Innholdsfortegnelse for December 5, 2013 i The New York Review of Books

Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air by Richard Holmes Pantheon, 404 pp., $35.00 Readers of Richard Holmes’s biographies and essays will occasionally have caught glimpses of him in autobiographical vignettes, motorcycling along narrow country lanes or yachting on the North Sea. They will not be surprised to learn, from his history of ballooning, that he himself has made several ascents in a basket attached to a “silken cloud.” Once, he landed in a field of “distinctly inhospitable” pigs in his home county of Norfolk in eastern England; on another occasion, he was a passenger in a balloon whose pilot attempted to land “on the trim lawns of the National Parliament building” in Canberra, “until waved away by a genial security officer who threatened to give us a parking…

Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China by Jung Chang Knopf, 436 pp., $30.00 In the mid-1950s, when I was a graduate student of Chinese history, the Manchu Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908) was invariably condemned as a reactionary hate figure; Mao Zedong was admired. In the textbooks of that time, leading American scholars characterized Cixi as cruel, imperious, and opposed to the Westernizing reforms championed by progressive officials, all of whom were Han Chinese. Those reformers, we learned, were unlike the ruling Manchus, who had conquered China in 1644 and were struggling brutally to preserve their crumbling empire. A Chinese friend, in high school in Beijing in the 1970s, tells me she was taught that Cixi was a maiguozei, a traitor. Since then the judgment on Cixi has…

The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code by Margalit Fox Ecco, 363 pp., $27.99 Stories of code-breaking and decipherment usually end at the moment the code is finally cracked, or the once-mysterious language demystified and translated. The narrative thrill is in the chase, in the rivalries between the various would-be code-breakers, and if possible (for this adds another dimension to the excitement) in the vested national interests at stake. The British still like to fancy that Egyptian hieroglyphs were first deciphered by their own polymath, Thomas Young. The French, of course, know that it was all done by Jean-François Champollion. There tends to be a “tortoise-and-the-hare” element to the tales too. Will the winner be the brilliant maverick who cuts corners, but has the lucky…

From Silence to Memory: Revelations of the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional with a foreword by Carlos Aguirre and a preface by Kate Doyle University of Oregon Libraries, 476 pp., available at scholarsbank.uoregon.edu A few weeks ago in Guatemala, I participated in a long-overdue commemoration. September 14 was the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of President Jacobo Árbenz, a former army officer who was elected in 1950, then ousted in 1954 in a coup organized by the CIA, and replaced by a military junta. His name has been taboo in Guatemala for most of the time since then. Many in the ruling elite still consider the causes he championed—land reform above all—repugnant and mortally dangerous. September’s commemoration included speeches, conferences, and a vote by the city council in Quetzaltenango,…

The Fabliaux translated from the Old French by Nathaniel E. Dubin, with an introduction by R. Howard Bloch Liveright, 982 pp., $29.95 “Restricted: Language.” Meaning that what you are about to watch is not a silent film? No, a movie with a blue streak. What is a fabliau, exactly? The French dictionary says simply that it is a medieval story in verse, “popular in character, most often satiric.” But “broadly” may be a fitter word than “exactly,” since the broad humor of the Old French fabliau calls a spade a spade. “The Cunt Made with a Spade” (Du con qui fu fait a la besche) can stand as Exhibit Number 1, being the very first of the fabliaux in this thousand-page, twelfth- to fourteenth-century compilation. Understood, as it is again…

Achieving justice for racial discrimination has long been fraught with obstacles. During the civil rights era, it was southern governors and school boards who blatantly obstructed court orders to desegregate schools. In more recent years, the burdens have been erected not by southern politicians, but by the courts themselves. The Supreme Court has made it virtually impossible to prove racial discrimination short of compelling evidence that specific individuals were intentionally targeted because of their race. Proof that government policies or practices have widespread discriminatory effects on African-Americans is not enough. On that rationale, the Supreme Court in 1984 upheld Georgia’s execution of a black man for killing a white victim, despite evidence that in Georgia, even after controlling for thirty-nine other possible variables that might explain the difference, defendants who…

To the Editors: In recounting the reasons to praise Bernard Berenson [NYR, November 21], Walter Kaiser unfortunately has stumbled over some important facts that require a much more balanced assessment. Kaiser erroneously asserts that the incomparable collection of Henry Walters was “essentially the creation of Berenson.” Contrary to this claim, most of Walters’s collection of hundreds of Italian paintings was acquired by him in 1902, seven years before he ever met Berenson. In 1910, Berenson contacted Walters and proposed to write a scholarly catalog about his collection. Although he studied the collection and helped to refine it, Berenson never satisfied his promise to write a catalog about it. Instead, he began to sell paintings to Walters. Berenson sold thirty-six paintings to Walters between 1910 and 1916. Most of the attributions…

To the Editors: Freeman Dyson’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants [NYR, November 21] wrongly states that nonviolent protests in Birmingham in 1963 led to “passage of the Civil Rights Act a year later, enforcing the right of blacks to vote in elections and overturning the political power of white segregationists in southern states.” The act did not facilitate black voting—that was done by the Civil Rights Act (so-called Voting Rights Act) of 1965. James T. Patterson Professor of History Emeritus Brown University Providence, Rhode Island Freeman Dyson replies: Thanks to James Patterson for correcting my mistake. He is a historian and I am not.…

The Republican Party may have come off very poorly indeed to a large number of Americans during the October debacle over the shutdown of the government and the debt limit. In more than one poll, the party’s popularity hit record lows, with approval ratings down in the 20s. However, it didn’t take long after the fiasco ended for many observers to note that while the party may have absorbed a political black eye, it was more able to exert power over economic policy than most Americans, even most Washingtonians, realized. As the National Journal’s Michael Hirsh, a keen spectator of the goings-on in the capital, wrote in an October 19 column, while it was true that, at the eleventh hour, the Republicans lost the fight over Obamacare and “surrendered” on…

The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future by Paul Sabin Yale University Press, 304 pp., $28.50 In 1980, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich entered into a dramatic bet with the economist Julian Simon. Insisting that population growth would produce scarcity, Ehrlich wagered that the prices of five specified metals would increase over the next decade. Insisting that innovation in methods of finding, extracting, and using the metals would increase supply, Simon bet that the prices of those metals would decrease. The two meant their bet to test a larger question: Is population growth a serious problem, particularly in its effects on available resources? Ehrlich thought yes; Simon thought no; and they agreed that the bet would help to establish who was right. For over three decades,…

Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel Basic Books, 292 pp., $27.99 For those who have learned something of higher mathematics, nothing could be more natural than to use the word “beautiful” in connection with it. Mathematical beauty, like the beauty of, say, a late Beethoven quartet, arises from a combination of strangeness and inevitability. Simply defined abstractions disclose hidden quirks and complexities. Seemingly unrelated structures turn out to have mysterious correspondences. Uncanny patterns emerge, and they remain uncanny even after being underwritten by the rigor of logic. So powerful are these aesthetic impressions that one great mathematician, G.H. Hardy, declared that beauty, not usefulness, is the true justification for mathematics. To Hardy, mathematics was first and foremost a creative art. “The mathematician’s patterns, like the…

Reason and Imagination: The Selected Correspondence of Learned Hand: 1897–1961 edited by Constance Jordan, with a preface by Ronald Dworkin Oxford University Press, 435 pp., $39.95 The Manhattan courthouse of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit was reopened this year after a long renovation. The chief judge returned to the main courtroom a bust of Learned Hand, the most venerated member in the court’s history. The imposing head and resolute face, bristling eyebrows and wide-set eyes make him look like a great judge, and he was.1 Hand served on the federal trial court for New York State’s Southern District for fifteen years beginning in 1909 and then on the federal appeals court for New York, Connecticut, and Vermont for thirty-seven years, for an astonishing, near-record total…

The commander is thirty-six years old. A few strands of white in his dark, curly hair make him seem older, as do his words. He points to six young men, posed like football players in a team photograph on a wall of his forward command post, and says, “Two are martyrs, two are prisoners, and two are still working.” By working, he means fighting. Those recruits under his command were friends in their twenties. Of the two who died, he explains, “He was twenty-two years old when he was killed. And this one was martyred in June this year here in Tadamon.” Tadamon is a ragged neighborhood of Sunnis, Druze, and Alawites on the southern outskirts of Damascus, bordering the Palestinian refugee camp of Al-Yarmouk and perched astride the road…

The Last of the Unjust a film directed by Claude Lanzmann Shown at the New York Film Festival in September; general release in February 2014 Terezin: Il ghetto-modello di Eichmann [Theresienstadt: Eichmann’s Model Ghetto] by Benjamin Murmelstein Brescia: La Scuola, 246 pp., €15.50 “Der Letzte der Ungerechten”: Der “Judenälteste” Benjamin Murmelstein in Filmen 1942–1975 [“The Last of the Unjust”: The “Jewish Head Elder” Benjamin Murmelstein in Films 1942–1975] edited by Ronny Loewy and Katharina Rauschenberger Frankfurt: Campus, 201 pp., €24.90 1. A half-century has passed since Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was first published. Yet somehow we can’t escape it. Even today historians of the Final Solution do battle with her misguided thesis that Adolf Eichmann, the cold-blooded engineer of the Nazi killing machine, was himself but a cog in…

To the Editors: As a descendant of the Russian nobility (a better word is “gentry”), I would like to comment on the review by Michael Scammell of the book by Douglas Smith, Former People [NYR, March 7]. I find both the review and the book patronizing and distasteful. The likes of us are not professional victims moaning and complaining, nor are we interested in making capital of our miseries. Far better than a litany of reproaches and recriminations is a good history of what this class did accomplish both at home and abroad—an assessment of their (our) contributions, for which much material is available in The New Review published in New York (Novyi Zhurnal in Russian), with names like Sikorsky, the two Nabokovs (Vladimir and Nicolas), Karpovich, Dobuzhinsky, Eugene Berman, Gleb…

The World’s Masterpieces: Italian Painting by Michalena Le Frere Carroll and Frances Cavanah Grosset and Dunlap, 26 pp. (out of print) My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 441 pp., $16.00 (paper) My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett Archipelago, 573 pp., $26.00 Taipei by Tao Lin Vintage, 248 pp., $14.95 (paper) 1. One September night, running home from dinner to meet a babysitter, I took off my heels and hopped barefoot—it was raining—up Crosby Street, and so home. Hepatitis, I thought. Hep-a-ti-tis. I reached my building bedraggled, looking like death. The doorman—who’d complimented me on my way out—blushed and looked down at his smart phone.…

Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat Knopf, 238 pp., $25.95 Nozias Faustin, a fisherman and widower in a Haitian village, has a dilemma. He loves his seven-year-old daughter, Claire, and therefore believes he should give her away. Especially if the town’s fabric vendor, Gaëlle Lavaud, will finally take her. Madame Lavaud is rich and has what Nozias hopes is a soft spot for Claire. But, loving Claire, Nozias does not want to lose her. He loves his daughter with the faithful intensity with which he loved his wife, also named Claire, who died giving birth to her. In the evenings, in their shack near the water, he pretends to repair his net so he can sit close to his daughter as she singsongs through the school day’s vocabulary…

The Bridge Over the Neroch and Other Works by Leonid Tsypkin, translated from the Russian by Jamey Gambrell New Directions, 252 pp., $16.95 (paper) Leonid Tsypkin was the authentic underground man of the Soviet “era of stagnation,” leading a hidden life as a writer during Leonid Brezhnev’s years as Party leader. He died of a heart attack in Moscow in 1982 at the age of fifty-six, professionally humiliated and socially isolated, a brokenhearted Jewish refusenik, denied permission to join his only son, who had emigrated. Not a word of his small body of literary work was printed anywhere until just a few days before his death, when a fragment of his novel Summer in Baden-Baden appeared in a small-circulation New York émigré journal, Novaya Gazeta. The news of his publication…

The Vatican Diaries: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Power, Personalities and Politics at the Heart of the Catholic Church by John Thavis Viking, 321 pp., $27.95 Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo by Tim Parks Norton, 261 pp., $25.95 1. An ophthalmologist visiting an exhibition of the artist Chuck Close spotted what he suspected was a serious condition in the eye of one of the subjects of Close’s larger-than-life, hyperrealistic portraits. The doctor left a note for the artist to urge the subject, Close’s own father-in-law, to have a checkup. Sure enough, Close’s father-in-law did have the condition that the doctor had observed. On reading about this incident, I immediately felt that it was a parable about journalism. In observing carefully and rendering detail closely,…

Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War by Paul Kennedy Random House, 436 pp., $30.00 Different kinds of historians have tended to emphasize different reasons for the Allies’ defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. The more traditional military historians put the stress on the varying qualities of leadership on the two sides. They contrast the inspiration provided by Churchill and Roosevelt and, in a very different way, Stalin, with the remoteness of Hirohito or the unbalanced decision-making and growing withdrawal of Hitler from public life during the war. Generalship counted for a great deal in this view too. Brilliant German military figures like Erwin Rommel, Heinz Guderian, or Erich von Manstein were hamstrung by Hitler’s constant meddling and rigid…

I am an admirer of Alan Rusbridger’s editorial and journalistic talents but his article on the Snowden leaks [NYR, November 21] reads more like the case for the defense than an objective analysis by a fiercely independent newspaper. He did not mention his newspaper’s attempt to suggest that the United Kingdom’s GCHQ might have been attempting to avoid UK law by asking the NSA to intercept on its behalf. If true this would have been highly damaging to GCHQ’s integrity. The Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, which I chair, examined these allegations and found that GCHQ had legal warrants in every case. At no time has Mr. Rusbridger explicitly acknowledged that they got it wrong. I was amused that Mr. Rusbridger suggested that I might not be the right…

To the Editors: May I just clarify some facts about the recent commission of inquiry (the Hammarskjöld Commission), which I chaired and to which Michael Ignatieff refers in his article on Dag Hammarskjöld [NYR, November 7]? The commission was sponsored not by the Swedish Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation but by an ad hoc trust whose members are listed at the end of our report. The report can be read on the commission’s website: HammarskjoldCommission .org. I have not been able to locate it at the address given in Ignatieff’s footnote. Perhaps I may add that the researchers mentioned by Michael Ignatieff who are trying to track down NSA and other records of air traffic intercepts from the minutes before the crash have been doing so on behalf of the commission. The…