Innholdsfortegnelse for August 15, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

In mid-May, Edward Snowden, an American in his late twenties, walked through the onyx entrance of the Mira Hotel on Nathan Road in Hong Kong and checked in. He was pulling a small black travel bag and had a number of laptop cases draped over his shoulders. Inside those cases were four computers packed with some of his country’s most closely held secrets. Within days of Snowden’s documents appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post, revealing several of the National Security Agency’s extensive domestic surveillance programs, bookstores reported a sudden spike in the sales of George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984. On Amazon.com, the book made the “Movers & Shakers” list and skyrocketed 6,021 percent in a single day. Written sixty-five years ago, it described a fictitious totalitarian society…

Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center by Ray Monk Doubleday, 825 pp., $37.50 Why another book about Robert Oppenheimer? Many books have been written and widely read, ranging from the impressionistic Lawrence and Oppenheimer of Nuel Pharr Davis to the scholarly American Prometheus of Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Ray Monk says he wrote his book because the others gave too much weight to Oppenheimer’s politics and too little weight to his science. Monk restores the balance by describing in detail the activities that occupied most of Oppenheimer’s life: learning and exploring and teaching science. The subtitle, “A Life Inside the Center,” calls attention to a rarer skill in which Oppenheimer excelled. He had a unique ability to put himself at the places and times at which important things…

In the film The Magic Box, which was made in England in 1950, the great English actor Robert Donat plays William Friese-Greene—one of the people who invented movies. The Magic Box was packed with guest stars. It was made for an event called the Festival of Britain. You had about fifty or sixty of the biggest actors in England at the time, all doing for the most part little cameos, including the man who played the policeman—that was Sir Laurence Olivier. I saw this picture for the first time with my father. I was eight years old. I’ve never really gotten over the impact that it had. I believe this is what ignited in me the wonder of cinema, and the obsession—with watching movies, making them, inventing them. Friese-Greene gives…

I have been struck by parallels between the challenges facing the Federal Reserve today and those when I first entered the Federal Reserve System as a neophyte economist in 1949. Most striking then, as now, was the commitment of the Federal Reserve, which was and is a formally independent body, to maintaining a pattern of very low interest rates, ranging from near zero to 2.5 percent or less for Treasury bonds. If you feel a bit impatient about the prevailing rates, quite understandably so, recall that the earlier episode lasted fifteen years. The initial steps taken in the midst of the depression of the 1930s to support the economy by keeping interest rates low were made at the Fed’s initiative. The pattern was held through World War II in explicit…

Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer Penguin, 231 pp., $15.00 (paper) Getting lost appears to be a major theme in European literature. From Odysseus’ long detour home, to Dante’s midlife crisis in the selva oscura, to the abandoned children of the Brothers Grimm, it would seem that the “straight way” is rarely the best way to make an interesting story. “As you set out on the way to Ithaca,” C.P. Cavafy wrote, offering advice to both storytellers and ordinary folk, “hope that the road is a long one,/filled with adventures, filled with discoveries. The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,/Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them.”* The woman who calls herself “Emilie” in the Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker’s evocative and unsettling short novel Ten…

There is a new German question. It is this: Can Europe’s most powerful country lead the way in building both a sustainable, internationally competitive eurozone and a strong, internationally credible European Union? Germany’s difficulties in responding convincingly to this challenge are partly the result of earlier German questions and the solutions found to them. Yesterday’s answers have sown the seeds of today’s question. Before I explore those historical connections, however, let us reflect on everything that this new German question is not. Twenty-three years after unification, the enlarged Federal Republic of Germany is about as solid a bourgeois liberal democracy as you can find on earth. It has not only absorbed the huge costs of unification but also, since 2003, made impressive economic reforms, lowering labor costs by consensus and…

The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet by Lawrence J. Friedman, with assistance from Anke M. Schreiber Columbia University Press, 410 pp., $29.95 Some readers will recall being given a copy of Erich Fromm’s popular The Art of Loving in high school or college, usually remembering it with gratitude, but sometimes with a sense that its reliance on the ideas of Freud and Marx now makes it not only unfashionable, but old-fashioned. Still others may recall their first reading of Escape from Freedom, one of the earlier attempts to explain what became known as the authoritarian personality: it was provoked by astonishment that so many otherwise rational people followed leaders such as Hitler, but it was much more wide-ranging in its exploration of the fear of freedom and the longing…

Metaphysical Dog by Frank Bidart Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 113 pp., $24.00 Frank Bidart writes with terrifying candor. Himself a child of the “confessional” poetry of the 1950s and 1960s—he was a student and friend of Robert Lowell’s—he has taken the mode of confessional poetry to a kind of logical conclusion, away from penitent speaking to priest, or patient speaking to therapist, all the way to the tormented, divided psyche speaking to itself, as it does again and again in these new poems: Even when, memorably, Bidart has chosen to adopt the voices of various personae—the mad Nijinsky (“The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,” 1983), or an anorexia patient (“Ellen West,” 1977), or a child molester and killer (“Herbert White,” 1973)—the “confessions” offered by these characters are oddly, horrifyingly familiar and…

To the Editors: Since all three authors in your exchange on “Mandela & Communism” [NYR, June 6] did me the honor of citing my research on Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC), perhaps you would allow me to comment further? Bill Keller is correct in pointing out that Nelson Mandela adopted a variety of political and ideological positions during his long fight against apartheid in South Africa. His membership in the South African Communist Party (SACP) seems to have been brief, probably lasting only from 1960, or shortly before, until his imprisonment in 1962. However, Mr. Keller underestimates the extent to which the SACP extended its influence within the ANC during the twenty-seven years that Mandela spent in prison. He is wrong to dismiss as “Red-baiting nonsense” the…

Every reporter, in the development of a story, depends on and coddles, or protects, his or her sources. Only when the protection of the source gets in the way of telling the story does the reporter face a professional, even a moral, choice: he can blow the source and move to another beat or he can roll over, shape the story to continue serving the source. The necessity for making this choice between the source and the story seems not to have come up in the course of writing Mr. Woodward’s books, for good reason: since he proceeds from a position in which the very impulse to sort through the evidence and reach a conclusion is seen as suspect, something to be avoided in the higher interest of fairness, he…

Photography and the American Civil War an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, April 2–September 2, 2013; the Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, September 27, 2013–January 5, 2014; and the New Orleans Museum of Art, January 31–May 4, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition by Jeff L. Rosenheim Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Yale University Press, 278 pp., $50.00 Photography began as a craft technology that lent its resources to the imitation of an art—chiefly, at first, portrait and landscape painting—and like other devices of convenience, it easily adopted the name of its inventor. We no more associate the daguerreotype with a particular French painter than we connect the guillotine to a particular doctor, and this marks an initial difference from the high arts: it would…

Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir by Amanda Knox Harper, 461 pp., $28.99 In May 2011, I went to dinner in Perugia with several reporters who had spent most of the previous three and a half years covering the Meredith Kercher murder case. They shared a sardonic, wary view of the proceedings, in which their reporting had played an outsized and perhaps decisive role. We met at a restaurant called, appropriately enough, Altromondo (Otherworld). It was underground, like so much of Perugia, including the courtroom where Amanda Knox and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were tried and convicted for Kercher’s death. In Perugia, you almost always feel like you’re underground, even when you’re outside. The medieval city descends a steep hill in crooked, claustrophobic side streets that cross each other at…

United States v. WindsorHollingsworth v. Perry two cases decided by the Supreme Court, June 26, 2013 Shelby County v. Holder a case decided by the Supreme Court, June 25, 2013 Fisher v. University of Texas a case decided by the Supreme Court, June 24, 2013 The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, adopted three years after the Civil War as part of the Fourteenth Amendment, was designed principally to protect emancipated slaves from states that would deny their newly gained status as free and equal citizens. Yet in the Supreme Court this term, African-Americans were the big losers, while the winners were groups that the clause’s authors would not have imagined they were protecting at all: (1) southern states with a documented history of race discrimination; (2)…

Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century by Paul Kildea Penguin, 666 pp., $45.00 Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, 1913–1976: Volume Six, 1966–1976 edited by Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke Boydell/Britten–Pears Foundation, 806 pp., $80.00 Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction by Heather Wiebe Cambridge University Press, 239 pp., $99.00 1. “Who is BEN-jam-in BRI-ttenBEN-jam-in BRI-tten?” sang the satirical English duo Flanders and Swann in 1953, setting the composer’s name to a plausibly Brittenesque 5/4 rhythm. Britten himself was turning forty and the country was recognizing, sometimes reluctantly, the scale of his success. The young man who had amazed postwar London with the opera Peter Grimes was now a household name—well known enough for Flanders and Swann’s mainstream audience to get…

Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father—and How We Can Fix It by David Goldhill Knopf, 369 pp., $25.95 Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us a special report by Steven Brill Time, March 4, 2013 The US health care system urgently needs fixing. It is much too expensive and inefficient, and leaves too many people with no care or inadequate care. In March 2010, the recently elected Obama administration barely managed to pass the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a huge and complicated collection of legislative initiatives designed to correct the system’s problems.1 The statute is 2,700 pages long, and so far there are about 20,000 pages of regulations. Most Democrats generally approve of the ACA as an important achievement in health care legislation, which moves the…

The Wartime Journals by Hugh Trevor-Roper, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines I.B. Tauris, 322 pp., $35.00 Hugh Trevor-Roper was one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language. He was also a man of prodigious learning, a classical scholar, and a remarkable historian. As a writer he took for models Francis Bacon, Donne, Hobbes, Sir Thomas Browne, Gibbon, and, perhaps surprisingly, Flaubert, and perhaps more surprisingly, George Moore. Stylistically, his nearest though laggardly competitor among his contemporaries would have been Evelyn Waugh, who loathed him personally—they both greatly admired Gibbon and sought to emulate his sonorous periods. Among historiographers, few could compete with him for elegance, insight, and liveliness. A.J.P. Taylor, his friendly rival, once remarked that when he read one of Trevor-Roper’s essays, tears of envy stood in his…

Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Elliott Abrams Cambridge University Press, 339 pp., $30.00 The Future of the Jews: How Global Forces Are Impacting the Jewish People, Israel, and Its Relationship with the United States by Stuart E. Eizenstat Rowman and Littlefield, 356 pp., $37.50 Israel, Jordan, and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative by Asher Susser Brandeis University Press, 297 pp., $29.95 (paper) Beyond the Two-State Solution: A Jewish Political Essay by Yehouda Shenhav, translated from the Hebrew by Dimi Reider and Efrat Weiss Polity, 237 pp., $59.95; $19.95 (paper) At his Jerusalem residence on September 16, 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert showed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas a map representing the most far-reaching territorial compromise ever proposed by an Israeli premier. According to Olmert, his…

The Chinese Question in Central Asia: Domestic Order, Social Change and the Chinese Factor by Marlène Laruelle and Sébastien Peyrouse Columbia University Press, 271 pp., $60.00 Great Games, Local Rules: The New Great Power Contest in Central Asia by Alexander Cooley Oxford University Press, 252 pp., $29.95 Central Asia and Afghanistan: Insulation on the Silk Road, Between Eurasia and the Heart of Asia a report by Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh Peace Research Institute Oslo, 62 pp., available at www.prio.no Restless Valley: Revolution, Murder and Intrigue in the Heart of Central Asia by Philip Shishkin Yale University Press, 316 pp., $28.00 China’s Central Asian Problem a report by the International Crisis Group 35 pp., available at www.crisisgroup.org On the freezing night of December 12, 1991, in the heart of Central Asia, I stood…

To the Editors: In his review of books by Mark Blyth, Neil Irwin, and David A. Stockman [NYR, June 6], New York Times columnist Professor Paul Krugman continues his attack on me and Carmen Reinhart. Never mind that only one of the three books even mentions us. This is no obstacle to Krugman’s relentless campaign narrowly to circumscribe and grossly to misrepresent our research and its influence. His goal seems to be to paint us as extremists whose work is only referred to by conservatives. In reality, our long-standing position has been as centrists in the economic policy debate. One would never know from Krugman’s writings that our studies on the history of financial crises helped provide the intellectual basis for the 2012 Obama campaign’s claim that the president’s policies…

My Brazilian friend Marina and I were picking up a visiting friend from New York, who heads an NGO, in her hotel lobby near Paulista, the most prestigious avenue in São Paulo. It was 7:30 on a busy Friday night last October. We walked up to a taxi outside the hotel. I sat in the front to let the two women chat in the back. Marina asked me to Google the restaurant menu. I was doing so when I saw a teenage boy run up to the taxi and gesticulate through my open window. I thought he was a beggar, asking for money. Then I saw the gun, going from my head to the cell phone. “Just give him the phone,” Marina said from the back seat. I gave him…

Could this be the year for an engagement with Iran that “is honest and grounded in mutual respect,” as President Obama proposed over four years ago? That goal seems unlikely without a shift in Iranian thinking and without a change in American diplomatic and political strategy. But two developments, one in Iran and one in the region, provide reason to think that diplomatic progress might be possible. The first is Iran’s recent presidential election, which Hassan Rouhani won thanks to an alliance between Iran’s reformist and moderate camps. Together with the departure of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this may provide the Obama administration the chance to start a new phase of relations with Iran. The second development is the war in Syria, which has the potential to grow into a region-wide Shia–Sunni…

Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns by David Margolick Other Press, 382 pp., $28.95 For a while in the 1940s John Horne Burns was widely considered one of the most promising American novelists, and his best-selling war novel, The Gallery, intimidated Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and Joseph Heller. Then after not one but three dud novels he committed suicide at age thirty-six (or rather his death seemed to be self-willed, caused by epic drunks and exposure to the sun). Other successful first novelists of the period killed themselves, such as Thomas Heggen (Mister Roberts) and Ross Lockridge (Raintree County). Burns was mostly forgotten, though over the decades Gore Vidal would frequently tell friends about the gay flash-in-the-pan author. Even Ernest Hemingway remembered him and as…

Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy by Gary May Basic Books, 314 pp., $28.99 In Bending Toward Justice, Professor Gary May describes a number of the conflicts between white supremacists in Alabama and nonviolent civil rights workers that led to the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—often just called the VRA. The book also describes political developments that influenced President Lyndon Johnson to support the act in 1965, and later events that supported the congressional reenactments of the VRA signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, by President Gerald Ford in 1975, by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, and by President George W. Bush in 2006. May’s eminently readable book is particularly timely because the Supreme Court, on June 25, 2013,…

Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age by Jonathon Keats Oxford University Press, 197 pp., $19.95 Art Forgery: The History of a Modern Obsession by Thierry Lenain Reaktion, 383 pp., $55.00 Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger by Ken Perenyi Pegasus, 314 pp., $27.95 The existence of a market for any kind of valuable object almost always encourages the production of counterfeits. It happens with drugs, banknotes, and designer handbags. It also happens with works of art. But whereas counterfeiting banknotes or other documents has always been considered a crime, attitudes toward art forgery have changed greatly over time, as Jonathon Keats and Thierry Lenain explain in their recent books. Keats provides a succinct, intelligent, and very readable summary of the subject, concentrating…

Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain Penguin, 472 pp., $16.00 (paper) One of the rarer pleasures that comes with reviewing works of fiction is happily losing one’s place, falling inadvertently into reading for personal pleasure and not as a proxy for potential readers. That’s what happened to me as I got into Caleb Crain’s debut novel, Necessary Errors—a bildungsroman, very well put together, polished, dry but tender, ferociously observed. The author is a scholar and a prolific essayist and reviewer. His book American Sympathy (2001), a study of male friendship and authorship in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, is frequently taught in American Studies courses. Intense research distinguishes Crain’s journalism. He has a blog called Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, which has won awards and has many readers. A younger version of the…

The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays by Simon Leys New York Review Books, 572 pp., $19.95 (paper) 1. Near the beginning of Simon Leys’s marvelous collection of essays is an odd polemic between the author and the late Christopher Hitchens, fought out in these very pages. Leys takes Hitchens to task for attacking Mother Teresa in a book entitled The Missionary Position. He writes: “Bashing an elderly nun under an obscene label does not seem to be a particularly brave or stylish thing to do.” Hitchens replies: What do you mean, obscene? You know perfectly well, answers Leys. And so on and on. What interested me about this exchange was not the relative merits of the arguments put forth by two writers who had at least one thing in common—a…

To the Editors: In my response to Colin McGinn [“What Can Your Neurons Tell You?,” NYR, July 11] I don’t wish to enter into the philosophical debate between philosophers and neuroscientists. Even if it is much needed, it requires extensive developments that are being carried out in different circles. I shall be concerned here by facts as they are reported in his NYR review. First of all I am shocked by the overall arrogant style of his review. The use of the attributes “fallacy” or “confusion,” if still employed by some philosophers, does not belong to a dialogue between a scientist and a philosopher. Differences of opinion or of interpretation are more acceptable terms. Time has passed since Auguste Comte’s suggested hierarchy of disciplines. There is no reason today for…

To the Editors: I appreciate Adam Hochschild’s review of my book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power [NYR, May 23], especially since he was a reporter on the scene yet still found much new about the FBI’s covert operations at the University of California during the Sixties and the bureau’s efforts to oust UC President Clark Kerr, stifle student leader Mario Savio, and help neophyte politician Ronald Reagan. As Hochschild wrote, “Although Rosenfeld far overstates the bureau’s influence on Reagan’s rise, it is nonetheless jarring to see how much help he got from an agency that was supposed to stay above partisan politics.” In fact, I quantify Hoover’s help to Reagan only during the post–World War II years in Hollywood, after FBI agents enlisted…