Innholdsfortegnelse for June 6, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

If you were to run into eighteen-year-old Baudy Mazaev on a multicultural Boston street, you’d probably take him for a Portuguese or an Italian; in a pinch you might guess his family origins to lie somewhere farther east. He has straight black hair and an aquiline nose and a build that attests to a long and successful stint as a high school wrestler. Nor does his speech provide any particular clues to his ethnicity: he has the distinctive accent of someone who has grown up on the banks of the Charles River. Baudy is a native-born American, but like many Americans from immigrant families he also has another identity: he’s a Chechen. His parents, Anna and Makhmud, come from Grozny, the capital of the Chechen Republic, a small province (about…

The Angel of the Odd: Dark Romanticism from Goya to Max Ernst an exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, March 5–June 9, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Felix Krämer. Hatje Cantz, 305 pp., $70.00 “Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst,” a survey first conceived and mounted by the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, has been retitled “The Angel of the Odd” by the curators of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it runs until June 9. Ambitious and forceful, the exhibition plunges you in a giddying aesthetic abyss. There are a great many bats in the images on display, and it is perhaps batwise that the whole enterprise is best approached. Winding your way through the cave- system of galleries, with their soot-and-stormcloud decor and their isolated spotlights,…

The announcement on March 23 by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) of a cease-fire with Turkey is only one sign among many that the fortunes of the Kurds may be taking a new, more hopeful direction. For almost a century, they have inspired sympathy for the underdog. Jonathan Randal’s book After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?: My Encounters with Kurdistan (1997), for example, describes the brave, inept, and inevitably doomed efforts of the Kurds to gain recognition as a nation. After more than three hundred pages, Randal ends rather abruptly, as if he has had his fill of Kurdish misery. Randal was writing in the mid-1990s, when things were no more than usually awful for the Kurds in the four states that had incorporated, between them, the Kurdish-inhabited parts of the…

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 240 pp., $28.00 I never learned to type. The best I can do is hunt and peck with two fingers while looking at the keyboard. Instead of touch-typing, I was taught how to work with metal: shape flashings, solder wires, drill into tin. Learning such skills traces back to the fifth grade at Public School 187 in Queens. My teacher, Mrs. L., divided the class into those able to undertake a so-called “academic curriculum” and ultimately attend college, and those like me, only fit for vocational training, destined to work in factories or repair shops. Mrs. L. was a squat, middle-aged woman with a dour mien. She made clear to us what marked a…

Red Doc> by Anne Carson Knopf, 167 pp., $24.95 1. Red Doc> is the poet Anne Carson’s “sequel” to her novel in verse, Autobiography of Red, which told the story of Geryon, the red monster slain by Herakles in one of his lesser-known labors. Carson’s Geryon was a contemporary boy; he was gay, art-inclined, and, as he knew from reading his own myth, doomed to an early death. These internal differences were manifest in his redness and his wings: the book was partly about the hazards and joys of having the identity you want to harbor inwardly emblazoned upon your body. Carson’s achievement was to translate an obscure Greek myth into the idiom of contemporary adolescence. The book was the story of a character trying to write the story he…

Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 by James Oakes Norton, 595 pp., $29.95 While historians have long countered the myth that slavery was not the central cause of the Civil War, they have clung to the view that the Union’s opposition to slavery developed very slowly and almost reluctantly, largely due to the Republicans’ commitment to the constitutional ban on “interference” with slavery that already existed in slaveholding states. Hence Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation often appears as a sudden, radical action, really out of the blue. Though I long accepted most such interpretations, I have always been puzzled by the so-called First and Second Confiscation Acts, passed by Congress in 1861 and 1862, which have received far too little attention. These acts applied, among others, to…

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin Penguin, 430 pp., $29.95 Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea by Mark Blyth Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $24.95 The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America by David A. Stockman PublicAffairs, 742 pp., $35.00 In normal times, an arithmetic mistake in an economics paper would be a complete nonevent as far as the wider world was concerned. But in April 2013, the discovery of such a mistake—actually, a coding error in a spreadsheet, coupled with several other flaws in the analysis—not only became the talk of the economics profession, but made headlines. Looking back, we might even conclude that it changed the course of policy. Why? Because the paper in question, “Growth in a…

To the Editors: What is the Scottish definition of biography? I ask this because Andrew O’Hagan [“Jack Kerouac: Crossing the Line,” NYR, March 21] is the second Scottish reviewer in recent months to call my book The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac a memoir. I suppose it would be futile to point out that I end the book in 1951, six years before Kerouac entered my life, and that my research was not conducted in the bedroom but in the unsexy archives of the Berg Collection, where I tracked Jack’s most important relationship—the one he had with his work. I do understand, however, that I may have disconcerted Andrew O’Hagan by stepping out of my ordained role as the limp Beat-chick object of his scrutiny and…

To the Editors: I cannot object if a person finds a book of mine too onerous or boring to read but, in that case, he should not pretend to review it, as William Pfaff did [“Challenge to the Church,” NYR, May 9]. To spare himself the labor of discussing Why Priests? he wanders back to things remembered from the time when he still read books. We get his views on the history of Jansenism, the trappings of various European royal courts, the Syllabus of Errors, church reform that he thinks desirable (married priests) and that he thinks improbable (women priests). None of these has anything to do with my book, whose basic argument concerns (1) the dim origin, logical contradictions, and odd use of the Letter to Hebrews, as a…

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell Knopf, 228 pp., $24.95 The End of Men and the Rise of Women by Hanna Rosin Riverhead, 310 pp., $27.95 To begin with, a quiz. Who wrote the following sentences: Lee Iacocca, Jack Welch, or Sheryl Sandberg? Before looking at the answers—at the bottom of this page1 —look closely at the prose. These are the words of successful people. More to the point, these are the words of successful people who are trying to sell the secrets of their success to others. In order to do so, they have tailored their language to appeal to the widest possible audience. Hence the blandness of the vocabulary, the interchangeability of the thoughts, the imperative and declarative nature…

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 434 pp., $27.00 Before jumping off on his brave spelunking descent into the “new America,” George Packer offers up an orientation, or maybe it’s a pep talk, for readers who’ll be accompanying him on his expedition. In just eight paragraphs, he sketches a philosophy of history that’s faintly Hegelian. His dialectic works like this: every so often—a couple of times a century, it seems—American society unravels, ripping ties that bind communities, families, and individuals, leaving them mostly in free fall, except for self-seekers and climbers who manage to hang on and find higher and higher handholds. Such dislocations are his eponymous “unwindings,” the most recent of which—not yet ended, according to this vision—started in…

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov by Andrea Pitzer Pegasus, 432 pp., $29.95 The Tragedy of Mister Morn by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Thomas Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy Knopf, 147 pp., $26.00 Selected Poems by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov, and edited and with an introduction by Thomas Karshan Knopf, 203 pp., $30.00 Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays by Brian Boyd Columbia University Press, 452 pp., $35.00; $26.00 (paper) Vladimir Nabokov was eighteen when the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 made his wealthy family’s continued residence in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed at the start of World War I) impossible. They fled first to the Crimea and then, in 1919, to London. The following year they settled in Berlin, where in 1922 Nabokov’s…

Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti by Amy Wilentz Simon and Schuster, 329 pp., $27.00 The Rainy Season: Haiti—Then and Now by Amy Wilentz Simon and Schuster, 427 pp., $16.00 (paper) Haiti: The Aftershocks of History by Laurent Dubois Picador, 434 pp., $20.00 (paper) Amy Wilentz knows Haiti very well. She has a quarter-century of experience with the country. She speaks excellent French and Creole. She understands Haitian history intimately. She has the patience to sit with Haitians for hours, and the empathy to listen as her Haitian informants talk. She is marvelously observant and in command of a prose style sufficiently supple and imaginative to communicate her observations. Her naive illusions about the place have long since been stripped away. Her first book about Haiti, The Rainy Season,…

Bolívar: American Liberator by Marie Arana Simon and Schuster, 603 pp., $35.00 In the Complete Works of Simón Bolívar appears a prose poem so unusual that some historians have questioned its authenticity. Entitled “Mi delirio en Chimborazo” (My Rapture on Chimborazo) and dating from around 1822, it describes the ascent (certainly only partial and perhaps completely imaginary) of the Ecuadorian volcanic peak of that name. Bolívar writes that, on his “march of liberty” in South America, he had crossed “infernal regions, plowed the rivers and the seas, climbed to the giant shoulders of the Andes” until he reached this “watchtower of the Universe.” Possessed by the “God of Colombia”—the immense and promising nation that, after a series of victories, he had recently established in what is today Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador,…

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson Basic Books, 327 pp., $26.99 The fork in Bee Wilson’s title is considered in detail, with companion implements like spoons and chopsticks, only toward the end of her eloquent and information-packed book on the technology of cooking and eating. If the phrase “consider the lilies” hums in your mind, that is entirely apt, as we learn that the modern spoon, if not the fork, arrived in Britain at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, with a new design of the handle, “the trifid,” or trefoil, “an echo of the fleur-de-lis, the stylized lily associated with French kingship.” Even a simple implement can thus carry a political or religious resonance: in the years before the Restoration,…

Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100–1900 by John Guy and Jorrit Britschgi Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Yale University Press, 224 pp., $45.00 Masters of Indian Painting, 1100–1900 edited by Milo C. Beach, Eberhard Fischer, and B.N. Goswamy Artibus Asiae, two volumes, 839 pp., $200.00 One morning in 1740, a thin young man could be seen heading down the steep cobbled road leading from the Kashmir Gate of the Punjabi hilltown of Guler, and making for the banks of the fast-running river Ravi far below. Nainsukh was just short of thirty, with a slightly hesitant expression, buckteeth, and a downy mustache. He had just been appointed as court miniature painter at the neighboring Himalayan princedom of Jasrota, and in his baggage were the sketchbooks, albums, boxes of pens,…

To the Editors: On February 27, just as Ian Frazier’s review of my anthology Arctic Voices was being published [NYR, March 7], Shell announced that after both its rigs, Noble Discoverer and Kulluk, suffered heavy damage and were cited for EPA violations, it would not drill in Alaska’s Arctic waters in 2013. Shell’s mishaps are dissuading other companies that also bought leases in Alaska’s Arctic waters. On March 15, the Norwegian company Statoil indicated that it might abandon plans for drilling in the Chukchi Sea altogether, after previously saying that it would postpone until 2015. On April 10, ConocoPhillips announced that it would “put its 2014 Alaska Chukchi Sea exploration drilling plans on hold.” There will be calm in the Arctic Ocean this summer. It’s a good time to reflect…

To the Editors: Many thanks to Professor Robert Paxton for clarifying the question regarding the Flandre/Maréchal Pétain/La Marseillaise story [“Vichy’s Ocean Liner,” Letters, NYR, May 9], but there is more, I think, of interest relating to this ship. First, it should be noted that this ship was only in small part a Vichy project. The origins of the ship go back at least to December 1938 when the Messageries Maritimes, a Marseille shipping company, set out to construct a liner for its service to Indochina, ordering a vessel on that date of small enough size to operate in the restricted port of Saigon. Design commenced immediately and had progressed sufficiently for the keel to be laid on June 15, 1939, a full year before Vichy came into existence. This ship,…

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré Viking, 310 pp., $28.95 In the official morality of states, treason and patriotism are poles apart, as starkly opposed as love and hate, right and wrong. David Cornwell, writing as John le Carré, has spent more than half a century blurring that sharp opposition, making it unstable and obscure. And now, at the age of eighty-one and in his twenty-third novel, he has finally brought the poles together. In A Delicate Truth, treason is not merely compatible with patriotism. In order to be a patriot, the novel suggests, it is necessary to betray the state.  A Delicate Truth is simpler than almost any other le Carré novel because he is no longer in the swamp of moral ambiguities. He has crossed all the…

All That Is by James Salter Knopf, 290 pp., $26.95 Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps edited by John McIntyre Counterpoint, 212 pp., $25.00; $15.95 (paper) Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days by James and Kay Salter Knopf, 462 pp., $22.50 There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter by James Salter Shoemaker and Hoard, 226 pp., $15.00 (paper) John Masters is now an almost forgotten novelist, though there was a time when Bhowani Junction and Nightrunners of Bengal might be glimpsed on the paperback racks of any drugstore. Masters had been an officer in the British army in Burma during World War II, though he seldom spoke of the jungle fighting or the defense of hilltops and narrow places against overwhelming odds.…

The Roadmap by Suragamika Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 120 pp., $18.50 (paper) Bones Will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets edited and translated from the Burmese by Ko Ko Thett and James Byrne Northern Illinois University Press, 172 pp., $18.95 (paper) Rangoon It’s good to be back. I was last here thirteen years ago, at the turn of the century. I spoke about transitions to democracy at the headquarters of the National League for Democracy (NLD), with Aung San Suu Kyi in the chair. I wrote about the trip for The New York Review, in a piece of analytical reportage entitled “Beauty and the Beast in Burma.”1 Then the military regime put me on its visa blacklist. I can say this with unusual certainty because last summer the office of Burma’s reformist president,…

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe by Lee Smolin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 319 pp., $28.00 A pregnant moment in intellectual history occurs when H.G. Wells’s Time Traveller (“for so it will be convenient to speak of him”) gathers his friends around the drawing room fire to explain that everything they know about time is wrong. This after-dinner conversation marked something of a watershed, more telling than young Wells, who had never even published a book before The Time Machine, imagined just before the turn of the twentieth century. What is time? Nothing but a fourth dimension, after length, breadth, and thickness. “Through a natural infirmity of the flesh,” the cheerful host explains, “we incline to overlook this fact.” The geometry taught in school…

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Ein biographisches Album edited by Michael Nedo Munich: C.H. Beck, 463 pp., e39.95 “Perhaps the best place to begin trying to understand Wittgenstein’s character,” the British philosopher Colin McGinn once remarked, “is with the photographs that exist of his face.” Looking into Wittgenstein’s eyes, McGinn went on, it is hard to meet his gaze for very long: It is possible to be fairly sure which pictures McGinn has in mind here, since there are relatively few surviving photographs of the great philosopher and, of those, only a handful show him looking straight into the camera. Because so many books on Wittgenstein have been published since his death in 1951, most of these pictures have been reproduced many times and have thus become very familiar. Best known, perhaps, is…

Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett Metropolitan, 478 pp., $32.00 Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett are unusual among former staffers of the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council in their deep affection for the Islamic Republic of Iran. This attraction, which knows few bounds, finds its apotheosis in Going to Tehran. Their stated goal is “the most objective analysis of Iranian politics.” Yet they find that Iran embraces, “more fully and openly than Turkey, the project of building a state that is simultaneously Islamic and democratic.” (The greater openness of Tehran than Istanbul should, they seem to think, be apparent to any objective analyst.) Iran’s government “of the Shi’a,…

To the Editors: I enjoyed Bill Keller’s review of my scribblings [“The Heretic,” NYR, March 21] but must take issue with his view of the tiny but hugely influential South African Communist Party (SACP). “Most...members weren’t all that Communist,” writes Keller, seemingly wishing to impute that our Reds were only pretending to believe in the totalitarian Soviet ideal. I’m afraid Mr. Keller is wrong. We know this from any number of sources, but let’s hear it from Hilda Bernstein, who lived long enough to acquire a shrewd understanding of herself and the Communist movement of which she was a lifelong part. “Joe and Rusty were hardline Stalinists,” she said in 2004, speaking of her late husband Rusty, a Central Committee member, and Joe Slovo, the most influential Communist of his…

To the Editors: I very much admired Michael Scammell’s masterful and exhaustively researched biographies, and I read with great interest his nuanced review of Douglas Smith’s Former People: The Last Days of The Russian Aristocracy [NYR, March 7]. All the more surprising, then, is the impression of chronological confusion conveyed in the passage dealing with the fashion for fox-trot, brought to Russia by Americans working for the American Relief Administration in 1921–1923. Scammell writes: The impression, then, is that Gorky, who invited the ARA to come to Russia in the first place but from 1921 lived abroad until his return in 1928, spoke out against fox-trot in 1923–1924 or that around the same time Anatoly Lunacharsky “succeeded in banning all syncopated music.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Gorky’s…

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and…