Innholdsfortegnelse for February 20, 2014 i The New York Review of Books

Little Failure: A Memoir by Gary Shteyngart Random House, 349 pp., $27.00 “I am a kind of joke, but the question is: which kind?” Gary Shteyngart writes in his new memoir. That’s something every immigrant could say. Most lives don’t make much sense even to people who never leave the city and the country where they were born, so they have the luxury of leaving them unexamined. This is a feat nearly impossible for immigrants to accomplish. Not just the ones who have survived massacres, bombings, expulsions, famines, genocides, and other hair-raising escapades, but even those who did not have a million murderers chasing after them. One time riding in a cab in New York, I found out that my driver had been a shepherd in Mongolia tending sheep just…

A New Leaf: The End of Cannabis Prohibition by Alyson Martin and Nushin Rashidian New Press, 264 pp., $17.95 (paper) In the summer of 2006, a young scientist from Israel joined my laboratory. He came to learn how viruses attack cells, a major focus of my research program. And I looked forward to drawing on his expertise in an emerging area of science that intrigued me: the biological effects of cannabinoids, the active chemical compounds in the marijuana plant. The Israeli researcher had trained at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University with Professor Raphael Mechoulam, a chemist credited with the discovery in 1964 of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the primary psychoactive compound in marijuana. Mechoulam later characterized cannabidiol (CBD), a related substance plentiful in the plant, as distinct from THC in that it had no…

Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven by John Eliot Gardiner Knopf, 629 pp., $35.00 One of my most moving encounters with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach took place in the spring of 1997 in New York City’s Central Synagogue. I was there to pay last respects to Gabe Wiener, a talented young recording engineer who died of a brain aneurysm at age twenty-six. I had approached Gabe earlier in the year to see if his recording company, PGM Classics, would consider collaborating with the American Bach Society, which I led at the time, to produce a compact disc of previously unrecorded organ music from Bach’s circle. Gabe enthusiastically agreed to the proposal, and together we embarked on a project we called “The Uncommon Bach.” We had just settled…

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin Simon and Schuster, 910 pp., $40.00 “I’ve had a bully time and a bully fight. I feel as big and strong as a bull moose,” Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt ebulliently told reporters when he returned to New York after the famous charge up San Juan Hill in the summer of 1898. Avid for publicity, Roosevelt had arranged for two photographers to accompany him and his Rough Riders to Cuba and had led favored reporters with him into battle. “Up, up they went in the face of death,” wrote one of them, “men dropping from the ranks at every step.... Roosevelt sat erect on his horse, holding his sword and shouting for his…

Janet Malcolm: The Emily Dickinson Series an exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, New York City, January 9–February 8, 2014 Dickinson/Walser: Pencil Sketches an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City, November 15, 2013–January 12, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Claire Gilman, with an essay by Josiah McElheny The Drawing Center, 116 pp., $20.00 (paper) 1. The twenty-six collages that make up Janet Malcolm’s arresting and faintly melancholy “Emily Dickinson Series,” the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at Lori Bookstein Fine Art in Chelsea, look on first view like leaves from some late Victorian archive, though the field of science or art to which they belong remains unclear. Certain motifs recur: vintage photographs of the 1874 transit of Venus, a rare astronomical event when the planet Venus…

To the Editors: In his review of The Right Path by Joe Scarborough [NYR, January 9], Garry Wills writes that “America has the greatest disparity of income between the top few and the rest of society...among all nations.” I side with Wills completely in deploring the growing inequality in the US, but there are countries where the problem is even worse. Every measure I have seen from any group lists China, with the world’s second-largest economy, as having greater inequality than the US. To that we must add two more problems: the government’s hypocrisy in calling its system “socialist” and its repression of the truth about the inequality. Chinese people who call for transparency about wealth inequality (Xu Zhiyong, most recently) are sent to prison. This letter, if posted on…

To the Editors: In reviewing Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books [NYR, December 19, 2013], Gideon Lewis-Kraus insists that Claudia Roth Pierpont is “protective of her friend and his privacy,” that “she is unabashed in her admiration,” and that in “smothering” the author she “diminishes his real, inestimable achievements.” While it is true that Pierpont not surprisingly admires much of Roth’s brilliant work, she is anything but uncritical, not hesitating to state outright that there are times when the emperor’s clothes strike her as threadbare. Joel Conarroe President Emeritus, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Former President, PEN American Center New York City…

1. In recent weeks, Iran and the United States, for the first time, have broken through more than a decade of impasse over Iran’s nuclear program. Significant differences remain, but at long last, both governments appear ready to work their way toward a resolution. Yet the US Congress, acting reflexively against Iran, and under intense pressure from Israel, seems ready to shatter the agreement with a bill that takes no account of Iranian political developments, misunderstands proliferation realities, and ignores the dire national security consequences for the United States. By November 2013, when Iran and the P5+1 group (the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France, and Germany) announced that they had arrived at an interim deal on Iran’s nuclear program, it had been thirty-three fractious years since Washington and Tehran…

JFK, Conservative by Ira Stoll Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 288 pp., $27.00 and numerous other books and TV programs about John F. Kennedy If the yardsticks are sheer volume and patriotic pretense, then the fiftieth-anniversary commemoration of the Kennedy assassination can be called an epic cultural event. Some 140 books on the thirty-fifth president and his murder were released or rereleased in 2013, according to Amazon.com, on top of a previous inventory estimated at some 40,000 titles. Such is the perceived posthumous clout of JFK in the marketplace that his death’s half-centennial still had the power to jolt The Saturday Evening Post and Life back to life to publish a fresh round of special editions. Television was no less rapacious in ransacking the archives. It was Kennedy who validated the medium…

Orfeo by Richard Powers Norton, 369 pp., $26.95 Richard Powers has equal claim to being the most forward-looking American novelist and the most old-fashioned. What is old-fashioned is his unabashed desire to write novels that are, in their essence, philosophical. His novels tend to possess the qualities we expect from the best literature—vivid characters, engrossing stories, and surprising, at times glorious prose—but Powers’s greatest interest often seems to lie in asking, if not always answering, the most vexing questions about history, science, race, art, time, wisdom, and joy. In this he resembles Jan O’Deigh, the librarian narrator of his 1991 novel The Gold Bug Variations: “From birth, I was addicted to questions. When the delivering nurse slapped my rump, instead of howling, I blinked inquisitively. As a child I pushed…

The Human Comedy: Selected Stories by Honoré de Balzac, edited and with an introduction by Peter Brooks, and translated from the French by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump New York Review Books, 428 pp., $17.95 (paper) The Human Comedy, a selection by Peter Brooks of nine short works by Honoré de Balzac, might well serve as a point of entry into a body of work that, however central to literary studies, seems increasingly neglected by English-language readers. Brooks’s selection is artfully chosen to give a sense of Balzac’s dominant preoccupations and the stylistic range he brought to bear on them. Mostly written in the early 1830s, as happily fecund a period as Balzac was to know, they include—as Brooks notes in a sharp and extremely helpful introduction—some of…

On paper, Ukraine is now a dictatorship. President Viktor Yanukovych, in having the deputies of his Party of Regions endorse an extraordinary packet of legislation, has arrogated decisive political power to himself. After hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians spent weeks in the cold demonstrating for basic human rights and a stronger association with Europe, the president has responded with a violation of human rights and a rather sad imitation of Russia. In procedure and in content the laws “passed” by the Ukrainian parliament in mid-January contravene the most basic rights of modern constitutional democracies: to speech, assembly, and representation. Although they concern the most fundamental aspects of political life and transform the constitutional structure of the Ukrainian state, these measures were not subjected to even the barest of parliamentary procedures.…

To the Editors: In her review of A Feathered River Across the Sky [NYR, January 9], Elizabeth Kolbert refers to the multitudes of passenger pigeons that were documented by Audubon, Muir, and others. But what is the archaeological evidence for such huge populations before the arrival of Columbus? Billion-strong flocks of birds with voracious appetites for mast and maize sound more like a manifestation of ecological disturbance than natural population growth. I haven't seen this issue discussed in any reviews of this book and wonder if Ms. Kolbert is aware of sources establishing a pre-Columbian presence of vast numbers of passenger pigeons. Jane D. Saxton Director of Library Services Bastyr University Kenmore, Washington Elizabeth Kolbert replies: I have not seen this issue discussed in the literature and therefore can only…

Wordsworth famously defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” An obituary, prepared ahead of someone’s death, has been called emotion anticipated in tranquility. In reading the well-prepared obituaries about Ariel Sharon, one gets the impression that the eight years he’d spent in a vegetative state removed the sting from the strong emotions that he aroused in his lifetime. His death, unlike his stormy life, was accepted, if not in complete tranquility, then at least with resignation. According to Nahum Barnea, Sharon’s sons, Omri and Gilad, affectionately called their father “the Caucasian.” They didn’t mean a white man. What they alluded to was the fact that although Sharon’s parents, Vera and Shmuel, were both born in what is now Belarus, they met and married in the Caucasus. But they meant even…

He was sitting by the river, among reeds that peasants had been scything for their thatch. And it was quiet there, and in his soul it was quieter and stiller still. He kicked off his boots and put his feet into the water, and the water began talking to him, not knowing he didn’t know its language. He had thought that water is deaf-mute, that the home of sleepy fish is without words, that blue dragonflies hover over the water and catch mosquitoes or horseflies, that you wash if you want to wash, and drink if you want to drink, and that’s all there is to water. But in all truth the water’s language was a wonder, a story of some kind about some thing, some unchanging thing that seemed…

I am the drone of a banjo’s fifth string. I am the drone that gives bottom to the chanter in a highland fling. Haw, hum. I am the drone of drone itself, planted so pleasurably in the mouth. A monotone. A lodestone. I’m an MQ-9, a Reaper Drone, ranging wide, circling in the sky. No windows, no cockpit. No one onboard. See how my Hellfires fly faster than sound. I am drone, from the tymbal under the cicada’s wing. I gather no pollen, and have no sting. Arriving unheard, I haunt the sky and inseminate the queen before I die. I am a poetry that celebrates power. I bring. I bring. The white house is empty. I bomb air. I bomb stone. My country, ’tis…

The Discovery of Middle Earth: Mapping the Lost World of the Celts by Graham Robb Norton, 387 pp., $28.95 Middle Earth in a book title would suggest to most readers that it was about J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, and it is likely that the publisher of Graham Robb’s book had an eye on this market. Robb has taken the phrase over to describe the European realm of the ancient Celts, the group of tribal societies that arrived in France from the Upper Danube beginning around 600 BC. But the Celts had no Middle Earth. The name, which was Germanic in origin, had reached Tolkien through his work on Old and Middle English, and its diffusion to a broad public in modern times was entirely the result…

One way to measure the horrific suffering of Syria’s increasingly violent war is through the experience of Syrian children. More than one million children are now refugees. At least 11,500 have been killed because of the armed conflict,1 well over half of these because of the direct bombing of schools, homes, and health centers, and roughly 1,500 have been executed, shot by snipers or tortured to death. At least 128 were killed in the chemical massacre in August. In the midst of all this violence, it is easy to miss the health catastrophe that has also struck Syrian children, who must cope with war trauma, malnutrition, and stunted growth alongside collapsing sanitation and living conditions. Syria has become a cauldron of once-rare infectious diseases, with hundreds of cases of measles…

To the Editors: In Robert Gottlieb’s fine review of Leonard Bernstein’s letters, Bernstein’s encounters with Lillian Hellman came up [NYR, December 19, 2013]. It brought to mind my only encounter with her. It was at a Board of Editors meeting of The American Scholar. I was introduced and she insisted on knowing how I pronounced my name—“steen” or “styne.” I used a formula I had learned from my then New Yorker colleague Burton Bernstein—Lenny’s brother. When asked Burton always said “eether or eyther.” Ms. Hellman then provided the information that Lenny pronounced it “steen.” This I knew for an absolute fact was wrong. Lenny was “styne”all the way. When I politely explained this to her she glared at me and walked away after saying “Bernsteen” again. Jeremy Bernstein Aspen, Colorado…