Innholdsfortegnelse for October 24, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

Bill de Blasio’s victory on September 10 in New York City’s Democratic primary for mayor is a reminder that through some inexplicable emanation, certain New York mayors have caught perfectly the gestalt of the city. Who can forget Abe Beame, the five-foot-two-inch Polish Jewish accountant, subsumed in the fog of New York’s impending bankruptcy and crumbling streets? During Beame’s administration in the mid-1970s, money was so tight that a subway maintenance worker told me he would rip up track from one part of a tunnel to repair damage somewhere else down the line. David Dinkins, whose one term ended in 1993, was New York’s last Democratic mayor. He was also New York’s only black mayor, elected partly as a corrective to Ed Koch, who many felt had needlessly inflamed racial…

In mid-September, a chorus of critics called President Barack Obama weak, indecisive, rudderless, and even a threat to the presidency for not ordering an immediate military strike on Syria. By seeking congressional approval for a strike, they claimed, he risked a debilitating political defeat at home. And now, by allowing the UN a chance to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons program, he has given a victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He should have just launched the missiles. That’s what a real American president would have done. These claims are made not only by such persistent Obama naysayers as Michael Gerson and Charles Krauthammer. Obama’s own former defense secretary, Robert Gates, while opposing a strike as too risky, argued that going to Congress was a mistake.…

Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin by Jill Lepore Knopf, 442 pp., $27.95 “I blame myself for not sooner desiring you to lay in your Winter’s Wood,” Benjamin Franklin apologized to his seventy-five-year-old sister Jane in the fall of 1787. He was concerned that she might not have enough firewood to get through the rough New England winter. “But I have been so busy,” he explained. It was the first letter he had time to write after the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. In her eloquent Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, Jill Lepore, a professor of history at Harvard and a staff writer for The New Yorker, imaginatively weaves together the lives of Benjamin Franklin and his favorite sister Jane, the youngest of…

TransAtlantic by Colum McCann Random House, 304 pp., $27.00 In June, during his first-ever visit to Northern Ireland, President Obama gave a speech to two thousand young people at the Waterfront Hall, Belfast. Of the two Irish writers he quoted, one—perhaps inevitably—was W.B. Yeats (“Peace comes dropping slow”). The other was Colum McCann: “Peace is indeed harder than war, and its constant fragility is part of its beauty.” For anyone who disapproves of modern literary hype, the good news is that McCann’s progress to such exalted company has been almost charmingly old-fashioned in its stateliness. He began the old-fashioned way too, with a collection of short stories, Fishing the Sloe-Black River—a book published to quiet murmurs of appreciation in Britain and Ireland in 1994, but that had to wait until…

Garry Winogrand an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, March 9–June 2, 2013; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., March 2–June 8, 2014; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, June 27–September 21, 2014; the Jeu de Paume, Paris, October 14, 2014–January 25, 2015; and the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, March 3–May 10, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Leo Rubinfien, with contributions by Sarah Greenough, Susan Kismaric, Erin O’Toole, Tod Papageorge, and Sandra S. Phillips San Francisco Museum of Modern Art/Yale University Press, 464 pp. $85.00; $50.00 (paper) Which artist made the fullest and most engaging picture of the United States in the second half of the twentieth century? In the still-and-mute division of the visual arts, I’d nominate two photographers: Lee Friedlander, whose…

The Flame of Eternity: An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Thought by Krzysztof Michalski, translated from the Polish by Benjamin Paloff Princeton University Press, 231 pp.,$39.50 Nietzsche does not belong entirely to philosophers. He was a philosopher-poet concerned not simply with describing and explaining the world as he found it, but with identifying and employing the electrifying arts that make the world appear uncanny and ineffably deep. The current Anglophone literature on his work for the most part maintains an embarrassed silence about this poetic power. But Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler would not have been moved to set to music a novel critique, say, of the neo-Kantian form of epistemic skepticism. The early intellectual and artistic loves of Nietzsche’s life, Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner, both wielded convoluted metaphysical arguments in…

To the Editors: In Arnold Relman’s review of my book Catastrophic Care [NYR, August 15], he writes: “Rarely has the irrationality of the system been so convincingly demonstrated.” I greatly appreciate the kind words. But I think he’s missed my point. My argument in Catastrophic Care is in fact that the health care system is very rational. Health care is an industry, and as such, it has responded almost perfectly to the misguided economic incentives wrapped up in private insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid. Our health care debate is imprisoned by a set of assumptions that have gone unexamined for at least fifty years. Most care, we are told, is used by only a small percentage of patients. Care is so expensive that only insurance could make it affordable to anyone…

To the Editors: With some diffidence as just “an interested reader” and the hope that Britten “scholars” will comment on Leo Carey’s interesting article [“The Battle of Britten,” NYR, August 15], I feel the author’s linking a supposed “retreat” by Britten following the premiere of Gloriana in 1953 with the setting up of the English Opera Group and the Aldeburgh Festival is seriously misleading and requires a correction of fact. Britten appears as extraordinarily productive in this early postwar period, with tours in Britain and abroad, nonoperatic compositions, and performances as conductor and pianist, apart from his rapid sequence of operas. Neil Pride London, England Leo Carey replies: I am grateful to Neil Pride for clarifying a chronology that, while not actually misstated, was perhaps too elided in my piece.…

The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri Knopf, 340 pp., $27.95 Subhash Mitra comes home one day from his Rhode Island lab to an unexpectedly empty apartment and finds the bedroom table covered with the dark hanks of his wife Gauri’s hair. She’s chopped it all off with a pair of kitchen shears, and then taken the blades to her clothes as well, so that “her saris, and her petticoats and blouses, were lying in ribbons and scraps...as if an animal had shredded the fabric with its teeth and claws.” When she returns a few minutes later she’s dressed for the first time like an American, in pants and a breast-hugging sweater, but she can’t really be bothered to explain. “I was tired of it,” she says, that’s all, and sweeps the…

Kafka: The Decisive Years by Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Princeton University Press, 581 pp., $24.95 (paper) Kafka: The Years of Insight by Reiner Stach, translated from the German by Shelley Frisch Princeton University Press, 682 pp., $35.00 Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt by Saul Friedländer Yale University Press, 183 pp., $25.00 What are we to make of Kafka? Not, surely, what he made of himself, or at least what he would have us believe he made of himself. In a letter to his long-suffering fiancée Felice Bauer he declared: “I am made of literature; I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.” This was a constant theme of his mature years, and one that he expanded on in a highly significant…

Secluded amid a sea of sand dunes at the edge of the Sahara, the Maison de Qaddafi, or Qaddafi’s Palace, was once considered the most desirable piece of real estate in Timbuktu, the ancient town in the northwest of Mali, one of Africa’s largest and poorest countries. Constructed by the Libyan dictator between 2006 and 2007 as an African outpost, it is a low-slung, Moorish-style villa of beige concrete, with oblong windows and turquoise ornamental trim, surrounded by a garden of pine and palm trees. Qaddafi decided to build his palace on the exact spot where Jacques Chirac had been feted by traditional chiefs in a Bedouin tent during his 2003 West African tour. “We still call it ‘Chirac’s Dune,’” my Tuareg acquaintance, Azima Ag Ali Mohammed, told me, leading…

Simpler: The Future of Government by Cass R. Sunstein Simon and Schuster, 260 pp., $26.00 1. Public, political, and academic opinion about the role of government has changed considerably since the early 1980s. There is now a widespread presumption that private, free-market solutions are the appropriate way to address not just economic but also social and political issues. In the spirit of our free-market era, Simpler: The Future of Government outlines strategies that regulate economic behavior but also promote individual welfare by preserving freedom of choice rather than by mandates, prohibitions, subsidies, and other incentives. Cass Sunstein is a leading legal and political theorist, recognized for his many works in constitutional jurisprudence and regulatory theory. In recent years, he has been trying to combine his long-standing commitment to progressive liberal…

The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus translated from the German and annotated by Jonathan Franzen, with assistance and additional notes from Paul Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 318 pp., $27.00 It was suggested in 1976, and again in 1986, by Karl Kraus’s early torch-bearer in English, Harry Zohn, and by others at other times, before and since, and probably in between as well, that there is a particular timeliness about the work of this Viennese Jewish writer, who was born in Bohemia in 1874 and died in Vienna in 1936. Even though most of Kraus’s writing was ad hominem and highly occasional. (This timeliness card, it seems, is one that one can always play, or at least hardly ever not. A sort of low trump, if…

Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2011–12: National Inmate Survey, 2011–12 by Allen J. Beck and others Bureau of Justice Statistics, 107 pp., available at www.bjs.gov Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2012: National Survey of Youth in Custody, 2012 by Allen J. Beck and others Bureau of Justice Statistics, 64 pp., available at www.bjs.gov As recently as five years ago, American corrections officials almost uniformly denied that rape in prison was a widespread problem. When we at Just Detention International—an organization aimed at preventing the sexual abuse of inmates—recounted stories of people we knew who had been raped in prison, we were told either that these men and women were exceptional cases, or simply that they were liars. But all this has changed. What…

To the Editors: John Paul Stevens [“The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent,” NYR, August 15] is confused about the history, the arithmetic, and, surprisingly, the constitutional status of the provision counting slaves as three fifths of a person for purposes of the apportionment of the House of Representatives. Justice Stevens refers to a “slave bonus” as if treating slaves like other people would have magnified the power of the South. He writes as if apportionment was based on counting the number of people eligible to vote, but in fact apportionment is based on the population of the state irrespective of eligibility to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment did not change this fact, though it did remove the three-fifths clause. Article 1, section 2, paragraph 3 of the Constitution…

If I call these stories “dated,” I do not mean that they are out-of-date, only that, like most works of art, they could only have been produced at a particular period in social and cultural history. The notion of the alienated artist is a phenomenon of the second half of the nineteenth century. In earlier times we do not find it and, in our own, alienation has become almost a universal problem. The causes for it were, I think, three. Firstly, after the disappearance of patronage, artists ceased to have a professional social status. Individual artists might become famous public figures but, collectively, they ceased to have status in the way that doctors, lawyers, businessmen, farmers, etc., have, whether famous or obscure, successful or unsuccessful. Secondly, European society in the…

Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist by Bill McKibben Times Books, 255 pp., $26.00 Four years ago, I gave a morning talk at Wes Jackson’s Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. It was the institute’s thirty-first Prairie Festival, a sparkling autumn weekend in the central Kansas hills. For years, the Land Institute has been one of the centers of positive thinking about agriculture. It is both farm and laboratory, a place where Jackson and his colleagues are trying to create, among other things, a way of farming with perennial plants instead of annual crops like corn and soybeans. My subject was the dedemocratization of the rural landscape. Ruthless concentration—what the USDA likes to call “efficiency”—has depopulated America’s farmland since World War II, leaving fewer and fewer people behind…

The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam by Akbar Ahmed Brookings, 424 pp., $32.95 Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murad opens with the image of a beautiful thistle flower, wrenched from a ditch, that the narrator seeks to add to his bouquet. His effort to pluck it, however, This late masterpiece, written in 1904 but never published in Tolstoy’s lifetime, was based on a real-life episode. In 1851 the Avar warlord Hajimurad al-Khunzaki, a confederate of the Imam Shamil, who led the resistance to Russia’s annexation of the Caucasus, betrayed his ally and went over to the Russians. In Tolstoy’s story he is driven by ambition, hoping to govern the Caucasian tribes under the “white tsar.” The most telling portrayals in the…

Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer by Elizabeth Kendall Oxford University Press, 288 pp., $35.00 George Balanchine had a hidden childhood. When he left his native Russia for Europe and the United States in 1924, his entire family stayed behind, and even letters between them were unreliable. Judging from what he later told friends and biographers, he didn’t remember much, though what he did recall fit neatly, perhaps a bit too neatly, in two halves. Balanchine thought of his early family life as mostly warm, even happy, and he recalled with nostalgia a lost imperial world. He was born in St. Petersburg in 1904, and his father was Georgian, charismatic, a composer; his mother was Russian, and she played the piano and made wonderful…

Inferno by Dan Brown Doubleday, 461 pp., $29.95 Inferno by Dante, translated from the Italian by Mary Jo Bang, with illustrations by Henrik Drescher Graywolf, 340 pp., $35.00 The Divine Comedy by Dante, translated from the Italian by Clive James Liveright, 527 pp., $29.95 Professionally trained Dante scholars—I am one of them—believe we have special access to The Divine Comedy’s deeper layers of meaning, yet judged by Dante’s criteria, we are self-deceived. In Inferno 9, Dante challenges his audience with a direct address: Who among the members of the Dante Society believes in good faith that he or she possesses the “sound mind” that Dante appeals to here? No one reconstructed the Christian doctrines that supposedly underlie the Comedy’s veils of allegory more piously than the great American Dante scholar…

For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet’s Journey Through a Chinese Prison by Liao Yiwu, translated from the Chinese by Wenguang Huang Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 404 pp., $26.00 This Generation: Dispatches from China’s Most Popular Literary Star (and Race Car Driver) by Han Han, edited and translated from the Chinese by Allan H. Barr Simon and Schuster, 265 pp., $24.00 Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006–2009 by Ai Weiwei, edited and translated from the Chinese by Lee Ambrozy MIT Press, 307 pp., $24.95 (paper) The massacre of protesters in Beijing on June 4, 1989, and the harsh repression during the months immediately following put China into a foul mood. Among ordinary Chinese, the prestige of the Communist Party, whose leaders had ordered the brutal assault,…

The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris by Jonathan Kirsch Liveright, 336 pp., $27.95 On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War by Bernard Wasserstein Simon and Schuster, 552 pp., $32.50 Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia by James Mace Ward Cornell University Press, 362 pp., $39.95 À l’intérieur du camp de Drancy by Annette Wieviorka and Michel Laffitte Paris: Perrin, 382 pp., e23.00 (paper) Herschel Grynszpan shot the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris on November 7, 1938. The Nazis claimed that the young man was an agent of the international Jewish conspiracy, and that his act of murder was an early salvo in the “Jewish War” against…

To the Editors: In my recent review of Benoit Mandelbrot’s posthumous memoir The Fractalist [NYR, May 23], I spent a few paragraphs discussing the subversive work that Mandelbrot did in economics, particularly in the theory of financial markets. I noted that the orthodox model of financial markets—the one taught in business schools today, the one sharply criticized by Mandelbrot during his lifetime—was originally proposed in 1900 by a Frenchman named Louis Bachelier, who, I parenthetically remarked, “copied it from the physics of a gas in equilibrium.” Several readers have written to the Review maintaining—correctly, I think—that I failed to do justice to Bachelier’s originality. While he was a doctoral student in mathematics at the Sorbonne, Bachelier derived his financial model by considering the movement of bond prices on the Paris…