Innholdsfortegnelse for May 23, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

The only surprising thing about the Museum of Modern Art's announcement in April that it intends to demolish Tod Williams and Billie Tsien's American Folk Art Museum of 1997–2001—an architectural gem that abuts the Modern's campus on Manhattan's West 53rd Street—to make way for yet another MoMA addition is that this deplorable decision took so long to occur. When in 2011 the Folk Art Museum was compelled to sell its decade-old building because of the worldwide economic crash that had caused its default on $32 million in bonds that financed the $18.4 million scheme, seasoned observers fully expected that the superb structure's days were numbered. Some commentators unfairly portrayed this debacle as the comeuppance of a quirky little institution's overweening ambition. At a time when all cultural and educational institutions…

 For Joe Lelyveld and Janny Scott ’Twas brillig and as if I’d drunk Green absinthe the night before. The bed felt like an upper bunk Ten miles above the bedroom floor. Maybe it’s because I did, Maybe it’s because I do Drink a bathtub of poison gas each night and kid Myself I’m still able to. Hey, something is coming—what’s that glow? It’s snow or rain, it’s spring. It’s chemical weapons. It’s baseball spring training. Whoa! Mariano Rivera throws a wicked cut fastball—a vicious, delicious thing! Day after day of gray For Obama in his second term, And trying not to be poisoned by the horror in Syria today. The apple is trying to digest the worm. Bashar al-Assad (may his tribe increase!) Awoke one…

Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan a report by the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and the Global Justice Clinic at the NYU School of Law 165 pp., available at livingunderdrones.org Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands edited by Shahzad Bashir and Robert D. Crews Harvard University Press, 327 pp., $27.95 US drones operated by the CIA first struck in Pakistan in July 2004. According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), there have now been a total of 367 such strikes. These have reportedly killed between 2,541 and 3,586 people in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the seven regions including North Waziristan and South Waziristan that border Afghanistan. The…

Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans After the Second World War by R.M. Douglas Yale University Press, 486 pp., $38.00 1. If you have ever thought that the black hole of horrors that was World War II must by now have surrendered all of its ghastly secrets, perhaps it’s time to think again. A recent book by Colgate historian R.M. Douglas has opened, or rather reopened, yet another tortured and largely ignored chapter of that war, a chapter whose specter is still dragging and clanking its chains across World War II battlefields. In 1944 and the early months of 1945, when the Red Army was driving the Wehrmacht westward through Eastern Europe, it dislodged large pockets of ethnic German settlers who fled before the advancing Soviet troops. The…

Inheriting Abraham: The Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by Jon D. Levenson Princeton University Press, 244 pp., $29.95 Jacob: Unexpected Patriarch by Yair Zakovitch, translated from the Hebrew by Valerie Zakovitch Yale University Press, 202 pp., $25.00 The first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis are an almost unrelieved chronicle of human evil, corruption, and malice. The first human beings, Adam and Eve, are given a single commandment by God, not to eat of the tree of knowledge; but they listen to the serpent, transgress God’s order, and are expelled from Eden. In the next generation, Cain murders his brother Abel and is sent to wander the earth. By chapter six, “the Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan…

The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick by Benoit B. Mandelbrot Pantheon, 324 pp., $30.00 Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity. To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form—the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now…

To the Editors: Diane Johnson’s sophomoric line claiming that you can spot a Scientologist by their “glazed look” tells you everything you need to know about her bias and prejudice toward the global religious movement and why she was the wrong person to objectively review Lawrence Wright’s book [“Scientology: The Story,” NYR, April 25]. This does a great disservice to readers of The New York Review of Books. Among Ms. Johnson’s misstatements: We believe your readers should be able to judge for themselves whether Mr. Wright did his homework, or whether he merely compiled a laundry list of exaggerated claims and allegations made to newspaper and TV reporters by disgruntled ex-members. Publishers in the United Kingdom and Canada chose not to publish the book, which we believe speaks to quality…

In Sylvia Plath’s work and in her life the elements of pathology are so deeply rooted and so little resisted that one is disinclined to hope for general principles, sure origins, applications, or lessons. Her fate and her themes are hardly separate and both are singularly terrible. Her work is brutal, like the smash of a fist; and sometimes it is also mean in its feeling. Literary comparisons are possible, echoes vibrate occasionally, but to whom can she be compared in spirit, in content, in temperament? Certain frames for her destructiveness have been suggested by critics. Perhaps being born a woman is part of the exceptional rasp of her nature, a woman whose stack of duties was laid over the ground of genius, ambition, and grave mental instability. Or is…

David Bowie Is an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 23–August 11, 2013 Catalog edited by Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, with contributions by Camille Paglia, Jon Savage, and others London: V&A Publishing, 320 pp., $55.00 (distributed in the US by Abrams) The Next Day an album by David Bowie 1.  David Bowie: “My trousers changed the world.” A fashionable man in dark glasses: “I think it was more the shoes.” Bowie: “It was the shoes.”* He laughed. It was a joke. Up to a point. There is no question that Bowie changed the way many people looked, in the 1970s, 1980s, even 1990s. He set styles. Fashion designers—Alexander McQueen, Yamamoto Kansai, Dries van Noten, Jean Paul Gaultier, et al.—were inspired by him. Bowie’s extraordinary stage…

There are summer evenings in London when Piccadilly Circus looks impatient for its neon, when the rain is falling and the tourists appear to be weary of the daylight. And it was on such a night in June 2003 that I met Margaret Thatcher. The meeting wasn’t entirely auspicious: she didn’t know who I was, and, more importantly, I didn’t know who I was, until I saw her across from me and realized I wouldn’t shake her hand. I have never met anyone so politically galvanizing as the person I had known only as Maggie throughout my childhood. She could make heroes and villains of people just by existing. Let us allow, if nothing else, that Maggie’s effectiveness ran proud of the usual standards, for people could decide what kind…

In her youth Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) more or less created what we now call American modern dance, and she soon became famous for it. She was also a beauty, leaving behind her a trail of glamorous lovers. But by 1927, when she was fifty, all that was over. Duncan was living in a rented studio in Nice. She was barely performing any longer, and years of hard living—above all, heavy drinking—had coarsened her looks. Her most recent and thorough biographer, Peter Kurth, quotes Nicolas Nabokov to the effect that, already in the early 1920s, “her baggy face was glistening and red.” Her hair was patchily hennaed; her body, heavy now, was draped in tatty shawls. She had no money. She went to parties in order to eat the canapés. Partly,…

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo by Tom Reiss Crown, 414 pp., $27.00 As a boy I wanted above all other professions to be a musketeer. After Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, read to me by my father, I carried on myself with the sequels, Twenty Years After, The Man in the Iron Mask. They were, though I didn’t want to admit it, a bit disappointing: somehow the verve of d’Artagnan and his companions had grown old and gone darker. Then someone gave me the same writer’s The Count of Monte Cristo. It was the longest book I had ever held in my hands. It filled the whole of a summer, in one of those reading experiences best described by Proust, where the…

Birth Certificate: The Story of Danilo Kiš by Mark Thompson Cornell University Press, 355 pp., $40.00 The Attic translated from the Serbian and with an introduction by John K. Cox Dalkey Archive, 115 pp., $12.95 (paper) Psalm 44 translated from the Serbian with an afterword by John K. Cox, and with a preface by Aleksandar Hemon Dalkey Archive, 148 pp., $16.95 Garden, Ashes translated from the Serbian by William J. Hannaher, with an introduction by Aleksandar Hemon Dalkey Archive, 170 pp., $12.95 (paper) Early Sorrows translated from the Serbian by Michael Henry Heim New Directions, 120 pp., $19.95 Hourglass translated from the Serbian by Ralph Manheim Northwestern University Press, 274 pp., $22.00 (paper) A Tomb for Boris Davidovich translated from the Serbian by Duška Mikić-Mitchell, with an introduction by Joseph…

When a woman from the Cabinet Office at Number 10 Downing Street, the residence and offices of the British prime minister, told me over the phone that I was invited to the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, I immediately suspected it was a scam. I get regular calls intended to extract money from me. I said I would call her back, looked up the Cabinet Office phone number, and when I called, the same woman answered. “Why me?” I asked. “I was nothing to Lady Thatcher.” She told me I was “on the list,” and that she would send me an invitation by courier. Why me? I had never been a parliamentary journalist. My career was as a foreign correspondent in China and Hong Kong. Margaret Thatcher’s visits to China were…

To the Editors: Colin McGinn’s devastating review of Ray Kurzweil’s book How to Create a Mind emphasizes a classic mistake: confusing analogues with homologues [NYR, March 21]. Computers and brains may both be able to recognize patterns, but they do it differently. But in his eagerness to dismantle the book, Colin McGinn himself falls into a trap or two. Neuroscientists are rightly humble folk: whilst our colleagues understand the principles of how the heart produces a circulation, or the liver metabolizes our food, we still cannot account for most of what we know the brain can do. I cannot tell you what happens in your brain to make you feel hungry, or angry, or recognize your friends, or plan your future. I cannot tell you how the brain can malfunction,…

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman Princeton University Press, 740 pp., $39.95 Albert Hirschman, who died late last year, was one of the most interesting and unusual thinkers of the last century. An anti-utopian reformer with a keen eye for detail, Hirschman insisted on the complexity of social life and human nature. He opposed intransigence in all its forms. He believed that political and economic possibilities could be found in the most surprising places. Hirschman is principally known for four remarkable books. The most influential, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), explores two ways to respond to unjust, exasperating, or inefficient organizations and relationships. You can leave (“exit”) or you can complain (“voice”). If you are loyal, you will not exit, and you may or may…

Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America by François Weil Harvard University Press, 304 pp., $27.95 The United States was born in a sudden and decisive repudiation of blood. By abolishing monarchy and becoming republicans in 1776, Americans turned their backs on the age-old tradition of birth and patrimony. No longer would it matter who your father was or who your ancestors were. In the new republican society, merit and talent were all that would count. Even the ancien régime had recognized that in the arts and sciences only individual genius mattered. Artists and scientists in the old order may have resided in hereditary monarchies, but they knew that they actually lived in “a republic of letters.” Who remembered the sons of Homer and Euclid? asked Thomas Paine. The…

Truth on Trial in Thailand: Defamation, Treason, and Lèse-Majesté by David Streckfuss Routledge, 494 pp., $49.95 (paper) Bangkok She sits calmly smiling at me across the lunch table: quiet, matter-of-fact, professional. Yet just a week ago, Joop’s husband, Somyot Pruksakasemsuk, was condemned to ten years in prison for lèse-majesté—plus a further year on a related defamation charge. What was Somyot’s mortal insult to Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the world’s longest-reigning monarch? A magazine he edited had published two articles: one, a tale about an unnamed family that kills millions of people to maintain itself in power, the other, a fictional story about a ghost that haunts Thailand and plots massacres. The court held that both referred to the king and his Chakri dynasty, and that merely publishing them merited ten…

Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power by Seth Rosenfeld Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 734 pp., $40.00 A curious thing about the United States is that anticommunism has always been far louder and more potent than communism. Unlike sister parties in France, Italy, India, and elsewhere, the Communist Party here has never controlled a major city or region, or even elected a single member to the national legislature. Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party in 1948 received no more than 2.4 percent of the popular vote with Communist support; and Wallace himself soon repudiated the Communists here and abroad. American anticommunism, by contrast, built and destroyed thousands of careers; witch-hunted dissidents in Hollywood, universities, and government departments; and was a force that politicians like Joseph McCarthy and…

Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens by Robert Gottlieb Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 239 pp., $25.00 Between 2005 and 2010 the National Archives in Dublin put the returns from the 1901 and 1911 Irish census online, with a search engine allowing those interested to key in any name, place, or occupation and then search further for an ancestor, a neighbor’s ancestor, or for anyone else. One can, for example, search for the total number of female servants in County Cork in 1901, and then trace them again in 1911 to see what happened to them, or look for Tony Blair’s grandmother Sarah Lipsett of Ballyshannon, County Donegal. The website, because it is free of charge, has become as popular with the curious browser as much as the…

Herakles by Euripides, translated from the Greek and adapted by Peter Meineck, directed by Desiree Sanchez Brooklyn Academy of Music, March 27–30, 2013 1. For Aristotle in the Poetics, the most important element of drama is plot, “the arrangement of incidents”: plot more than character, plot more than theme, plot more than diction. What makes a good tragic plot? After impatiently dismissing what he calls “episodic” plots (“the worst...the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence”), Aristotle goes on to speak about the kinds of plots he likes. These, he says, evolve organically—subject to the “law of probability or necessity”—and can be either “simple” or “complex.” A simple plot straightforwardly traces a character’s “change of fortune,” katastrophe, either from happiness to misery or vice versa. Of…

To the Editors: Russell Baker’s review of Jim Sterba’s Nature Wars reflects many of the errors and prejudices of the book’s author, including miscasting the human-animal relationship as a “battleground” [NYR, February 21]. We see the various challenges Sterba discusses, whether in relation to conflicts we humans have on occasion with Canada geese, beavers, foxes, deer, or even feral cats, as an emerging field of human opportunity. The presence of conflict does not typically necessitate mass killing, as Sterba suggests, but a measure of human ingenuity and investments in technical and policy solutions consistent with our best inclinations toward wildlife and domesticated animals living in our communities, all wanting their own measure of peace and safety. The concern we demonstrate toward animals by seeking nonlethal and nonviolent solutions to the…