Innholdsfortegnelse for November 7, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

Titian: His Life by Sheila Hale Harper, 832 pp., $39.99 Tiziano an exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome, March 5–June 16, 2013 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa Milan: Silvana, 287 pp., €34.00 (paper) Writing an artist’s biography has never been easy, for one of the most significant elements of any artistic life, the passage of an idea from eye to hand, is virtually indescribable. Furthermore, the pioneer of the form, the sixteenth-century Tuscan painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, struck such a brilliant balance between professional insight and juicy anecdote in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (first published in 1550, revised and reissued in 1568) that writing an artistic biography after him can seem like trying to write epic after…

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov PublicAffairs, 413 pp., $28.99 Hacking the Future: Privacy, Identity and Anonymity on the Web by Cole Stryker Overlook, 255 pp., $25.95 From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet by John Naughton London: Quercus, 373 pp., £10.99 (paper) Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die by Eric Siegel Wiley, 302 pp., $28.00 Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 242 pp., $27.00 Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age by Alice E. Marwick Yale University Press, 368 pp., $27.50 Privacy and Big Data: The Players, Regulators…

Hammarskjöld: A Life by Roger Lipsey University of Michigan Press, 738 pp., $35.00 When Dag Hammarskjöld’s body was recovered from the crash site in Ndola, Zambia, where the Albertina, his chartered DC-6, went down on the night of September 18, 1961, he was lying on his back, propped up against an ant hill, immaculately dressed as always, in neatly pressed trousers and a white shirt with cuff links. His left hand was clutching some leaves and twigs, leaving rescuers to think he might have survived for a time after being thrown clear of the wreckage. Searchers also retrieved his briefcase. Inside were a copy of the New Testament, a German edition of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, a novel by the French writer Jean Giono, and copies of the Jewish…

It was a bright cold day in 1984 and a conservative American friend was berating me about my article in The New York Review. How dare I even think of comparing US policy in Central America with Soviet policy in Central Europe? What kind of whining Chomskyesque relativist had I become? We were just beginning a long car journey. I was his prisoner. On and on went the interrogation. This memory returned unbidden to my mind when I was contemplating the subject of this essay, which is the political world around The New York Review over the fifty years between the first issue, published in 1963, and this fiftieth anniversary one. For the theme of that 1984 article,1 my first contribution to this journal, spoke directly to what seems to…

Remarks by the President at the National Defense University May 23, 2013 available at whitehouse.gov What Changed When Everything Changed: 9/11 and the Making of National Identity by Joseph Margulies Yale University Press, 376 pp., $30.00 Report of the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment 560 pp. available at detaineetaskforce.org 1. Can President Barack Obama end the “war on terror”? As a purely semantic matter, it began in September 2001 when George W. Bush first used those words, and it ended in March 2009, when the Defense Department replaced the term with “Overseas Contingency Operations.” But the latter term has never caught on. The main reason is not that President Bush’s label sells more newspapers, or flows more easily off the tongue, but because the war itself goes on.…

Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon Penguin, 477 pp., $28.95 1. A couple of months before September 11, 2001, and nine chapters into Bleeding Edge, a novel set in—spliced into—New York City before, during, and after the events of that day, a commodities trader named Horst Loeffler Apart from a soap-opera sting of Hammond organ audible only to the reader, the chapter ends there. Like many Pynchon characters, Horst is gifted with a form of precognition, which in his case enables him to predict the futures of certain traded commodities but not the Future itself. (Such gifts, chez Pynchon, are always narrowly bestowed.) Only we, irretrievably wised up, understand the hollowness, the irony, of Jake’s reassurance. Irony, verbal and situational, has been the most often remarked of the tactics deployed by…

The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing by Mark McGurl Harvard University Press, 466 pp., $38.50; $19.95 (paper) 1. This past summer, as every summer, well-known writers were teaching in creative writing seminars, workshops, conferences, and residential programs, and hundreds of people attended, at Bread Loaf and Sewanee, Sun Valley and Squaw Valley, and dozens of other places. This fall, thousands more students will be enrolled in long-term writing programs leading to master’s degrees and doctorates in fine arts. Given the number of people who want to write, these programs are lucrative for the universities that sponsor them; but one wonders why, apart from the profitability, our institutions continue to foster what Mark McGurl explains as McGurl’s book on the rise of creative writing programs at…

In the past fifty years two large branches of physical science have each made a historic transition. I recall both cosmology and elementary particle physics in the early 1960s as cacophonies of competing conjectures. By now in each case we have a widely accepted theory, known as a “standard model.” Cosmology and elementary particle physics span a range from the largest to the smallest distances about which we have any reliable knowledge. The cosmologist looks out to a cosmic horizon, the farthest distance light could have traveled since the universe became transparent to light over ten billion years ago, while the elementary particle physicist explores distances much smaller than an atomic nucleus. Yet our standard models really work—they allow us to make numerical predictions of high precision, which turn out…

The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George by Denise Gigante Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 499 pp., $35.00 John Keats: A New Life by Nicholas Roe Yale University Press, 446 pp., $32.50; $20.00 (paper) 1. Forty years ago this autumn, I spent a week working at a small wooden table on a tiny ironwork balcony in Rome. The balcony was directly above the Spanish Steps. The apartment was on the second floor of 26 Piazza di Spagna. It was the apartment where John Keats died at 11 o’clock at night on February 23, 1821, with the famous injunction to his faithful companion, the painter Joseph Severn. “Severn—Severn—lift me up for I am dying—I shall die easy—don’t be frightened—thank God it has come.” My balcony was built onto the room…

To the Editors: I read Robert Brustein’s recent report on the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, for which he served as honorary chair, with great interest and pleasure [NYR, September 26]. But I was surprised that in it one of the most distinguished figures in American theater wrote that “Chinese playwriting is a relatively new phenomenon. (Until the early part of the twentieth century, theater in China was mostly composed of Beijing and Cantonese opera and shadow puppetry.)” Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle is widely known. Less familiar now is the remarkable thirteenth-century play by Li Xingfu that Brecht based his script on, also borrowing the Chinese convention of characters addressing the audience and explaining the plot before engaging in dialogue. Li was one of many playwrights who flourished during the Yuan…

The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World by William D. Nordhaus Yale University Press, 378 pp., $30.00 1. Forty years ago a brilliant young Yale economist named William Nordhaus published a landmark paper, “The Allocation of Energy Resources,” that opened new frontiers in economic analysis.1 Nordhaus argued that to think clearly about the economics of exhaustible resources like oil and coal, it was necessary to look far into the future, to assess their value as they become more scarce—and that this look into the future necessarily involved considering not just available resources and expected future economic growth, but likely future technologies as well. Moreover, he developed a method for incorporating all of this information—resource estimates, long-run economic forecasts, and engineers’ best guesses about the costs of…

A man is talking to himself again. He strolls down Broadway in the rain. He’s hidden in a slicker, so he’s yellow, obvious. A rainy day on Broadway looks like Auschwitz, more or less. He has a fancy accent so he isn’t Jewish, is he? He walks down Piccadilly, more or less. Not exactly talking to himself, more like quiet shouting. He’s a hotdog wearing yellow mustard spouting A fancy accent but he isn’t English. In fact, he’d sink England in the North Atlantic with relish. Down to Eighty-second Street and back each day, Ten blocks or sometimes more each way. Like waking from a dream and you realize you’re shouting. But you’re happy and you’re walking. I’m quite aware I’m making faces. I’ll look good in…

Game of Thrones a television series created by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, based on A Song of Ice and Fire, by George R.R. Martin HBO, DVD box sets, Seasons 1–2, $59.99 (also available on Blu-ray) Dreamsongs, Volume 1 by George R.R. Martin Bantam, 683 pp., $18.00 (paper) A Song of Ice and Fire a fantasy series by George R.R. Martin: A Game of Thrones Bantam, 835 pp., $9.99 (paper) A Clash of Kings Bantam, 1,009 pp., $9.99 (paper) A Storm of Swords Bantam, 1,177 pp., $9.99 (paper) A Feast for Crows Bantam, 1,060 pp., $9.99 (paper) A Dance with Dragons Bantam, 1,016 pp., $35.00 1. About halfway through A Clash of Kings, the second installment of George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series A…

Law is at the cutting edge of many different disciplines and I am going to try to illustrate this point by talking about my own career, not because I believe that everything I think is right, but because my career has illustrated a marked trajectory from the very concrete to the very abstract. My last book, Justice for Hedgehogs (2011), offers a panorama of the work I have done over half a century: not just a survey but an integration, trying to explain how it all fits together. I began my professional life as a young lawyer in a grand Wall Street law firm. My work could not have been more detailed and less abstract then. I wrote elaborate bond indentures and studied the balance sheets of giant corporations, helping…

We publish here for the first time T.S. Eliot’s lecture on George Chapman (1559–1634), the Elizabethan and Jacobean poet, dramatist, and translator, known particularly for his translations of Homer. The following headnote is by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard, coeditors of volume 2 of the forthcoming eight-volume edition of The Online Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot, in which all essays will appear with scholarly annotation and apparatus. The first two volumes (1905–1926) will be published in April 2014 on Project MUSE, a provider of digital humanities content made available by Johns Hopkins University Press in collaboration with the Milton S. Eisenhower Library. —The Editors T.S. Eliot delivered this unpublished lecture, which scholars have long believed lost, at Cambridge University on Saturday, November 8, 1924. In a letter of May 21,…

Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker by Stanley Crouch Harper, 365 pp., $27.99 “Bird was kind of like the sun, giving off the energy we drew from him,” Max Roach said of the alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. The sun set early for Parker, who died at thirty-four of pneumonia on March 12, 1955. He spent his last few days in a suite at the Stanhope Hotel owned by the Baronness Nica de Koenigswarter, a Rothschild heiress who was well known for her patronage of jazz musicians. He’d been watching a juggler on the Tommy Dorsey show when he collapsed. A baseless rumor spread that the baroness’s lover, the drummer Art Blakey, either shot or knocked him out in the middle of a quarrel, but Parker, who…

In the Shadow of the Rising Dragon: Stories of Repression in the New China edited by Xu Youyu and Hua Ze, translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher Palgrave Macmillan, 236 pp., $16.00 (paper) Zaoyu jingcha: Zhongguo weiquan diyixian qinli gushi [Encounters with the Chinese Police: Stories of Personal Experience at the First Line of Defense of Chinese Rights] edited by Xu Youyu and Hua Ze Hong Kong: Kaifeng chubanshe, 370 pp., HK $100.00 A casual visitor to China today does not get the impression of a police state. Life bustles along as people pursue work, fashion, sports, romance, amusement, and so on, without any sign of being under coercion. But the government spends tens of billions of dollars annually (more than on national defense) on domestic weiwen, or “stability…

The Hanging Garden by Patrick White, with an afterword by David Marr Picador, 225 pp., $15.00 (paper) Patrick White is, on most counts, the greatest writer Australia has produced, though the sense in which that country produced him needs at once to be qualified—he had his schooling in England, studied at Cambridge University, spent his twenties as a young man about town in London, and during World War II served with the British armed forces. What Australia did provide him with was fortune, in the form of an early inheritance—the White family were wealthy graziers—substantial enough for him to live an independent life. The nineteenth century was the heyday of the Great Writer. In our times the concept of greatness has fallen under suspicion, especially when attached to whiteness and…

To the Editors: Yasmine El Rashidi’s riveting description of the events in Egypt [“Egypt: The Misunderstood Agony,” NYR, September 26] either ignores or denies the evidence that it was a military coup against the elected Morsi government. Perhaps the reason for this evasion is that under American law, taxpayer funds cannot be disbursed to a faction that comes to power through an overthrow of elected government. That is why President Obama hesitated to release the $1.3 billion in military assistance to Egypt’s new military junta, and is leaning against sending military hardware to the generals. According to Washington officials I have interviewed, the $1.3 billion cannot be disbursed in the case of a coup without a waiver from Congress. If the president tries limiting aid only for counterterrorism operations in…

“Identity” is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses. In Britain, the mandarins of New Labour—not satisfied with installing more closed-circuit surveillance cameras than any other democracy—have sought (so far unsuccessfully) to invoke the “war on terror” as an occasion to introduce mandatory identity cards. In France and the Netherlands, artificially stimulated “national debates” on identity are a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment—and a blatant ploy to deflect economic anxiety onto minority targets. In academic life, the word has comparably mischievous uses. Undergraduates today can select from a swathe of identity studies: “gender studies,” “women’s studies,” “Asian-Pacific-American studies,” and dozens of others. The shortcoming of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they…

Boboli, Florence When my father was old and I was still young, I came into some money. Though it was money “earned” for work done, it seemed, both to my father and me, no different than a win on the lottery. We looked at the contract more than once, checking and rechecking it, just like a lottery ticket, to ensure no mistake had been made. No mistake had been made. I was to be paid for writing a book. For a long time, neither of us could work out what to do about this new reality. My father kept on with his habit of tucking a ten- or twenty-pound note inside his letters to me. I took the rest of my family (my parents having separated long before) to a…

Ioanna Kohler: In the preface to his translation of John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, Proust talks about the importance of the memories associated with reading, the circumstances and setting in which we read a particular book. When and in what setting did you read À la recherche du temps perdu? Stephen Breyer: I read the Recherche when I was working as a legal intern at an American law firm in Paris. I was trying to learn French, so I read all seven volumes in French. Every night I drew up vocabulary index cards with lists of the new words that I’d learned from Proust. But luckily I found that the lists became shorter and shorter as I made my way deeper into the book! In any case, it was with…

Holding on Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore by Linda Leavell Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 455 pp., $30.00 Any scholar visiting the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia quails before the huge Marianne Moore archive—poems, drafts, letters, reading notebooks, conversation notebooks, poetry notebooks, postcards, clippings, and little objects (not to speak of her grandfather’s large furniture). The museum says on its website: In spite of the intimidating quantity of the collection (including more than 30,000 letters), writers on Moore have courageously undertaken to construct the outlines of her life and work, with varying degrees of attention to the life and the poetry. It is simply not possible to compile an exhaustive account of either, let alone of both. Linda Leavell, a professor emerita at Rice University, has chosen, in…

Algerian Chronicles by Albert Camus, edited and with an introduction by Alice Kaplan, and translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 224 pp., $21.95 One Christmas when I was in my early twenties, my mother, my sister, and I returned home from midnight services to find my deeply private and resolutely lapsed father watching John Paul II’s mass at St. Peter’s on television, his face wet with tears. Distressed to see him thus, we asked why he was crying. “Because when I last heard the mass in Latin,” he replied, “I thought I had a religion, and I thought I had a country.” My father, like Albert Camus, was a pied-noir, a French Algerian. Eighteen years Camus’s junior, he grew up in Bab el-Oued, a working-class…

Cotton Tenants: Three Families by James Agee and Walker Evans, edited by John Summers and with a preface by Adam Haslett The Baffler/Melville House, 224 pp., $24.95 Amazing to think that in 1936 the editors of Fortune magazine cared enough about the hard lives of tenant farmers in the South’s Cotton Belt that they sent a reporter and a photographer to Alabama to do a story on them. One explanation is that the magazine was going through a weird period. Henry Luce, who founded Fortune as a business magazine with a target audience of tycoons and millionaires, had recently noticed the Depression. The then-widespread notion that straight-ahead, free-market capitalism did not always work had begun to make inroads upon his mind. Fortune’s writing staff at the time included a lot…

The Americans who first greeted The New York Review of Books in 1963 were a mostly prosperous lot. The US economy grew that year by nearly 4.5 percent, following 6 percent growth the year before, and with more than 6 percent growth to come on average over the next three years as well. By fall, when the new Review’s first regular pages appeared, the unemployment rate was just 5.5 percent, on its way to 4.5 percent by mid-1965 and almost to 3.5 percent by late 1966. Nor was there much inflation; consumer prices rose just 1.3 percent in 1963, the same rate that prevailed on average throughout the first half of the 1960s. Best of all, most Americans’ incomes were outpacing inflation, as they had for a decade and a…

Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, September 25, 2013–January 12, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition by Sabine Rewald Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 166 pp., $45.00 The subtitle of the splendid exhibition of works by Balthus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is really a misnomer. For there is no evidence that Balthus painted adolescent girls, let alone cats, as provocations. Which is not to say that he never set out to shock. His painting The Guitar Lesson shows a music teacher, modeled after Balthus’s own mother, maliciously pulling the hair and pawing the crotch of a half-naked girl in white knee socks sprawled helplessly across her lap. Robert Hughes called this picture of molestation “one of the…

The Syria Dilemma edited by Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel Boston Review/MIT Press, 285 pp., $14.95 A decade ago, during a few exciting weeks in the spring of 2003, United States soldiers and Marines “liberated” Iraq. Americans saw the great yellow and red nighttime explosions of the “shock and awe” bombing campaign and then the columns of tanks storming headlong to Baghdad. Iraqis, their views unconstrained by the imposed inhibitions of American television executives, saw enormous carnage. During the four weeks of the American advance, more than three thousand Iraqi civilians were killed.1 How to grasp this number? An equivalent proportion of the American population would give us 36,000 American civilians killed. (During the decade of the Vietnam War, more than 58,000 US soldiers and Marines died.) Today, a decade…

To the Editors: Garry Wills is an acute observer of Catholic culture, as he indicates in his informed review of the letters of J.F. Powers [NYR, October 10]. But he obviously fails to appreciate the artistry of Powers’s fiction, a writer who was well aware of Catholicism’s foibles and stupidities, but loved “the Church” nonetheless. Flannery O’Connor, among his many admirers, wrote that Powers was “one of the country’s finest story writers,” who, like other good writers, “knows how to write and that writing is his vocation.” Evelyn Waugh regarded Powers as “almost unique in his country as a lay writer who is at ease in the Church; whose whole art, moreover, is everywhere infused and directed by his Faith.” Powers was not a satirist, but an ironist, with a…