Innholdsfortegnelse for November 21, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

The Circle by Dave Eggers Knopf/McSweeney’s, 491 pp., $27.95 The Circle is Dave Eggers’s tenth work of fiction, and a fascinating item it is. Eggers’s first major book was the much-acclaimed semifictional memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), which recounts the struggles of Eggers to raise his younger brother after the death of their parents. By that time he was already active in the underground worlds of comic strip writing, small-magazine founding, and columnizing in the then-embryonic realm of online magazines. He has continued along a multibranched road that has included the founding of McSweeney’s magazine and publishing house, and an associated monthly, The Believer; of 826 Valencia, a youth literacy charity; and of ScholarMatch, connecting non-rich college-age kids in the San Francisco Bay Area with donors. Then…

The Most of Nora Ephron by Nora Ephron, with an introduction by Robert Gottlieb Knopf, 555 pp., $35.00 The Most of Nora Ephron begins with a series of essays that may surprise two distinct groups of readers: those who became admirers of Ephron’s work when she began to write bubbly Hollywood comedies and adopted the literary persona of the funny, wise best friend helping her gal pals surmount the indignities of age; and those who lost interest in her work at around the same time and had forgotten why they’d admired her in the first place. Included in the present volume—along with a novel, a screenplay, and a broad selection of nonfiction—are Ephron’s astute, acerbic, and occasionally caustic magazine articles from the 1970s, among them the intrepid “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” Threatened…

David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown, 305 pp., $29.00 The RAND Corporation is a think tank in Santa Monica, California, where scholars from many disciplines work for the Department of Defense, mixing academic research with practical advice concerning military problems. The experts at RAND consider themselves the brains of the military establishment. Two fat documents were among those produced at the RAND Corporation during the years of the American war in Vietnam. One was a magnum opus in six volumes with the title Oregon Trail, written by a large group of historians, many of them eminent university professors. The other was a single volume with the title Rebellion and Authority, written by two economists, Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf. The…

Hannah Arendt a film by Margarethe von Trotta Hannah Arendt: Ihr Denken veränderte die Welt [Hannah Arendt: Her Thought Changed the World] edited by Martin Wiebel, with a foreword by Franziska Augstein Munich: Piper, 252 pp., €9.99 (paper) 1. In The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi’s final book on his experiences at Auschwitz, he makes a wise remark about the difficulty of rendering judgment on history. The historian is pulled in two directions. He is obliged to gather and take into account all relevant material and perspectives; but he is also obliged to render the mass of material into a coherent object of thought and judgment: Satisfying both imperatives is difficult under any circumstances, and with certain events may seem impossible. The Holocaust is one of those. Every…

The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert Viking, 501 pp., $28.95 Archangel by Andrea Barrett Norton, 238 pp., $24.95 In the early 1870s, George Eliot looked back forty years to the England of her childhood; Middlemarch is a “historical” novel, all the more so because Eliot’s concerns are often with how the past has shaped the present. Lydgate, the doctor who marries so unwisely and whose hopes of making a contribution to medical science are consequently derailed, absorbs much of Eliot’s sympathy and exasperation—as does Dorothea Brooke, whose own hopes of contributing to human progress in social reform are also thwarted. That our sense of Lydgate’s failure to make “a link in the chain of discovery” is his personal tragedy and not a large one for us all depends…

Magicians and Charlatans: Essays on Art and Culture by Jed Perl Eakins, 358 pp., $45.00 You pause for a moment in the fifth-floor lobby. There through the plate glass the Hudson River glitters, framed by converted warehouses, the traffic on the West Side Highway, and, on the far shore, New Jersey in hazy silhouette. Transported, your mind floats free of the business that brought you here. Which gallery did you just step out of? What claim was made on your eyes, and by whom? All is canceled by the bright water. But ping! here’s the elevator you summoned: just time to pocket away the sheet of blather vouchsafed by the snooty graduate behind the desk, before heading out onto the scruffy Chelsea sidewalk to enter some other doorway a few…

Margins and Metropolis: Authority Across the Byzantine Empire by Judith Herrin Princeton University Press, 365 pp., $39.50 Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium by Judith Herrin Princeton University Press, 328 pp., $35.00 When the British Byzantinist Judith Herrin published her book The Formation of Christendom in 1987, many historians suddenly discovered that early medieval Christianity was far more complex than they had ever imagined. The concept of Christendom embraced not only medieval European Christianity, which ultimately led to the Crusades, but also the rival Byzantine orthodoxy that was based in Constantinople as well as the new faith of Islam that challenged it. By capturing Constantinople in 1204, the Roman Catholic Crusaders from Europe finally succeeded in doing what the Arabs had been desperately trying to do in the seventh…

To the Editors: In James Bamford’s informative article about the NSA [“They Know Much More Than You Think,” NYR, August 15], he doesn’t mention that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when there was no cyber, the US government was already hacking into the privacy of its citizens. There were several thousands, of whom I was one, and after Nixon came to power it was called the Enemies’ List. Unknown to us, our phones were tapped, our letters opened, our bank accounts examined, and journeys around the US and abroad were logged. If we gave speeches they were quoted at length. I found out the extent of this intrusion when the Freedom of Information Act became law and I asked one of my Vermont senators (I was teaching at…

 To the Editors: The 18th annual Irving Howe Memorial Lecture will be given by Wendy Lesser, the founder and editor of The Threepenny Review, on Thursday, November 7 at 6:30 PM in the Skylight Room of the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street). The subject is “A Great Neglected Writer: Reading Alexander Herzen.” Wendy Lesser is the author of numerous books, most recently Room for Doubt and Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets. These lectures, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, honor the late critic, editor, and political writer Irving Howe (1920–1993), who taught at the City University of New York from 1963 to 1986. They are made possible by a generous gift from the late Max Palevsky and are free and open…

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing by Anya von Bremzen Crown, 338 pp., $26.00 Russians have told so many lies about themselves they hardly know who they are anymore. In the 1990s, President Boris Yeltsin created a federal commission to draft a text describing the “national idea.” These days, President Vladimir Putin talks gibberish about Russia having a “cultural code,” which he seems to imagine is some sort of a spy code for the spirit. They should have started with food. There is no common Russian equivalent for the saying “you are what you eat,” but it is no accident that Russians have hardly any idea of distinctively Russian food—except perhaps bad sushi, which is served in Moscow restaurants that claim to be Japanese…

When the train stops, the woman said, you must get on it. But how will I know, the child asked, it is the right train? It will be the right train, said the woman, because it is the right time. A train approached the station; clouds of grayish smoke streamed from the chimney. How terrified I am, the child thinks, clutching the yellow tulips she will give to her grandmother. Her hair has been tightly braided to withstand the journey. Then, without a word, she gets on the train, from which a strange sound comes, not in a language like the one she speaks, something more like a moan or a cry.…

Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve a film by Jim Bruce America’s animosity toward central banks dates to the administration of George Washington, when Alexander Hamilton proposed the creation of a Bank of the United States to organize the debts of the states, establish a common currency, and promote manufacturing in the young nation’s economy. Thomas Jefferson feared that such a powerful joining of finance and state would lead to tyranny; Washington also had doubts but let the bank go ahead. Two decades later, Jefferson’s protégé, James Madison, allowed the bank’s charter to expire, only to realize he had made a mistake. He prevailed on Congress, in 1816, to create the Second Bank of the United States. It succeeded in establishing a uniform currency—a vital achievement—but Andrew Jackson…

On August 1, the Italian Supreme Court pronounced Silvio Berlusconi definitively and unappealably guilty of tax fraud, sentencing him to four years in prison, immediately commuted to one year’s house arrest thanks to various provisions aimed at easing overcrowding in the country’s jails. Members of the Senate, however, cannot be arrested, and as the painfully slow process to remove the four-time former prime minister and leader of one of the two main parties in the present right-left coalition from his Senate seat began, Berlusconi put a gun to the prime minister’s head: find a way to keep me out of jail or I will withdraw my support and bring down the government. Since Italy has been struggling to come out of a long and deep recession that has put more…

Ronald Dworkin by Stephen Guest Stanford Law Books, 297 pp., $90.00; $27.95 (paper) 1. Ronald Dworkin, who died on February 14 of this year, began to contribute to The New York Review of Books in 1968. His strong opinions and lucid prose helped to give the paper its distinctive tone, and he achieved through those writings on the law and politics of our time a level of public recognition and influence that is rare for a legal academic. But much as he loved the public arena and the cultural limelight, he was fundamentally a theorist—originally a legal philosopher and then a moral and political philosopher whose interests expanded finally to include the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of religion. His theoretical development followed a personal path, and because he…

Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–42 by William Dalrymple Knopf, 515 pp., $30.00 After a journey through Central Asia in 1888, the young George Curzon concluded that British policy on Afghanistan was a farrago of inexplicable waywardness. For fifty years, wrote the future viceroy of India, The British position, he added, was “impregnable” in Asia except in Afghanistan, where it was “uniformly vulnerable.” How had this contrast occurred? Curzon hinted at the answer when he archly dedicated the book of his travels “to the great army of Russophobes who mislead others, and Russophiles whom others mislead.” The problem was Russia, or rather, British perceptions of the ambitions of Russia. At the end of the eighteenth century there had been no problem because thousands of miles still separated…

Confronting the Bomb: Pakistani and Indian Scientists Speak Out edited by Pervez Hoodbhoy, with a preface by John Polyani Oxford University Press, 392 pp., $45.00 Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the scientist largely responsible for India’s atom bomb, was born in Bombay on October 30, 1909. He came from a Parsi family closely associated with the Tatas, one of the richest families in India. His father was a British-educated lawyer for the Tatas and his paternal aunt had married Sir Dorab Tata, the oldest son of the founder of the Tata industrial empire, Jamsetji N. Tata. Bhabha grew up in an atmosphere of high culture and great privilege. In his aunt’s house could be found people like Nehru and Gandhi. He was educated in the best of the most expensive schools in…

To the Editors: I’m a professional translator from the Italian, and a longtime aficionado of Dante. I therefore read Robert Pogue Harrison’s piece [“Dante: The Most Vivid Version,” NYR, October 24] with great interest. I feel that Professor Harrison may have slighted Clive James’s version on one point. “To interpolate a ‘keening sound’ here is ludicrous,” he writes. And yet, there is a keening sound present in Dante’s Italian, unless my eyes deceive me. The fourth line of The Divine Comedy begins with the word “Ahi,” which represents a sound and a thought that we have in English only at a barely articulated level. It sounds like “eye,” but with a twist: “iyiyi” is one way I’ve seen it written in English. It is a slightly modified version of the…

To the Editors: The Center for Public Scholarship at The New School in New York City is hosting two events this fall: “Corruption,” the 30th Social Research conference, with a keynote address by Peter Eigen, founder of Transparency International, will take place November 21–22. “Surveillance in the US,” a discussion with New York Review contributors James Bamford, a journalist who has written about the NSA, and Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, together with Martin Garbus, a First Amendment lawyer, will take place December 5 at 6:00 pm. More information is available at www.newschool.edu/cps/events. Arien Mack Director, Center for Public Scholarship The New School for Social Research New York City…

How should we make sense of the enforcement of a “red line” prohibiting one horrible weapon that has killed relatively few but leaving untouched the conventional weapons that the Syrian military has used to kill tens of thousands? It is easy to disparage a chemical weapons deal that aims to stop the method of slaughter responsible for fewer than 2 percent of Syria’s estimated 115,000 deaths resulting from the conflict over the past two-and-a-half years while leaving unimpeded the means used to slaughter more than 98 percent. “Red light for chemical weapons, green light for conventional weapons” would fairly summarize the approach. Yet it would be wrong to belittle September’s last-minute diplomatic breakthrough in which Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov seized on US Secretary of State John Kerry’s seemingly offhand…

Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael Lennon Simon and Schuster, 947 pp., $40.00 Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays by Norman Mailer, edited with a preface by Phillip Sipiora, and an introduction by Jonathan Lethem Random House, 624 pp., $40.00 1. Norman Mailer was sixteen when he discovered John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and James T. Farrell and, he said later, “formed the desire to be a major writer.” He was twenty-five when his first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), made him famous for its narrative force and notorious for its army barracks vocabulary. He became the most celebrated and most reviled American writer of his time, a one-man industry producing stories, novels, poems, sportswriting, essays, histories, and biographies in expansive and exhilarated prose, directing films…

1. It is harder than you might think to destroy an Apple MacBook Pro according to British government standards. In a perfect world the officials who want to destroy such machines prefer them to be dropped into a kind of giant food mixer that reduces them to dust. Lacking such equipment, The Guardian purchased a power drill and angle grinder on July 20 this year and—under the watchful eyes of two state observers—ripped them into obsolescence. It was hot, dusty work in the basement of The Guardian that Saturday, a date that surely merits some sort of footnote in any history of how, in modern democracies, governments tangle with the press. The British state had decreed that there had been “enough” debate around the material leaked in late May by…

An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen Princeton University Press, 434 pp., $29.95 Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya PublicAffairs, 280 pp., $28.99 In 1961, soon after arriving in Japan as the American ambassador, Edwin O. Reischauer held a public conversation with the Japanese economist Nakayama Ichiro.1 Their differences of perception illuminate many dilemmas of a developing nation like India today. The American diplomat, a particularly sanguine exponent of “Modernization Theory,” believed that rapid economic growth was well on its way to making Japan a Western-style developed nation and a model for other non-Communist Asian countries. The Japanese economist worried that economic growth that didn’t take account…

Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century by Orville Schell and John Delury Random House, 478 pp., $30.00 Stumbling Giant: The Threats to China’s Future by Timothy Beardson Yale University Press, 517 pp., $35.00 China’s Silent Army: The Pioneers, Traders, Fixers and Workers Who Are Remaking the World in Beijing’s Image by Juan Pablo Cardenal and Heriberto Araújo, translated from the Spanish by Catherine Mansfield Crown, 350 pp., $26.00 Cool War: The Future of Global Competition by Noah Feldman Random House, 201 pp., $26.00 The China Choice: Why We Should Share Power by Hugh White Oxford University Press, 191 pp., $24.95 China Dreams: Twenty Visions of the Future by William A. Callahan Oxford University Press, 212 pp., $29.95 Last November, China’s newly installed leader, Xi Jinping, asked…

Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade by Rachel Cohen Yale University Press, 328 pp., $25.00 This revelatory passage was written by Bernard Berenson in his diary in 1954, toward the end of his eighty-ninth year, long after his achievements as a scholar and connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting had made him famous. With the appearance of Rachel Cohen’s new biography, it’s worth recalling his distaste for being written about. Like most of us, he was adept at self-deception, yet he also possessed uncommonly objective perceptions about himself, which he candidly reported. For his entire life, beginning in early childhood, he seems to have been remarkably self-obsessed, yet he cannot be described as solipsistic, because he was as intrigued by other people as he was by himself. The striking…

Were the Popes Against the Jews?: Tracking the Myths, Confronting the Ideologues by Justus George Lawler Eerdmans, 387 pp., $35.00 1. In responding to questions about its part in the tragedy that befell Europe’s Jews in the twentieth century, the Vatican—most importantly in its 1998 “reflection on the Shoah,” entitled “We Remember”—makes a crucial distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism. In “We Remember” the Vatican describes anti-Judaism as discrimination rooted in religious differences: It describes anti-Semitism not as religious in nature, but rather as The Vatican’s statement points particularly to the rise of National Socialism as being instrumental to the development of anti-Semitism. In this account, it was anti-Semitism rather than anti-Judaism that made the Holocaust possible. In his widely praised book The Popes Against the Jews (2001), David Kertzer, the…

To the Editors: I am a subscriber, so I almost fell from my chair when I bumped into Luc Sante’s piece “‘After May’ What?” [NYR, July 11]. I am very grateful for the unexpected honor of having my work reviewed in a magazine I hugely respect. I nonetheless need to correct a factual mistake that ultimately has the author misreading the very meaning of my film. When he describes the final scene in Something in the Air (Après Mai), Luc Sante refers to a “brief dream sequence projected in a theater as if it were a commercial, with a voice-over drawn from that text [Debord’s].” This is not it. Gilles walks into an “experimental cinema night” at the Electric in Portobello—in the early Seventies this was a commercial-free zone. And…