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

Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein—Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe by Mario Livio Simon and Schuster, 341 pp., $26.00 Science consists of facts and theories. Facts and theories are born in different ways and are judged by different standards. Facts are supposed to be true or false. They are discovered by observers or experimenters. A scientist who claims to have discovered a fact that turns out to be wrong is judged harshly. One wrong fact is enough to ruin a career. Theories have an entirely different status. They are free creations of the human mind, intended to describe our understanding of nature. Since our understanding is incomplete, theories are provisional. Theories are tools of understanding, and a tool does not need…

Social Democratic America by Lane Kenworthy Oxford University Press, 238 pp., $27.95 Barack Obama’s fifth State of the Union address received the usual praise from Democrats and many cable news commentators, but the fact is the occasion was rather grim, and his approach in some ways frustrating. With all his talk of raising the minimum wage and other executive actions that would circumvent Congress, he implicitly admitted that progress on Capitol Hill is now all but impossible. At the same time, he couldn’t quite bring himself to invite direct confrontation with the Republicans, who control the House and will continue to block most of his programs. The general verdict on MSNBC was that he was successfully positioning himself above the fray. But is that really possible in today’s Washington? The…

Gabriele d’Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett Knopf, 589 pp., $35.00 On a summer afternoon in Tuscany in the years of the belle epoque, a celebrated French courtesan alighted from a carriage to greet her host, the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, and was astonished to behold “a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes, no hair, greenish teeth, bad breath, [and] the manners of a mountebank.” Wondering how he could have acquired a reputation as a ladies’ man, Liane de Pougy resisted his advances, climbed back into the carriage, and declined a subsequent offer to revisit the poet’s villa. To be fair to d’Annunzio, the lady’s response was unusual and indeed unfair. He may have been short and unhandsome, but gnomishness and mountebankery were accusations not…

Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 328 pp., $26.00 Among the wives of famous men who languished in the Gulag, few had a more tragic tale to tell than Lina Prokofiev, the wife of the composer, who in 1948 was sentenced to twenty years in the labor camps of the far north for “treason to the motherland.” Soviet Russia was not her motherland. Born in Madrid, she had grown up mainly in New York, where she met Prokofiev, who had fled there to escape the Bolshevik Revolution, in 1919. Lina had spent only a few childhood summers in her mother’s native Russia when she went back there with her homesick husband, first to visit, and finally to live with their…

Critical Mass: Four Decades of Essays, Reviews, Hand Grenades, and Hurrahs by James Wolcott Doubleday, 491 pp., $30.00 James Wolcott’s Critical Mass is, among other things, a guide through the wilds of YouTube. One way to read this book is in front of a computer screen, where many of Wolcott’s subjects, so memorably captured in his antic prose, can be experienced firsthand. He is the preeminent critic of contemporary spectacle, matching his own supercharged style to the highlights of forty years of TV, pop music, books, and movies. He writes equally well of Philip Larkin and Telly Savalas, Bob Dylan and Designing Women. He knows the secret channels that connect Mort Sahl to Alexander Haig and the Kennedys. Wolcott’s attention roves naturally from medium to medium, since wherever he looks…

The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village by Henrietta Harrison University of California Press, 276 pp., $65.00; $26.95 (paper) Christian Values in Communist China by Gerda Wielander Routledge, 193 pp., $155.00 1. Like most pilgrimage sites in China, the shrine in the village of Cave Gulley in Shanxi province is located partway up a mountain, reachable by steep stairs that are meant to shift worshipers’ attention from the world below to heaven above. Thousands make the journey each year, ending up in a structure of red columns, glazed tiles, and friezes of swirling Chinese dragons. It could be any Chinese folk religious temple, except for a cross on the roof that hints at what’s inside: a shrine to Our Lady of Lourdes, a title for apparitions…

To the Editors: Leo Carey concludes his thoughtful review of my Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach [NYR, January 9] by voicing the reasonable concern that, in giving prominence to Mann the serious thinker, I force Mann the artist to recede into the background. But I think my book captures important aspects of Mann’s artistry. One point of my title was to signal the many ambiguities of Death in Venice: “Deaths” not “Death,” “Cases” not “Case.” Traditionally, certain claims are taken for granted—Aschenbach is an artistic failure, he dies of cholera—and since these claims tend to limit the philosophical exploration of the novella, I hoped to show that they are not required. Carey reads me as aiming to replace one set of interpretive assumptions with another, and…

Nor Ulysses, nor any craftier man, At the sight of your O so godly face, So full of honor & respect & grace, Could have predicted what a wreck I am. Love, your eyes drove through me like a blade, Piercing my startled heart in one fell deed, And there you settle down, there you feed, But you alone can heal the wound you made. How cruel a thing is fate, how inhumane! Here I am, recovering from a scorpion's bite, Asking its venom to make me well again. Love, rid me of everything I sorely dread, But don't erase that ache I so desire: Without this lack, I might as well be dead.…

The Parthenon Enigma by Joan Breton Connelly Knopf, 485 pp., $35.00 In March 1816 a Select Committee of the British House of Commons met to decide the fate of “The Earl of Elgin’s Collection of Sculptured Marbles; etc.” Whatever high hopes or greedy intentions had driven Elgin to take these sculptures from the Athenian Acropolis in the first place, the whole enterprise—with the huge cost of the excavation, the removal of some precious slabs from the Parthenon itself, and the transport back from Greece to England—had ruined him. He was close to bankruptcy and his only option was to sell his marbles to the government. The asking price was £74,000. The Select Committee was, of course, concerned with fixing a good price (in the end Elgin had to accept just…

Liberty and Security in a Changing World: Report and Recommendations of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies December 12, 2013, 303 pp., available at www.whitehouse.gov Remarks by the President on Review of Signals Intelligence January 17, 2014, available at www.whitehouse.gov Report on the Telephone Records Program Conducted under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and on the Operations of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board January 23, 2014, 234 pp., available at www.fas.org 1. When the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) first authorized the National Security Agency in May 2006 to collect and search the telephone metadata records of every American—including every number we call, how often we call, when we call, and how long we…

Yoga: The Art of Transformation an exhibition at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C., October 19, 2013–January 26, 2014; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, February 22–May 18, 2014; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, June 22–September 7, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Debra Diamond Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery/Smithsonian Books, 328 pp., $55.00 The Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha: A Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of an Early Text of Haṭhayoga by James Mallinson Routledge, 299 pp., $49.95 (paper) Sinister Yogis by David Gordon White University of Chicago Press, 352 pp., $29.00 (paper) Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires by William R. Pinch Cambridge University Press, 280 pp., $36.99 (paper) Around 1600, a dramatic shift took place in Mughal art. The Mughal emperors of India were the…

Persécutions et entraides dans la France occupée: comment 75% des Juifs en France ont échappé à la mort [Persecutions and Mutual Help in Occupied France: How 75 Percent of the Jews of France Escaped Death] by Jacques Semelin Paris: Seuil-Les Arènes, 901 pp., r29.00 (paper) It’s called “the French paradox.” On the one hand the Germans, with the assistance of the actively anti-Semitic Vichy government and of a certain number of actively anti-Semitic French citizens, deported a shocking number of the Jews living in France between 1940 and 1944 to their deaths. On the other hand, the proportion of Jews deported from France was much smaller than that deported from the Netherlands, Belgium, or Norway. Is it not curious that among the Nazi-dominated countries of Western Europe the country reputedly…

The World According to Dick Cheney a film directed by R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir by Dick Cheney, with Liz Cheney Threshold, 565 pp., $16.00 (paper) Heart: An American Medical Odyssey by Dick Cheney and Jonathan Reiner, MD, with Liz Cheney Scribner, 344 pp., $28.00 1. In early 2007, as Iraq seemed to be slipping inexorably into chaos and President George W. Bush into inescapable political purgatory, Meir Dagan, the head of the Israeli Mossad, flew to Washington, sat down in a sunlit office of the West Wing of the White House, and spread out on the coffee table before him a series of photographs showing a strange-looking building rising out of the sands in the desert of eastern Syria. Vice…

To the Editors: Readers of The New York Review know that for nearly twenty-five years the Chinese government has hidden from the Chinese people the truth about the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Massacre, in which at least hundreds of peaceful Chinese demonstrators were killed by Chinese army troops in Beijing. Any discussion of what happened at Tiananmen is off-limits in China. It is not part of the Chinese Communist Party's operational code to apologize for its numerous monstrous errors. Of course, the massacre was not a mistake, but a deliberate, cold-blooded decision on the part of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and his associates. The forthcoming twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre is an opportunity for truth-telling. We are organizing an international effort under the rubric of the Tiananmen Initiative Project to…

Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations by Peter Evans and Ava Gardner Simon and Schuster, 293 pp., $26.00 A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True, 1907–1940 by Victoria Wilson Simon and Schuster, 1,044 pp., $40.00 In 1949, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio that boasted “more stars than there are in the heavens,” released one of its typical productions. Based on a soap-opera-ish novel by Marcia Davenport, East Side, West Side put MGM’s assets on show: Cyd Charisse (in a non-dancing role), Nancy Davis (soon to be Mrs. Ronald Reagan), James Mason (at his most suave), and Gale Sondergaard and Van Heflin (both Oscar winners). The headliners were Barbara Stanwyck and Ava Gardner, appearing together for the first and only time. They portrayed the two women in Mason’s life, wife (Stanwyck) and lover (Gardner), and…

The Kennan Diaries by George F. Kennan, edited by Frank Costigliola Norton, 712 pp., $39.95 George Kennan’s life spanned and defined the American century. He was born into a lawyer’s family in Milwaukee in 1904 when Theodore Roosevelt was president. He lived to become the chief intellectual architect of America’s victory in the cold war. He died in 2005, aged 101, in Princeton as another president dragged his country down into the mire of Iraq. The decisive event in his life—losing his mother to peritonitis when he was two months old—occurred too early for him ever to master with words. Though doted on by his sisters and a tender father, their love never filled the void. He recurrently dreamed of his mother in an agonized state of unrequited devotion. On…

Flyover Lives: A Memoir by Diane Johnson Viking, 263 pp., $26.95 Early in Diane Johnson’s new memoir, Flyover Lives, she reports on a house party in Provence, a gathering so fraught with social discomfort and mannerly hostility that it could be a scene in one of her witty, sharply observed novels. En route from Paris to Italy, Johnson and her husband John stop at the rented holiday home of a French friend, Simone, who is married to a former US Army colonel; the couple is sharing the house with a group of retired American generals and their decorative, geisha-like wives. There is considerable fuss about the food (the military wives are accomplished, fiercely competitive cooks) and some amicable small talk. While the men play tennis, the wives alternately interrogate and…

I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War by Jerome Charyn Liveright, 456 pp., $26.95 1. Anyone who writes about Lincoln has a problem: his story is so well known that it’s all but impossible to tell it with suspense or surprise. In their 2012 movie, Lincoln, Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg solved this problem by focusing on a single episode, the struggle to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, whose details were unlikely to be known in advance by most people watching the film. But there is a second problem. Lincoln is so wrapped up in smothering epithets—Honest Abe, Rail Splitter, Great Emancipator, Father Abraham—that there’s a temptation to break through to something fresh by applying a corrosive dose of iconoclasm to the layers of myth. That is…

La Vida Doble by Arturo Fontaine, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell Yale University Press, 302 pp., $25.00 Ways of Going Home by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 139 pp., $23.00 On September 11, 2013, Chileans commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the military coup in Chile. Memories of it helped the center-left opposition led by former president Michelle Bachelet, who returned to power in elections this past December. For young people, the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet is remembered not for its economic reforms but for its abuses of human rights. More than 2,000 political adversaries were killed, of which 1,107 simply disappeared; some 38,000 were tortured, and many more were exiled.1 Michelle Bachelet was herself tortured and exiled, and her…

To the Editors: Dr. Annie Sparrow’s article “Syria’s Polio Epidemic: The Suppressed Truth” [NYR, February 20] is a stark reminder of the devastating impact that conflict can have on public health, and the difficulties of obtaining accurate information and responding to outbreaks during complex emergencies. Accuracy of data is paramount to an appropriate response to polio and protecting children. By confusing the definitions of suspected and confirmed polio cases, Dr. Sparrow inadvertently overstates by more than 100 percent the number of cases that have actually been confirmed in the country, irrespective of source. Such inaccuracies confuse public understanding of the magnitude of the outbreak, the risk it poses in relation to other major health challenges in the country, and the prospects for its rapid control. It is also untrue to…