Innholdsfortegnelse for February 6, 2014 i The New York Review of Books

White Girls by Hilton Als McSweeney’s, 338 pp., $24.00 Hilton Als is a theater critic for The New Yorker, but the two books he has written are not simply, or even primarily, works of criticism. His characteristic form is a kind of essay in which biography, memoir, and literary criticism flow into one another as if it were perfectly natural that they should. The pieces in his new book are about Truman Capote, Louise Brooks, Eminem, Flannery O’Connor, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor, among others, and leading the collection is an eighty-four-page personal essay about a romantic friendship that has shaped the last thirty years of Als’s own life and work. In all of his essays, the life gets as much scrutiny as the work, with an eye to one…

Past the gaga experiments to ginger high school thriller days I wheel fragile issues: a fight on there, bulbous antennae, a herald carved alone in the archer position—sweet! We had a few people over to celebrate the monotony of the new place. Meatless meat loaf. Roger. Over to you. I took a piece of plain foolscap, my American University in Baku stationery, sole thing to be underestimated here, and set down just words that wrote something, probably as close as I want to keep to it, all the water and stringiness. It feels like Sunday today but it’s Saturday. What does Saturday feel like on Sunday? Not that it’s that hard to remember. I’d always be grinning and opened. No protocol; heck, no manners on flood watch.…

Twelfth Night a play by William Shakespeare, directed by Tim Carroll and produced by Shakespeare’s Globe, London, at the Belasco Theatre, New York City, November 20, 2013–February 16, 2014 The production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night by the English theatrical company Shakespeare’s Globe, currently at the Belasco Theatre, brings this play to life in a way I have only very rarely seen equaled in a Shakespearean production. The performances are so uniformly skillful, the interpretation of the play so intelligent and imaginative, and the costumes and stage set so accurate and evocative that the entire experience is exhilarating. Audiences at the performances I’ve attended have been overcome with delight, clearly somewhat surprised by the affecting immediacy of the theatrical experience they have undergone, unaccustomed to a Shakespeare so readily comprehensible…

I am a senior physician with over six decades of experience who has observed his share of critical illness—but only from the doctor’s perspective. That changed suddenly and disastrously on the morning of June 27, 2013, ten days after my ninetieth birthday, when I fell down the stairs in my home, broke my neck, and very nearly died. Since then, I have made an astonishing recovery, in the course of which I learned how it feels to be a helpless patient close to death. I also learned some things about the US medical care system that I had never fully appreciated, even though this is a subject that I have studied and written about for many years. As background, I should first explain that this was not my first experience…

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. On a lovely morning in May 2004, as occupied Iraq slipped deeper into a chaos of suicide bombings, improvised explosive attacks, and sectarian warfare, the American commander in Baghdad, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, together with his superior, General John Abizaid of Central Command, arrived at the White House for an appointment with the president. Once inside the Oval Office, General Sanchez tells us in his memoir: A perfect little chamber play of dysfunction: the American proconsul in Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, secretly demands that 30,000 more…

To the Editors: I was appalled that in Jason Epstein's review of Dana Goodyear's book on extreme eating [NYR, December 19, 2013] not a single mention is made of the fact that the penises, brains, hearts, and whole embryos that are now de rigueur to consume by our haute cuisine establishment derive from sentient creatures. These animals are all capable of sophisticated behaviors that, would they occur in people, are associated with empathy, attachment, curiosity, metacognition, and conscious awareness. Maybe even food writers and their critics can acknowledge this uncomfortable truth and face up to their ethical blindness. Christof Koch, Ph.D. Author of Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist Seattle, Washington Jason Epstein replies: We are omnivores. We eat anything edible including ourselves. I deeply regret the suffering of animals…

To the Editors: The footnote on p. 27 of Jim Holt's review of Edward Frenkel's Love and Math [NYR, December 5, 2013] makes it sound a bit as if Professor Love were a pseudonym or mild witticism. A.E.H. Love was an expert on various kinds of wave motion, and Love waves are named for him. They are surface waves, which, in the case of earthquakes, travel more slowly than p (primary or pressure) and s (secondary or shear) waves and so arrive later, but sometimes do the most damage. Virginia Trimble Professor of Physics and Astronomy University of California Irvine, California Jim Holt replies: Facetiousness is silenced by Love waves.…

Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy by Rahul Sagar Princeton University Press, 281 pp., $35.00 Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles by James C. Goodale CUNY Journalism Press, 260 pp., $35.00 What should we make of Edward Snowden, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, and Julian Assange? Their names are known across the globe, yet the actions that made them famous have also driven them to lives of intense isolation—in hiding, in prison, or in a foreign embassy. They have been lionized as heroes and condemned as traitors. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), and Manning, a low-level army intelligence analyst, are responsible for the two largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the nation’s history. Manning released…

The King’s Pictures: The Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and His Courtiers by Francis Haskell, edited and with an introduction by Karen Serres, and a foreword by Nicholas Penny Yale University Press, 244 pp., $60.00 Until about sixty years ago art historians were mainly interested in works of art and the artists who had made them. But especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they also began to consider the wider setting in which art was produced, often associating artistic changes with other social developments. Art, it was claimed, reflected the spirit of the age—which of course it was bound to do, since the spirit of the age was usually defined by its artistic style. It was against this background that the British art historian…

The December budget deal, worked out between Representative Paul Ryan and Senator Patty Murray, has been widely greeted with relief. Since the first days of the Obama Administration in 2009, Washington has been in a pitched battle over the budget, with endless fights over stimulus packages, temporary tax cuts, spending limits and sequestration, fiscal cliffs, debt ceilings, and government shutdowns. Who would not welcome a moment of bipartisan calm, especially when the economy still needs to break out of its prolonged torpor? Yet the budget battles have never been quite what they’ve seemed, and the new bipartisan agreement is not a victory of bipartisan reason. Despite all of the budget turmoil over the past five years, the long-term trajectory of the US budget has remained remarkably and dangerously unaltered. With…

Tenth of December by George Saunders Random House, 251 pp., $26.00 Late in Jonathan Franzen’s recent, fourth novel, Freedom, Patty Berglund, six years estranged from her husband Walter after her affair with Walter’s best friend, takes an unusual path to reconciliation. On a wintry October night, Patty arrives unannounced from her home in Brooklyn at Walter’s distant, frozen, monastic, northern Minnesota door. Sitting down on his front step, she refuses to engage with him. Walter yells; Walter storms; loglike, Patty sits. Walter demands that she leave. Patty’s reply, in full, is “No.” Not dressed for the frosty night, Patty sits, minutes passing, temperature dropping. Incredulous, Walter tramps off behind his house where he fulminates until “the bite in the air became...more serious [and] he began to worry about Patty.” He…

The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 291 pp., $26.00 The Needle’s Eye by Margaret Drabble Mariner, 427 pp., $23.95 (paper) The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 180 pp., $14.00 (e-book) The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble Mariner, 334 pp., $19.95 (paper) The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 353 pp., $14.95 (paper) The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble Harvest/Harcourt, 345 pp., $14.00 (paper) The Millstone by Margaret Drabble Harvest, 192 pp., $14.00 (paper) It only makes sense that a novelist of such long tenure, one so preoccupied with the slippery nature of time, should actually write a novel on the subject of “prolepsis”—the anticipation of future events. Drabble uses the adjectival form of the…

To the Editors: Permit me to offer two points relating to Jonathan Mirsky’s review of Jung Chang’s Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China [NYR, December 5, 2013]. First, Chang is correct to say that by the end of the Qing, few Manchus still spoke the Manchu language in daily life. Use of the language was confined mainly to writing court documents. That does not mean Manchu identity had disappeared—as Mirsky points out, recent scholarship shows it had not—but by the late nineteenth century the language was not part of what made Manchus “Manchu” anymore. Second, on sources. In the introduction to the book, Chang says that most of her materials “have never been seen or used outside the Chinese-speaking world,” and in remarks at the Hong Kong…

To the Editors: I was astonished when told by Robert B. Silvers that my response to Kevin Madigan’s “Getting Jews and the Vatican Wrong” [NYR, November 21, 2013] shouldn’t exceed five hundred words—particularly since Madigan’s piece is nearly four thousand. Still, I had no choice but to abide by the Editor’s protocol, even though a year ago I had sent him this message about another kind of protocol: Silvers replied: “Thanks for your letter, which we will be taking into account.” I thought, “At least we’re rid of ‘A Nasty Piece of Work.’” I also applaud the use of the photo of Mendel Beilis, with Pius X’s statement: “I pray that the trial will end without harm to the poor Jews.” The Beilis trial along with that papal quotation has…

At Berkeley a film directed by Frederick Wiseman 1. In the summer of 1967 I drove across the country from Boston to the West Coast with my friend Burt Fishman. Neither of us had much money, but gas was 33 cents a gallon, cheap motels and simple food cost next to nothing, and life was good. I had never been west before, at least never west of the Berkshires. What I saw amazed me. Parts of the country seemed almost unimaginably uninhabited—in recent decades I have seen something like it only in the Kalahari and the Australian Outback. We drove for hours on end without seeing another soul. To amuse ourselves, we sang at the top of our lungs. We must have been bopping up and down in time…

The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 by Margaret MacMillan Random House, 739 pp., $35.00 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War by Charles Emmerson PublicAffairs, 526 pp., $30.00 The Russian Origins of the First World War by Sean McMeekin Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 324 pp., $29.95; $18.95 (paper) July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin Basic Books, 461 pp., $29.99 The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark Harper, 697 pp., $29.99 Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings Knopf, 628 pp., $35.00 June 28, 1914, Sarajevo, Bosnia. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the multinational Habsburg realms, resplendent in the dress uniform of an Austrian cavalry general, but also absurd in his plumed headdress, was shot…

Leaving the Sea by Ben Marcus Knopf, 271 pp., $25.95 Unless they are subscribers to Harper’s or The New Yorker, admirers of the experimental fiction of Ben Marcus are likely to find themselves somewhat baffled by the four stories that make up the first section of Leaving the Sea—although not, perhaps, as baffled as the uninitiated reader who picked up Marcus’s previous collection of stories, The Age of Wire and String, published in 1995, and perused, say, the opening of the first one, “Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife”: “Weird,” surely, would be the adjective elicited by a survey of responses to Marcus’s first three works of fiction. The Age of Wire and String was followed by two novels, Notable American Women (2002) and The Flame Alphabet (2012): the former entangles us…

What are we to make of the fact that in its eleven-year history, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has prosecuted only Africans? Should the court be condemned for discrimination—for taking advantage of Africa’s weak global position—as some African leaders contend? Or should it be applauded for giving long-overdue attention to atrocities in Africa—a sign that finally someone is concerned about the countless ignored African victims, as many African activists contend? This debate is at the heart of one of the most serious challenges the ICC has ever faced. If the current attack on it succeeds, the court’s future may be in doubt. The ICC was founded in 2002, under a treaty negotiated at a global conference in Rome, as an independent judicial body that would challenge impunity for the gravest…

To the Editors: Professor Richard J. Evans dismisses Paul Kennedy’s suggestion that the Germans might have won the war as “beside the point,” writing that “defeat was preprogrammed for the Axis by the very nature of its war aims” [“What the War Was Really About,” NYR, December 5, 2013]. Regarding Japan few would doubt that her resources were unequal to destroying US might, nor that its “brutal and sadistic behavior” in pursuit of a Co-prosperity Sphere served to doom its prospects. But Germany is another story. Evidence suggests that it wasn’t horrific Nazi war aims, but radical interference by Hitler himself that brought German ruin. Early victories in Operation Barbarossa unveiled remarkable and still not adequately explored possibilities. Bevin Alexander (How Hitler Could Have Won WWII: The Fatal Errors That…

To the Editors: Having written the introduction to Nathaniel Dubin’s translations of the The Fabliaux, I respond to Christopher Ricks’s characterization of the medieval works as misogynist bad poetry [NYR, December 5, 2013]. While the comic tales repeatedly denounce the “wiles” of women, they poke even more fun at male peasants, priests, and knights. And in most fabliaux, women come out on top. “The Good Woman of Orleans” is the story of a husband who tries to entrap his wife by returning home early in disguise. The clever wife recognizes the ruse, has him locked in a room while she entertains her lover between the sheets, then orders the servants to beat the disguised intruder, who ends up atop a manure pile, delighted at his wife’s apparent fidelity. A fine…