Innholdsfortegnelse for September 26, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils, translated from the French by Liesl Schillinger, with an introduction by Julie Kavanagh Penguin, 206 pp., $16.00 (paper) The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis by Julie Kavanagh Knopf, 288 pp., $ 27.95 In the pecking order of the demimonde of nineteenth-century Paris, the courtesans ranked highest. Merchants of love though they were, they stood apart from the prostitutes who walked the streets, from the grisettes who only took money from their lovers, if at all, to round out their salaries as seamstresses or florists, and from the lorettes who, in contrast, allowed themselves to be kept by their lovers but whose appetite for luxury remained modest. They were also different from the actresses or dancers…

L.S. Lowry: The Art and the Artist by T.G. Rosenthal Norwich: Unicorn, 320 pp., £45.00; £25.00 (paper) Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life an exhibition at Tate Britain, London, June 25–October 20, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition by T.J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner London: Tate Publishing, 224 pp., £24.99; £19.99 (paper) Aside from Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and David Hockney—and, possibly, Henry Moore (for viewers of a certain age) and Damien Hirst (if you have only recently been paying attention)—British art of the past hundred or so years is a dimly known terrain for American audiences. The very considerable figure of Walter Sickert, for instance, whose nudes, portraits, and scenes of people in rooms or in the theater have the heft and scope of Bonnard, his contemporary—and who…

1. They came to the Cairo morgue looking for bodies. This was nearly a month before the Egyptian police confronted the Muslim Brotherhood on August 14. A woman whose husband hadn’t come home in three days, a couple whose son had been absent for a week, three relatives looking for a man, Karam, who had been missing for nine days. He had last been seen on July 2, on his way to his mother’s apartment. He had taken a taxi there and neighbors saw him get out at the main street. There was fighting in the neighborhood between the residents—mainly supporters of the protest against President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood called Tamarod (“rebellion”)—and members of the Brotherhood, and people cautioned him against entering the alley that turned onto…

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson Random House, 456 pp., $15.00 (paper) A “Reader’s Guide” accompanying the paperback edition of Adam Johnson’s much-acclaimed, Pulitzer Prize–winning novel might suggest that the book is about North Korea. In an interview with his editor, David Ebershoff, Johnson mentions the vast amount of research he has done on that country, the books read, the people interviewed, and how much of his story is drawn from facts. Added to the interview is a list of suggested topics for discussion, presumably aimed at college students, including the following: “How should the rest of the world respond to the violence and tyranny of present-day North Korea? Do we have a moral obligation to intervene?” This seems an odd way to approach a work of fiction. In…

Calcutta: Two Years in the City by Amit Chaudhuri Knopf, 306 pp., $25.95 I was twenty when my family gave up our home in Old Delhi and moved to Bengal in the late 1950s. I thought Calcutta the first metropolis I had set eyes on. Delhi, although the capital since 1912, in the 1950s was still little more than a cluster of villages on the sand and dust of the northern plain. Calcutta by contrast seemed to pulse with a sense of purpose, a confidence in its raison d’être. The reason may have been taken away with the shift of the capital from Calcutta to Delhi but a tradition had been established, habits formed. One saw it in the energy with which the traffic moved, in the orderly variety of…

Most of the electorate can’t be bothered with midterm elections, and this has had large consequences—none of them good—for our political system and our country. Voting for a president might be exciting or dutiful, worth troubling ourselves for. But the midterms, in which a varying number of governorships are up for election, as well as the entire House of Representatives and one third of the Senate, just don’t seem worth as much effort. Such inaction is a political act in itself, with major effects. In the past ten elections, voter turnout for presidential contests—which requires a tremendous and expensive effort by the campaigns—has ranged from 51.7 to 61.6 percent, while for the midterms it’s been in the high thirties. Turnout was highest for the two midterms in which the Republicans…

Subtle Bodies by Norman Rush Knopf, 236 pp., $26.95 A pivotal scene in Norman Rush’s first novel, Mating, begins at a reception given by a USAID official in Botswana, a man whose wife, “the leading malcontent in the American community,” is notoriously inhospitable. Watching the partygoers gaze longingly at a few pitiful skewers of sate, as candles in hanging paper lanterns drip hot wax on “selected prominent people,” a graduate student in anthropology notes with cool delight that the “human comedy” she is witnessing “makes you want to be a writer so you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people who have it made in every way, the observer excepted.” By the time this bleak occasion ends and the last guest has gone home,…

Last May, my wife and I traveled to China in order to spend two weeks at the international Wuzhen Theatre Festival. I had previously been appointed honorary chairman of the event, which also included among its presentations the final play in my Shakespeare trilogy. 2013 is the festival’s inaugural year, and for the purpose a philanthropic businessman with advanced architectural tastes named Chen Xianghong had funded a 1,200-seat glass and filigree theater called the Grand, as well as subsidizing the renovation of four additional facilities. Although Chen is a former Communist official, there was little government presence in the project apart from its stamp of approval. Wuzhen is a picturesque theme park near Shanghai on a Venice-like canal, which draws about six million tourists a year. It has lively storefronts…

To the Editors: As the mayor of Venice—puzzlingly dismissed by Anna Somers Cocks as “just a lawyer”—I write in response to her article “The Coming Death of Venice?” [NYR, June 20]. Venice has been a World Heritage Site since 1987. The Italian government decided to make the requirement for a UNESCO site management plan compulsory in 2006. Hence the plan recently adopted by the city after very thorough preparatory work. The UNESCO site plan is not prescriptive in a binding way (unlike the PAT, Piano Assetto Territoriale, which is a legally binding instrument adopted by the City Council), and sets out the range of problems concerning the management of Venice and its lagoon as a World Heritage Site. In many ways the UNESCO plan could be viewed as a sort…

To the Editors: Your readers may be interested to know that this Fall’s LIVE from the New York Public Library season, which begins on September 17, features a number of conversations with contributors to The New York Review, including Lorrie Moore, John Ashbery, and Margaret Atwood. Other guests, many of whom have been discussed in the Review’s pages, include Carl Hiaasen, Timothy Donnelly, Adam Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Junot Díaz, Alan Rusbridger, Jesmyn Ward, Jaron Lanier, Andrew Solomon, Warren Buffett, Nico Muhly (with Ira Glass), Alice Waters, Kermit Lynch, Michael Connelly, Martin Cruz Smith, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Ann Patchett. For more information, please visit www.nypl.org/live. Paul Holdengräber Director, LIVE from the NYPL The New York Public Library New York City…

Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean by Lisa-ann Gershwin, with a foreword by Sylvia Earle University of Chicago Press, 424 pp., $27.50 It’s become fashionable to keep jellyfish in aquariums. Behind glass they can be hypnotically beautiful and immensely relaxing to watch. Unless we are enjoying them in this way, we usually give little thought to the creatures until we are stung by one. Jellyfish stings are often not much more than a painful interlude in a seaside holiday—unless you happen to live in northern Australia. There, you might be stung by the most venomous creature on Earth: the box jellyfish, Chironex fleckeri. Box jellyfish have bells (the disc-shaped “head”) around a foot across, behind which trail up to 550 feet of tentacles. It’s the tentacles…

This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital by Mark Leibovich Blue Rider, 386 pp., $27.95 The completely unforeseen announcement that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos will be buying The Washington Post for $250 million has unleashed a tremendous amount of speculation, again, about the future of the newspaper business. What could Bezos have up his sleeve? Print romantics, looking past the fact that Bezos’s company has largely destroyed the brick-and-mortar bookstore, seem to believe or at least hope that this whiz of contemporary capitalism surely knows something the rest of the world doesn’t and will light the path toward resurrection. There are side issues that many find only slightly less interesting. What are his motives? Does he privately entertain fantasies of himself as having…

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler Putnam, 310 pp., $26.95 In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin tacitly diminishes the difference between “man” and “animals” by matter-of-factly conflating, in passages fascinating and rich in detail, close examinations of human beings and “lower animals” (by which Darwin meant not relatively primitive animals but all “non-human” animals). Writing thirteen years after On the Origin of Species and one year after The Descent of Man, he takes as the object of his inquiry “the principle of the direct action of the excited nervous system on the body, independently of the will and in part of habit.” Not what might be self-described by people possessing language but rather what is displayed—“behavior.” While most of…

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir Times Books, 288 pp., $28.00 There is a great deal of unlovely jargon within the federal government. The product of an activity is called “the deliverable.” A task that follows a meeting is called a “do-out.” A request for action is described as “the ask.” If someone needs to continue a discussion with a colleague, he will promise to “circle back.” If a project must be abandoned or put on hold because of competing demands on people’s time and attention, the problem is one of “bandwidth.” Of course such terms can be found in many other places, including in businesses, but they are used with particular regularity in Washington, D.C. Of the various unlovely terms, “bandwidth”…

Zimnyaya Olimpiada v Subtropikakh. Nezavisimyi Ekspertnyi Doklad [Winter Olympics in the Subtropics: An Independent Expert Report] by Boris Nemstov and Leonid Martynyuk Moscow, 41 pp., May 2013 Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin by Ben Judah Yale University Press, 379 pp., $30.00 When the Russian city of Sochi, on the Black Sea, was chosen as the site of the 2014 Winter Olympics in 2007, Vladimir Putin had every reason to be pleased. Russia was given a chance to show the world the accomplishments of his regime. Now that he is again Russia’s president, after a four-year hiatus as prime minister from 2008 to 2012, Putin himself will be at the center of the events. But the Olympics might not turn out as he…

Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir by Greg Bellow Bloomsbury, 228 pp., $26.00 1. In outline form, Greg Bellow’s memoir of his father Saul tells a familiar twentieth-century story: a young Jewish left-wing idealist becomes an overbearing middle-aged reactionary, driven in part by sexual anxieties obvious to everyone but himself. In detail, the story is nuanced, moving, and idiosyncratic, with an unpredictable ending. As Greg Bellow describes him, “young Saul,” known only to his family and close friends, was the vulnerable, soft-hearted, independent-minded son of a brutal, observant-Jewish, immigrant father. Saul Bellow’s Heart opens with Greg’s memory of himself at eight, watching young Saul, at thirty-seven, burst into tears after “a terrible argument, in Yiddish, between my father and grandfather.” Twenty years later, “old Saul,” in violent contrast, was as…

The Lower East Side of New York was one of the most densely populated square miles on the face of the earth in the 1890s. The photo-essayist Jacob Riis famously described it as a world of bad smells, scooting rats, ash barrels, dead goats, and little boys drinking beer out of milk cartons. Six thousand people might be packed into a single city block, many in tenements with sanitary facilities so foul as to repel anyone who dared approach. City health inspectors called the neighborhood “the suicide ward”; one tenement was referred to—in an official New York City Health Department report, no less—as an “out and out hog pen.”1 Diarrhea epidemics blazed through the slums each summer, killing thousands of children every week. In the sweatshops of what was then…

In a major decision issued on June 13, the US Supreme Court unanimously struck down the patents held by a biotechnology firm on the DNA comprising BRCA1 and BRCA2.1 These are the two genes that, in their abnormal forms, are known to dispose women to a dramatically heightened risk of breast and/or ovarian cancer. The case had originated in May 2009, when the American Civil Liberties Union and the Public Patent Foundation filed a lawsuit in a federal district court to overturn the patents. The main defendant was the Myriad Genetics Corporation in Utah, which had located the two genes, extracted them from the chromosomes housing them, and, in 1997 and 1998, obtained the patents in question. The patents did not cover the DNA of the two genes while they…

To the Editors: In the July 11, 2013, New York Review of Books, one of your authors, David Bromwich, has used my alleged views on Iraq as a critical point of criticism of Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker. He claims that I was “an influential advocate of the Iraq war.” This is simply not true. Since I was neither a congressman nor a senator in 2002, I never faced the agonizing choice of whether to authorize President George W. Bush to use military force against Iraq. I say “agonizing” because I did believe (based on reading twelve years of highly classified intelligence reports) that Iraq had substantial chemical and biological weapons capability and because I also believed (along with Chief UN Weapons Inspector Hans Blix) that without the threat of…

More than twenty years ago, Susan Sontag in her famous “Notes on Camp” cited as an example of what she meant by the term “the outrageous aestheticism of [Josef von] Sternberg’s six American movies with [Marlene] Dietrich.” Everyone, including Dietrich herself, agrees that her Sternberg period was her greatest. In his films her toughness and sexual provocation were not so much veiled as enhanced and counterpointed by something protective, caressing, resigned, and even sad in her gestures and intonations, something dreamy and mysterious in her appearance (the result of virtuoso camera work). This is true even in The Blue Angel where she plays a cheap and callous little tart. The records she made show her in full command of the husky, suggestive, intersexual style of the Berlin nightclubs in the…

Speak to American Jews long enough about Israel and you begin to notice something. The conversation may begin with Israel, but it rarely ends there. It usually ends with “them.” Express concern about Israeli subsidies for West Bank settlements and you’ll be told that the settlements don’t matter because “they” won’t accept Israel within any borders. Cite the recent warning by former Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin that “over the past 10–15 years Israel has become more and more racist” and you’ll be told that whatever Israel’s imperfections, it is “they” who teach their children to hate and kill. Mention that former prime minister Ehud Olmert has called Mahmoud Abbas a partner for peace and you’ll be told that what “they” say in Arabic is different from what they say…

The Force of Things: A Marriage in War and Peace by Alexander Stille Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 376 pp., $28.00 One night in the early 1980s, the protean and immensely learned Italian journalist known to readers as Ugo Stille arrived at my door in Paris, followed by a stream of Portuguese curses echoing down the courtyard from the window of the concierge’s lodge. Misha, as Stille’s friends called him (though, like me, not many of them knew why), had been the American correspondent of Corriere della Sera for more than thirty years and was arguably its most respected writer. He lived in New York with his American wife, Elizabeth, and had stopped in Paris on his way home to her from a “command performance,” as he described it, at the…

Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House, Farrar, Straus & Giroux by Boris Kachka Simon and Schuster, 433 pp., $28.00 Boris Kachka’s history of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the distinguished publishing house that the late Roger Straus founded in 1945 and ran on a shoestring brilliantly until his death in 2004, is gossip at a very high level: not quite the level of art achieved by Dickens and Proust, who fictionalized their characters, but all the more gripping for being real and meticulously footnoted. I was a decade younger than Roger, a friend for many years, admirer, and occasional rival. Kachka’s Roger is the ebullient, often coarse, actually gentle curator of first-rate talent whom I knew, admired, and liked. For authors,…

Much Ado About Nothing a film directed by Joss Whedon In a curious way the central figure in the splendid new film of Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Avengers), is the house in which the events unfold. Not that the house—Whedon’s own—is particularly remarkable. It is a comfortable, sprawling Santa Monica McMansion, no doubt very expensive, with more than a touch of a suburb about it. But that is the point: we are not in faraway Sicily, where Shakespeare set the story, or in glorious, technicolor Tuscany, where Kenneth Branagh set his admirable film adaptation twenty years ago. We are rather on familiar ground, and, as if to conjure up the ordinary accoutrements of modern American upper-middle-class life, the camera dwells…

The Childhood of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee Viking, 277 pp., $26.95 In two of his letters to Paul Auster, written in the fall of 2009 and recently published in Here and Now,* J.M. Coetzee considers the idea of “late style”: He returns to the subject, which is obviously on his mind: “Late style, to me, starts with an ideal of a simple, subdued, unornamented language and a concentration on questions of real import, even questions of life and death.” These thoughts on “late style” were hardly, for Coetzee, abstract musings. He was then approaching his seventieth birthday, which presumably still counts as a biographical eleventh hour. (He is now seventy-three.) Perhaps more importantly, his need to “look elsewhere” is palpable. Coetzee’s last novel, the wonderfully playful but often self-lacerating autobiographical…

Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: From Grantham to the Falklands by Charles Moore Knopf, 859 pp., $35.00 1. In the more than seven hours set aside for parliamentary tributes to Margaret Thatcher in April this year, only one member of the House of Commons dared to speak unabashedly ill of the just dead. Glenda Jackson, the actress who won two Oscars and then traded Hollywood for the lesser theater of Westminster, delivered a scorching attack on the Conservative former prime minister who had led Britain from 1979 to 1990. This anti-eulogy, more memorable than any other act in Jackson’s less than stellar political career, culminated in her response to Labour colleagues who had felt they ought to pay tribute to Thatcher’s achievement in becoming Britain’s first woman prime minister. “A…

The Mystery of the Hanging Garden of Babylon: An Elusive World Wonder Traced by Stephanie Dalley Oxford University Press, 279 pp., $34.95 Before the mid-nineteenth century, when the British explorer Austen Henry Layard unearthed the spectacular Assyrian palaces of Nineveh (modern Mosul), the ancient empires of Mesopotamia could be glimpsed only through the lens of classical and biblical writings. These were almost uniformly hostile and understandably so, for the Assyrians and Babylonians (occupying roughly northern and southern Iraq, respectively) had brought only grief to ancient Israel, culminating in Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the exile of the Jews to Babylon. In this as in much else, the Old Testament is history written by the losers—probably by Judean refugees living in Babylon itself—and it shows in the portrayal…

Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time by Ira Katznelson Liveright, 706 pp., $29.95 The New Deal, the apogee of liberal political power in American history and a story with a relatively happy ending—the Great Depression vanquished, World War II won—has usually had its history presented, except by conservatives who disapprove of the expansion of central government and taxation in the 1930s and 1940s, as an uplifting, inspiring one. That is not how Ira Katznelson presents it. There is only one very brief personal note in his long, scholarly book—a snip of memory about having to wear military-style dogtags and practice responses to a nuclear attack as a schoolchild in the early 1950s—but all of Fear Itself is suffused with the same sense of pure terror…

To the Editors: Aileen Kelly accuses me of “imaginative use of sources,” misquotations, hyperbole, and skewed selectivity [“Getting Isaiah Berlin Wrong,” NYR, June 20]. Intent on indicting me for bending professional standards, the reviewer performs quite astonishing interpretive acrobatics, misrepresenting and ascribing to me positions and attitudes I did not take. She does not provide exact page references for my purported claim that the distinction between positive and negative freedoms originated in Collingwood. There are none. Likewise with the causal argument that “Berlin’s decision to abandon conventional philosophy and turn toward the history of ideas” was a “result” of Collingwood’s influence upon him. I made no such argument. Nor can she point to a place where I present a normative argument that Berlin should have endorsed “Ben-Gurion’s intransigent defiance of…