Innholdsfortegnelse for October 10, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools by Diane Ravitch Knopf, 396 pp., $27.95 Radical: Fighting to Put Students First by Michelle Rhee Harper, 286 pp., $27.99 1. In 1898, the Boston writer and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson published a memoir entitled Cheerful Yesterdays. One of the memories that cheered him was of lying before the hearth while his mother read aloud. As for “the children of to-day who have no such privilege,” he wrote, one must regard them with “pity.” Here we have the keynote of much that has been written about education before and since: praise for a bygone age when children were well served by their elders, and pity for the ill-served children of today. When Higginson was…

Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery by Rachel Adams Yale University Press, 258 pp., $26.00 Homer and Herodotus, Sophocles and Plato, Aristotle and Dante, Shakespeare and Milton. All names engraved in the edifice of Columbia’s Butler Library. They may be “dead white men,” but to undergraduates in the 1960s, they seemed very much alive in the classes where we engaged their texts and debated their ideas. The skills in thinking that we sought could be applied to professions like law and medicine and finance, but we felt the pure scholarship of our professors was the pinnacle of intellectual life. Some forty-five years later, students still begin their education at my alma mater with the Iliad. But the competition to read it on Morningside Heights has become much…

Just when we think that we have seen enough works on paper to have some sense of the possibilities and the limits of what paper can do, the poet Mark Strand’s beautiful collages—made in Madrid, where he lives—make us realize how profoundly we’ve underestimated the remarkable feats of magic that can be performed by some wood pulp, or rags, water, a few chemicals—and the hand and eye of an artist. Made from pieces of handmade paper, sometimes painted, Strand’s work is very different from that of Picasso, Matisse, and Kurt Schwitters, whose papiers collés, cut-outs, and collages often seem intended to make us aware of the origins and previous functions of their component parts, cut from sheets of wallpaper, colored paper, and newsprint, or, in the case of Schwitters, sometimes…

Dancing on Water: A Life in Ballet, from the Kirov to the ABT by Elena Tchernichova, with Joel Lobenthal Northeastern University Press, 312 pp., $35.00 It’s not only star dancers and choreographers and impresarios who contribute significantly to the art of ballet. Crucial, too, are the teachers, coaches, and ballet masters who keep classical technique—and classical dancers—honest. In our day, Elena Tchernichova, who was trained as a dancer in the Soviet Union and later emigrated to the US, has been a conspicuous example of a person who has performed all three roles. Her Dancing on Water is an important account of “A Life in Ballet,” as its subtitle has it: a book as illuminating as it is interesting, revelatory about how ballet works, and fascinating as an account of a…

Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life: The Letters of J.F. Powers, 1942–1963 edited by Katherine A. Powers Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 450 pp., $35.00 A hotbed of the Detachment movement—people detaching themselves from the commercialism of the modern world—was in Minnesota around World War II. Eugene and Abigail McCarthy were part of it. So were their good friends the writer J.F. (“Jim”) Powers and his wife Betty. So were their East Coast friends Robert (“Cal”) Lowell and his wife Jean Stafford. All had been part of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement. They were adherents of what was known, in mid-twentieth-century America, as the Catholic Renaissance. A window into that distant world is opened by the letters of Jim Powers, published by his daughter, along with excerpts from his…

The Letters of William Gaddis edited by Steven Moore, with an afterword by Sarah Gaddis Dalkey Archive, 545 pp., $34.50 William Gaddis was nineteen in 1942, when he wrote to his mother, Edith Gaddis, saying that the “section man” in his Harvard English class had recommended a book to him: One might think this simply callow, a snobbish reflex of class and family, but it does expose the bedrock on which Gaddis later built his idiosyncratic conservatism, just as it points to his unusually candid relationship with his mother. His parents had separated when he was three and he didn’t see his father again for twenty years. William Gaddis Sr. worked on Wall Street and was mainly prized by his son for bequeathing him his name (“a family as fine…

To the Editors: It probably will do no good to complain that Terry Castle’s presentation of Sylvia Plath’s life and fate in your issue of July 11 does little to shift the popular emphasis from her sensational story to her remarkable poetry—which is all that matters about her. I do, though, want to correct some of Professor Castle’s factual errors. Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes was for five years, on balance, neither “tragic” nor “catastrophic.” Between 1956 and 1961 their partnership produced some of the finest poetry of the midcentury; it is unlikely that Plath’s talent would have leaped from the labored mediocrity of her early work to the finely tuned professionalism of her late poems without Hughes’s support and encouragement. Hughes was not unfaithful to his wife until he…

While the Nobel committee was looking for Seamus Heaney to tell him that he had won the 1995 prize for literature, he was driving through, of all places, Arcadia in southern Greece. This was doubly apt. Heaney was surely the English language’s last great Arcadian poet, the last whose memory cells contained personal images of a pastoral life, the last who could regard Virgil as a contemporary and write eclogues without irony. He was also, however, Arcadian in the other sense, the one depicted in those Poussin and Guercino paintings of idealized shepherds gazing at tombs or skulls inscribed with the words et in Arcadia ego: even in Arcadia, I (that is, death) am present. In Heaney’s case, that shadowing presence was death indeed (he was, apart from so much…

Lookaway, Lookaway by Wilton Barnhardt St. Martin’s, 361 pp., $25.99 Wilton Barnhardt may not yet be a household name, but he is a fascinating writer, and Lookaway, Lookaway, his fourth novel, may be the one to get people’s attention. It certainly ought to be. Barnhardt is one of those writers who does not easily fit into the categories we’ve gotten used to. He is a male writer who writes, most often, about women. He’s been the director of the creative writing masters program at North Carolina State and has taught at numerous other colleges and universities, yet his work has none of the traits of the small, intense, overly worked products typical of so many MFA programs. He is a southerner who has not, until now, written about the South…

“I am not a boy, I am a girl,” wrote a twenty-one-year-old woman in Delhi, called Jyoti, who was studying at a medical college to be a physiotherapist. This was in a text message sent in December 2010 to a twenty-six-year-old man who worked in information technology and who had initially taken Jyoti to be a man. They met, and what began as a casual communication became a close friendship. Two years later, on December 16, 2012, after they had seen a film, The Life of Pi, Jyoti was gang-raped with extreme brutality, and the man was severely beaten as he tried to protect her. They had been tricked into boarding a bus that seemed to be going their way and that had offered them a ride. It was a…

         The glow farther than the head                                The heart’s leap On the slope where the air rolls its voice              the spokes of the wheel              the sun in the rut              At the crossroads              near the hill                       a prayer A few words unheard              Closer to the sky       And in his footsteps                     the last square of light…

The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov Atlantic Monthly, 306 pp., $25.00 After the Decembrist uprising of liberal officers in Russia in 1825, the imperial government restricted where the young Alexander Pushkin could go and what he could publish. In 1827, he began “The Negro of Peter the Great,” a novella about his great-grandfather Ibrahim Hannibal that he left unfinished. It is not among Pushkin’s best work, but it was his first attempt at fiction in prose. Pushkin’s story begins with Hannibal, the tsar’s Moor, having been sent in the early eighteenth century from St. Petersburg to Paris to further his military education. The libertine court of the regent, the duc d’Orléans, treats him as a tantalizing freak. After an unhappy love affair, he returns to St. Petersburg, where his promotion…

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom by Walter Johnson Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 526 pp., $35.00 Chugging against the current on a boxy steamer, the officer closely monitored the course of the Congo River. You’d think a river might be easier to navigate than the sea, since it flows in one direction and looks, more or less, like a line. You’d think it would be more interesting to look at, and presumably safer, too. You’d be wrong. Stones, sandbanks, widely varying soundings, sticky heat, banks a monotonous screen of jungle, and the menacing possibility of attack: being on the river was bad enough. And what surrounded it was ghastly, a rapacious imperial system to extract rubber or gold or timber, whose toll the officer had…

There are places on earth where, at certain moments in the cycle of day and night, the two are indistinguishable. It is impossible to know, without other referents, whether you are looking at dawn or dusk. And there are places at the margins of cities, or at the edges of the man-made sprawl of holiday islands, where at twilight growth and decay are indistinguishable; you can’t tell, at first glance, whether you are looking at a building site or a ruin. Is that earth-colored brick waiting for its glassy marble cladding, or is it crumbling back into the condition of soil? And that distant rumble, of traffic or marching feet: Have the entrepreneurs arrived, or is it the barbarians? Is it possible that they are the same? Instances of crepuscular…

The Blue Fox by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 115 pp., $10.00 (paper) From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 231 pp., $13.00 (paper) The Whispering Muse by Sjón, translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 141 pp., $22.00 Every now and then a writer changes the whole map of literature inside my head. The most recent has been the Icelander Sjón, whose work is unlike anything I had read, and very exciting. He was born in 1962 and published his first poetry collection when he was fifteen. He was a founder of the neosurrealist group Medúsa. He has published eight novels and books of poetry, plays,…

Year Zero: A History of 1945 by Ian Buruma Penguin, 368 pp., $29.95 “How empty, how sickish, how senseless everything suddenly seems the moment the war is over!” Edmund Wilson—who had opposed US involvement in World War II—said after a visit to England in 1945. If London looked grim, the appearance of Berlin, Cologne, Warsaw, Stalingrad, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and hundreds of other places, both in Europe and Asia, defied description. Just in Germany, where British planes attacked by night and American planes by day, the Allies dropped nearly two million tons of bombs, leaving cities and towns reduced to smoldering ruins reeking of death. There were 31.1 cubic meters of rubble for every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters for every inhabitant of Dresden. “The first thing,” Ian Buruma…

Zibaldone by Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino, translated from the Italian by Kathleen Baldwin, Richard Dixon, David Gibbons, Ann Goldstein, Gerard Slowey, Martin Thom, and Pamela Williams Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2,502 pp., $75.00 In 1817 in the small central Italian town of Recanati, some six miles from the Adriatic coast, a nineteen-year-old hunchback began a notebook with the words “Palazzo Bello. Cane di notte dal casolare al passare del viandante.” (Dog in the night from the farmhouse, as the wayfarer goes by.) Palazzo Bello was the house of family friends, but the note proceeds with the translation (from Latin) of a stanza of Avianus, a fifth-century writer of fables, then goes on to tell the story of a wolf who ingenuously wastes his day hoping…

In Tripoli, an Islamist businessman invited me to join him for dinner with one of Muammar Qaddafi’s oil men and an investor long exiled in Connecticut. “In the new Libya green tahalub [or seaweed, the rebels’ name for Qaddafi’s cronies] and rats [Qaddafi’s name for the rebels] all dine together,” explained my host, with that peculiarly Libyan talent for self-deprecation. Only through mockery, perhaps, can Libyans fathom how Africa’s richest state—endowed with oil and the Mediterranean’s appealing beaches and untouched antiquities—could appear so broken and bleak. Were Libyans not such defeatists, they might have cheered some hints of an approaching return to normality. Many Libyans now sleep undisturbed by gunfire. In contrast to the kamikaze-style driving of a year ago, cars in Tripoli stop at traffic lights. Much of the…

Alexander Wilson: The Scot Who Founded American Ornithology by Edward H. Burtt Jr. and William E. Davis Jr. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 444 pp., $35.00 Most people would say without hesitation that the founder of American ornithology was John James Audubon. Audubon himself knew better. “The Ornithology of the United States may be said to have been commenced by Alexander Wilson,” Audubon wrote in Ornithological Biography, the long and animated text he wrote to accompany his famous engravings. “It is unnecessary for me to say how well he performed the task which he had imposed upon himself; for all naturalists...acknowledge his great merits.” Elsewhere he refers to “my predecessor Wilson.” Edward H. Burtt Jr. and William W. Davis Jr. have had the excellent idea of publishing for the first time…

1. In early June 2011, some three months into the uprising against the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, Syrian government forces began preparing for a large-scale assault on Jisr al-Shughour, a rebellious border town sixty-five miles southwest of Aleppo. The events that led to this operation are a matter of some dispute. Residents of the town said that Assad’s security forces shot and killed an unarmed man during a protest after Friday prayers. At his funeral the next day, thousands of mourners marched to a post office where security forces were gathered. According to eyewitnesses, government snipers on top of the building began shooting at the crowd, while more troops arrived to back them up. But numerous accounts also describe soldiers defecting and joining with the mourners, a number…