Innholdsfortegnelse for January 9, 2014 i The New York Review of Books

Five years have passed since the onset of what is sometimes called the Great Recession. While the economy has slowly improved, there are still millions of Americans leading lives of quiet desperation: without jobs, without resources, without hope. Who was to blame? Was it simply a result of negligence, of the kind of inordinate risk-taking commonly called a “bubble,” of an imprudent but innocent failure to maintain adequate reserves for a rainy day? Or was it the result, at least in part, of fraudulent practices, of dubious mortgages portrayed as sound risks and packaged into ever more esoteric financial instruments, the fundamental weaknesses of which were intentionally obscured? If it was the former—if the recession was due, at worst, to a lack of caution—then the criminal law has no role…

The Right Path: From Ike to Reagan, How Republicans Once Mastered Politics—and Can Again by Joe Scarborough Random House, 194 pp., $26.00 The current Thing to Say about Republicans is that they are caught in a civil war—the Tea Party against the Establishment, “wacko birds” against “the adults,” fringe against mainstream. One of the most clamorous bearers of this message, on his TV show and in various other media, is Joe Scarborough. He has denounced Republicans for putting up outré candidates (like Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Christine O’Donnell, and Sharron Angle) to indulge their resentments, not to win elections. He has, in turn, been called a RINO (Republican in Name Only) by the objects of his criticism. He protests that he is the true Republican, principled and pragmatic like the…

The recent revelations regarding the NSA’s collection of the personal information and the digital activities of millions of people across the world have attracted immense attention and public concern. But there are equally troubling and equally opaque systems run by advertising, marketing, and data-mining firms that are far less known. Using techniques ranging from supermarket loyalty cards to targeted advertising on Facebook, private companies systematically collect very personal information, from who you are, to what you do, to what you buy. Data about your online and offline behavior are combined, analyzed, and sold to marketers, corporations, governments, and even criminals. The scope of this collection, aggregation, and brokering of information is similar to, if not larger than, that of the NSA, yet it is almost entirely unregulated and many of…

Double Down: Game Change 2012 by Mark Halperin and John Heilemann Penguin, 499 pp., $29.95 The Gamble: Choice and Chance in the 2012 Presidential Election by John Sides and Lynn Vavreck Princeton University Press, 331 pp., $29.95 The Polarized Public? Why American Government Is So Dysfunctional by Alan I. Abramowitz Pearson, 148 pp., $38.40 The Fracturing of the American Corporate Elite by Mark S. Mizruchi Harvard University Press, 363 pp., $35.00 The Almanac of American Politics 2014 by Michael Barone, Chuck McCutcheon, and others University of Chicago Press, 1,883 pp., $90.00 (paper) Here’s our current political situation: • A Democratic president has twice won the popular vote, both times by comfortable margins. • In the Senate, Democrats (with two independents) hold 55 percent of the seats, receiving nearly that share…

My fallen, my turned to dust, my earth, assumes the shape he has in the photograph: with a leaf's shadow on his face, with a seashell in his hand, he sets out toward my dream. He wanders through darknesses extinguished since never, through emptinesses opened to themselves forever, through seven times seven times seven silences. He appears on the other side of my eyelids, in the one and only world that he can reach. His shot heart beats. A first wind stirs from his hair. A meadow spreads between us. Skies come flying with clouds and birds, mountains rise silently on the horizon and a river flows downward, searching for the sea. You can see so far, so far, that day and night turn simultaneous, and…

Perilous Question: Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink, 1832 by Antonia Fraser PublicAffairs, 320 pp., $29.99 It is more than forty years since Antonia Fraser revealed a formidable talent for writing serious and well-researched books on history for a wide audience. Her Mary Queen of Scots, published in 1969, won the James Tait Black for biography; since then she has written prize-winning and best-selling accounts of a wide range of historical figures from Marie Antoinette to Oliver Cromwell, Charles II, and the six wives of Henry VIII. She has a particular gift for creating telling portraits of historical figures, often but not invariably aristocrats and royalty, embroiled in high politics with sometimes lethal consequences to themselves or others. She is an equally prolific and successful author of detective fiction.…

Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach by Philip Kitcher Columbia University Press, 254 pp., $30.00 “This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach,” remembered Thomas Mann’s long-suffering wife near the end of her life. “He didn’t pursue him through all of Venice—that he didn’t do—but the boy did fascinate him.” In May 1911, she, her husband, and his brother Heinrich arrived at the Hotel des Bains, on the Venetian Lido, and Thomas Mann developed a fixation with a young Polish boy. Over the next year, he wrote Death in Venice, turning his infatuation into the fatal passion of Gustav von Aschenbach, an aging, famous writer, for the boy Tadzio. Mann himself often remarked how closely the novella…

Sex Is Forbidden by Tim Parks Arcade, 290 pp., $24.95 Tim Parks has never been a man to take any received wisdoms for granted, however blameless they might appear. Perhaps his best-known novel, the Booker-shortlisted Europa (1997), had the regular refrain “every man is an island,” as the academic narrator Jerry Marlow gave everything from the environmental movement to the concept of universal human rights a thorough and often withering examination. Along the way, he also served up some surprisingly heartfelt paragraphs on the inadvisability of seizing the day and the wisdom of crying over split milk. As for books, Jerry reserved especial scorn for writers “who do nothing more than analyse the world in a way in which it has grown used to being analysed”—a view certainly shared by…

To the Editors: As the coauthors of China’s Silent Army, published by Penguin and Crown in English and translated to eight other languages, we are writing to you over the very unfortunate review written by Mr. Ian Johnson [“Dreams of a Different China,” NYR, November 21, 2013]. Let us first underline we have lived in China for a decade and we appreciate different views on such a complex matter as the rise of China. Therefore, we are not disappointed by a negative review, but by what we consider an unacceptable lack of professionalism by the reviewer. Mr. Johnson questions our book arguing that our views on China’s expansion in the developing world are “infantilistic” and underlining that the book is filled with “errors of fact.” Furthermore, he accuses us of…

Nelson Mandela has died after a long life—long yet lamentably truncated in that he spent twenty-seven of the best years of his manhood incarcerated at the pleasure of the state. Incarcerated, he was hardly powerless. During the final years of that long sentence he in effect exercised a power of veto over the foreign policy of his country, exerting more and more of a stranglehold over his jailers. With F.W. de Klerk, a man of much smaller moral stature, yet also, in his way, a contributor to the liberation of South Africa, Mandela held a turbulent country together during the dangerous years between 1990 and 1994, exercising his great personal charm to persuade whites that they had a place in the new democratic republic while step by step emasculating the…

“Revolution!” This is what they are shouting in Kiev. Ever since November 21 tens of thousands have been on the streets of the capital of Ukraine, defying the police and bans on demonstrations. On December 8 hundreds of thousands packed the city center, and a granite statue of Lenin was toppled in a scene recalling both Europe’s anti-Communist revolutions of 1989 and the symbolic fall of Saddam’s statue in Baghdad in 2003. Especially at the beginning of the demonstrations the riot police have reacted brutally, which brought out many more protesters. At times hard-liners among the demonstrators have resorted to violence but some of the violent actions seem to have been led by government-paid provocateurs. As the first snows of winter fell no one knew which way the upheaval in…

Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler, edited and with an introduction by Niko Kolodny, and with commentaries by Susan Wolf, Harry G. Frankfurt, Seana Valentine Shiffrin, and Niko Kolodny Oxford University Press, 210 pp., $29.95 1. We are all going to die, and the world will go on without us. In this highly original book Samuel Scheffler explores the powerful but often unnoticeable ways in which these obvious facts affect the values that govern our lives and the motives that shape them. The afterlife referred to in the title is not the personal afterlife, the continued existence of the individual in some form after death. Scheffler does not believe in a personal afterlife, and some of the book is taken up with the question of how we should feel…

A Feathered River Across the Sky: The Passenger Pigeon’s Flight to Extinction by Joel Greenberg Bloomsbury, 289 pp., $27.50 Lost Animals: Extinction and the Photographic Record by Errol Fuller Princeton University Press, 256 pp., $29.95 The very last passenger pigeon on earth was a female named Martha who lived at the Cincinnati Zoo. She was born sometime in 1895 or 1897, or perhaps 1900 or 1902, maybe at the zoo or maybe one state over, in Illinois; over the years, many different versions of her story have been offered. (As a Wisconsin naturalist once put it, “It would be difficult to find a more garbled history than that of Martha.”) Like all passenger pigeons, Martha was a slim, elegant bird, with long tapering tail feathers and a narrow black bill—a…

The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution, 1945–1957 by Frank Dikötter Bloomsbury, 376 pp., $30.00 Here are two snippets from a Chinese Communist journal called People’s China, published in August 1956: And so on. The tone, typical of all such publications, of which China Reconstructs was perhaps the best known, is defensive, as though the new regime needed to boast of every stupendous achievement and “bumper harvest” to be taken seriously, and, in line with the Marxist tradition, it is also pseudoscientific. Progress had to be measured precisely in percentages and square feet. And progress under communism could only accelerate, usually in great leaps. The scholar of modern China Frank Dikötter seeks to dismiss all this. If the official line in China today is that Chairman Mao’s…

Jimi Hendrix: I Hear My Train A Comin’ a film directed by Bob Smeaton in the PBS series American Masters Starting at Zero: His Own Story by Jimi Hendrix Bloomsbury, 256 pp., $26.00 Shortly before his death at age twenty-seven on September 18, 1970, Jimi Hendrix told his friend Colette Harron that he didn’t have much time left. He’d heard it from a fortune-teller in Morocco, and he believed her. Hendrix, who’d grown up penniless, could earn $14,000 a minute playing his white Fender Stratocaster guitar at Madison Square Garden, but he couldn’t find a minute’s peace. He was worn down by the predatory behavior of his manager Mike Jeffery, a corrupt former MI5 operative. Student radicals demanded that he play for free; the Black Panthers tried to shake him…

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil Council on Foreign Relations/ Princeton University Press, 449 p., $29.95 1. Do we need another book on Bretton Woods, the conference in 1944 in New Hampshire that established a new monetary system following World War II? The answer is yes. The two excellent existing histories of Bretton Woods, by Richard Gardner (1956) and Armand van Dormael (1978), are now dated.1 New historical materials have become available. Since the crash of 2008 the arcane subject of the world’s money has become urgently relevant. So a fresh look at the famous conference is warranted. In The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of…

The Unknown Known a film directed by Errol Morris Known and Unknown: A Memoir by Donald Rumsfeld Sentinel, 815 pp., $36.00 By His Own Rules: The Ambitions, Successes, and Ultimate Failures of Donald Rumsfeld by Bradley Graham PublicAffairs, 803 pp., $18.95 (paper) 1. It is a striking thought: night after night, the secretary of defense of the world’s most powerful country retires to his bed haunted not by some threatening, well-armed foe but by “a failure of imagining what might happen in the world.” There is something at once heroic and pleasingly humble about it, with hints of the tragic: the great hero haunted by the boundaries of his own imagination, struggling with all his vast strength to do nothing more than escape the net of his own ignorance.1…

To the Editors: Several readers of my review of Malcolm Gladwell's David and Goliath [NYR, November 21, 2013] have asked me for information about the Oregon Trail report. My account of it in the review, based on my memory of events forty-seven years ago, is incomplete and misleading. I read it at the Rand Corporation, but it was not a Rand report. It was a US Army report, and its official designation is Project OREGON TRAIL, Final Report, USACDC No. USC-6, February 1965. Volume 1, Main Report, TOP SECRET RD. The full report consisted of two parts, the historical part that was the biggest part and ought to have been published separately, and a war-game part that described war games carried out at Rand and at Research Analysis Corporation that…

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt Little, Brown, 771 pp., $30.00 What do people mean when they call a novel “Dickensian”? A large cast of vividly drawn characters, some of them grotesques with comically descriptive names and odd tics of speech and behavior; a plucky orphan who overcomes a childhood blighted by humiliating poverty or simple lower-class misery; numerous and ingeniously interconnected subplots; panoramic shifts of location; a narrative that makes the reader finish each chapter eager to begin the next. But like “Kafkaesque,” “Dickensian” is only a partial description of the writer’s work. Often missing from so-called Dickensian novels are the aspects of Dickens—his originality, his intelligence, his witty and precise descriptions, the depth and breadth of his powers of observation, his cadenced, graceful language—that can temper the urgency of…

Hugh Trevor-Roper and Kim Philby worked together from 1941 as fellow recruits of British wartime intelligence. They savoured each other’s company, admired each other’s intellects, and shared a contempt for the inadequacies they perceived in their superior officers. But whereas Trevor-Roper’s attitude toward them provoked calls for his dismissal, and on one occasion a preposterous charge of treason, Philby, the real traitor, charmed his superiors with courteous deference. In Trevor-Roper’s view Philby would have gone on to become head of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) but for the flight of Donald Maclean and Philby’s drinking companion Guy Burgess to Moscow in 1951. That episode, though it threw suspicion on Philby, did not destroy him. He remained on the intelligence payroll and from 1956 was stationed in Beirut, under cover…

In Search of Rex Whistler: His Life and His Work by Hugh and Mirabel Cecil Frances Lincoln, 272 pp., $60.00 Rex Whistler: A Talent Cut Short an exhibition at the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum, Salisbury, England, May 24–September 29, 2013 After the somber broadcast on September 3, 1939, in which Neville Chamberlain said that Hitler had persisted with his assault on Poland “and that consequently this country is at war with Germany,” there was little overt patriotic ardor in England. Even when Winston Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as prime minister the following May, and believed that there was “a white glow, overpowering, sublime, which ran though our island from end to end,” he was projecting his own zeal onto the British people. Their mood was stubborn or even sullen…

The good news is that the Renzo Piano Pavilion, its eponymous architect’s long-awaited addition to Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum of 1966–1972 in Fort Worth, is far from the disaster feared by many admirers of the most revered twentieth-century gallery. There is no bad news, only mild regret that the new $135 million building is not very distinguished, especially in light of what I believe to be Piano’s masterpiece, only thirty-two miles away in Dallas, his Nasher Sculpture Center of 1999–2003. More than ever before, the Nasher struck me during a recent visit as its designer’s equivalent of Kahn’s Kimbell, a warm and embracing fusion of art and architecture that seems increasingly remarkable each time I see it. Conversely, my primary response to Piano’s Kimbell expansion is relief that it…

Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis, and translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver New Directions, 306 pp., $24.95 Throughout his life, Jorge Luis Borges was engaged in a dialogue with violence. Speaking to an interviewer about his childhood in what was then the outlying barrio of Palermo, in Buenos Aires, he said, “To call a man, or to think of him, as a coward—that was the last thing...the kind of thing he couldn’t stand.” According to his biographer, Edwin Williamson,1 Borges’s father handed him a dagger when he was a boy, with instructions to overcome his poor eyesight and “generally defeated” demeanor and let the boys who were bullying him know that he was a man. Swords,…

The Allure of the Archives by Arlette Farge, translated from the French by Thomas Scott-Railton, with a foreword by Natalie Zemon Davis Yale University Press, 131 pp., $25.00 Take the title as a provocation: The Allure of the Archives. What, you may ask, could be less alluring in the digital age than an apology for deciphering words scribbled on paper several centuries ago? Even more provocative, Arlette Farge’s book first appeared in French in 1989, two years before the creation of the Web, not to mention all the subsequent technology, from search engines to smartphones, that now might make archival research look outmoded. Farge, one of France’s finest historians, could not see into the unfathomable future of electronic communication when she wrote her book. She was looking backward into the…

My Crazy Century by Ivan Klíma, translated from the Czech by Craig Cravens Grove, 534 pp., $30.00 Ivan Klíma, the prolific and irrepressible Czech novelist, essayist, and playwright, belongs to the remarkable cohort of Czech writers and artists who came to the world’s attention in the 1960s and went on to produce some of their best work in the following two decades, either in exile or in conditions of heavy repression at home. They included people of formidable talent but wildly different temperaments, among them Josef Škvorecký, Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, Ludvík Vaculík, Pavel Kohout, Václav Havel, Miloš Forman, and many others not as well known abroad but of no less importance in the revival of culture and politics they helped to bring about. In retrospect, there is something improbable…

To the Editors: Sue Halpern is correct about the appalling lack of competence in setting up the HealthCare.gov website [“The Flop,” NYR, December 19, 2013]. But I am doubtful that anyone could make it work, not for reasons of technological competence, but because of the Rube Goldberg–like nature of the law itself. All the ostensibly interlocking parts will not connect, either on the website or in practice. If the website is fixed, then the substantive problems will reveal themselves. Because the law left the for-profit private insurance industry in place and promised it millions of new customers, it will simply be too costly to implement fully, and too inflationary to sustain. And as premiums rise, coverage will inevitably shrink. Regulations to require companies to insure all comers, regardless of health,…