $27.00 For people familiar with Eastern Europe, Marci Shore’s The Taste of Ashes is, in spite of its subject matter, delicious. A professor at Yale with much experience in Eastern Europe, she writes with great sureness of touch, weaving personal recollections with intellectual commentary, and ideas with emotions, including her own. The book is remarkable for the first short paragraph alone: Has anyone ever put it better than that? The narrative invites the reader to share in encounters, conversations, and inquiries about the war and the postwar period, each conducted in a very specific milieu. It starts in Prague and Bratislava before settling down in Poland, with sidetrips to Bucharest, Budapest, Vienna, and…

The Axial Age and Its Consequences edited by Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 548 pp., $39.95 Reflecting on human history over the previous millennia, a few European thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries noticed a surprising conjunction. Many of the world’s most influential figures—Confucius, Buddha, the prophets of Israel (Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah), Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Zoroaster all emerged in their respective nations—China, India, Judaea, Greece, and Iran—in the middle of the first millennium BC, roughly between 800 and 200 BC. Although more recent scholarship has tended to move Zoroaster out of this chronological frame back into an earlier one, the coincidence remains impressive. The French Iranist Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron in the late eighteenth century may have been the first to draw attention…

To the Editors: In her review of Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography [NYR, February 21] Malise Ruthven quotes the book on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan: Ruthven should have pointed out that Kaplan’s interpretation is a fantasy based on Halford Mackinder’s specious geographic determinism. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is one of the best-documented episodes of the cold war. It arose not from a primordial drive to the Indian Ocean or Persian Gulf but Moscow’s near panic at the prospect of losing control of Afghanistan to Islamic rebels or a government that might ally itself with the United States. John L. Harper Professor of American Foreign Policy The Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University Bologna, Italy Malise Ruthven replies: In questioning my endorsement of Halford Mackinder’s geopolitical approach…

Why Priests? A Failed Tradition by Garry Wills Viking, 302 pp., $27.95 1. Garry Wills’s latest book on Catholicism coincides with a crisis in the church that has been developing since Pius IX (1792–1878) set the course of Peter’s barque against the winds of Enlightenment and revolution. Driven from Rome by the rioting of 1848, the pope returned under the protection of Napoleon III and retreated to the Vatican, refusing to recognize the new Italian kingdom (recognition did not come until the Lateran Treaty in 1929, signed by Pius XI and Mussolini). From his self-imposed “prison” Pius IX issued his sweeping condemnation of “modernism” in 1864 with the encyclical Quanta Cura, including “The Syllabus of Errors,”1 which remained an embarrassment to many if not most of the church’s scholarly and…

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber Melville House, 534 pp., $32.00; $22.00 (paper) At the heart of the argument about how to revive a depressed economy is the question of debt. When political leaders and economists debate the subject, they refer mostly to public debt. To conservatives, the economy’s capacity for recovery is impaired by too much government borrowing. These escalating obligations, they claim, will be passed along to our children and grandchildren, leaving America a poorer country. Liberal economists, such as Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, have replied that only faster growth rates and higher gross domestic product will reduce the relative weight of past debts. Budget austerity, in their view, will shrink demand and slow growth, making the debt burden that much heavier. As important as…

One morning in mid-March, at the beginning of the Kenyan rainy season, I drove to Kiambu, the ancestral homeland of Uhuru Kenyatta, the country’s newly elected president. Thirty minutes northeast of Nairobi I turned off a new six-lane highway and followed a country road across a fertile plateau. Coffee bushes glistened after a morning rainfall. Banana trees and plots of maize climbed the slopes of ravines. Mile after mile of new streetlamps bordered the road. “It is rare to see these lights in rural Kenya,” my companion, a reporter named Dominic Wabala, told me, attributing the local improvements in part to Kenyatta’s huge fortune. Soon we came to Ichaweri, near the birthplace of Kenyatta’s father, Jomo Kenyatta, the rebel leader and first president of Kenya, who died in 1978. The…

Following are excerpts from a recent conversation among Chen Guangcheng, the blind legal activist who was recently permitted to leave China and is currently a distinguished visitor at New York University School of Law; Jerome A. Cohen, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the US-Asia Law Institute at the NYU School of Law, who was active in securing Chen Guangcheng’s release; and Ira Belkin, Executive Director of the US-Asia Law Institute. For this exchange, Professor Cohen would put a question to Mr. Chen in Chinese and then summarize it to the audience at the New School in New York City. Ira Belkin then translated Mr. Chen’s replies into English. Jerome Cohen: I wanted to ask Chen Guangcheng if tomorrow he had a chance to meet with the new leader of…

Artist and Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed an exhibition at the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, May 26–December 31, 2012; and the American Folk Art Museum, New York City, January 24–May 26, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition by Jacquelyn Oak and Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw Fenimore Art Museum, 64 pp., $29.95 (paper) It is sometimes said that, before the Civil War, American artists usually showed African-Americans in a trivializing and condescending manner. The thought is that, in antebellum days, American painters—and this would be largely painters working out of the Northeast, where our art world was at the time—saw black people as types at best, and too often as mindless figures, even puppets. A good look at the art of the time jars this opinion, and the current exhibition at…

Climate and Social Stress: Implications for Security Analysis edited by John D. Steinbruner, Paul C. Stern, and Jo L. Husbands National Research Council, 238 pp., $54.00 (paperback), available at nap.edu/catalog Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4ºC Warmer World Must Be Avoided a report for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics November 2012, 58 pp., available at climatechange.worldbank.org The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway Daedalus, Winter 2013 And the heat goes on. In the last few weeks, new data from the CryoSat satellite system have shown that there’s only one fifth as much sea ice in the Arctic as there was in 1980. New data from the carbon dioxide monitors on…

To the Editors: Much as I appreciated Robert O. Paxton’s thoughtful and informative review, “Vichy Lives!—In a Way” [NYR, April 25], I was left puzzled by his comments that the keel of the Flandre, the liner on which he traveled in 1960 and knew humorously as the “Flounder,” had been laid down in the Vichy years (circa 1940–1945) as Le Maréchal Pétain. The Flandre was built for the CGT between 1949 and 1951 and did not make its first transatlantic voyage until 1952, all long after Vichy had happily become history. Was the Flandre built on the same keel and to the same plans as Le Maréchal Pétain? Would it be too much to ask Professor Paxton to let us in on what happened between the laying down of the…