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

1. W.H. Auden had a secret life that his closest friends knew little or nothing about. Everything about it was generous and honorable. He kept it secret because he would have been ashamed to have been praised for it. I learned about it mostly by chance, so it may have been far more extensive than I or anyone ever knew. Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery in New York. She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again. Someone else recalled that Auden had once been…

Kehua! by Fay Weldon Europa, 316 pp., $17.00 (paper) Praxis by Fay Weldon Penguin, 251 pp., $15.00 (paper) Down Among the Women by Fay Weldon Academy Chicago, 216 pp., $14.00 (paper) Auto da Fay: A Memoir by Fay Weldon Grove, 366 pp., $14.00 (paper) Splitting by Fay Weldon Atlantic Monthly Press, 246 pp., $12.00 (paper) The Bulgari Connection by Fay Weldon Grove, 190 pp., $12.00 (paper) She May Not Leave by Fay Weldon Grove, 284 pp., $13.00 (paper) Long Live the King by Fay Weldon St. Martin’s, 344 pp., $14.99 (paper) The New Countess by Fay Weldon St. Martin’s, 327 pp., $25.99 The image of an English woman writer of the first rank, for well over a hundred years, has been of a sensitive, well-bred, well-read person who is nevertheless…

               1. Give me your secret. I can keep it. I’ll become it.                2. The way ski racers Lining up Become the race:                3. Look what was put Into the pot And what came out!                4. The way each choice That made itself Make us unmade us;                5. Hid us, betrayed us. O my compass Your wilderness                6. Awaits reply: Say you and I Will find our way                7. Eventually— Like see and saw, Or sea and sky.…

Life and Death in Pompeii and Herculaneum catalog by Paul Roberts of a recent exhibition at the British Museum British Museum Press, 320 pp., $45.00 Herculaneum: Art of a Buried City by Maria Paola Guidobaldi and Domenico Esposito, with photographs by Luciano Pedicini, translated from the Italian by Ceil Friedman Abbeville, 352 pp., $125.00 The French writer Marcel Brion subtitled his 1960 study of Pompeii and Herculaneum “The Glory and the Grief,” a phrase that captures the enduring mystery of these two ancient Roman towns, both buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The explosion itself was a majestic sight, if not exactly glorious; we have the word of an eyewitness, Pliny the Younger, who compared the pillar of smoke created by the mountain’s pulverized core to…

Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition by David Nirenberg Norton, 610 pp., $35.00 1. In 1844, Karl Marx published his essay “On the Jewish Question.” This wasn’t an engagement with Judaism, or with Jewish history, or even with the sociology of German Jews. Its occasion was the contemporary debate about Jewish emancipation, but its real purpose was to call for the overthrow of the capitalist order. The call was expressed in a language that is probably not surprising to readers today and that was entirely familiar to readers in the nineteenth century. Still, it is a very strange language. Capitalism is identified by Marx with Judaism, and so the overthrow of capitalism will be, he writes, “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” The argument is worth quoting, at least briefly: “Through [the…

Ping-Pong Diplomacy: The Secret History Behind the Game That Changed the World by Nicholas Griffin Scribner, 336 pp., $26.00 For Richard Nixon’s foreign policy, 1971 was the best of years and the worst of years. He revealed his opening to China, but he connived at genocide in East Pakistan. Fortunately for him, the world marveled at the one, but was largely ignorant of the other. The two events were connected. General Yahya Khan, the president of Pakistan, was Washington’s principal back channel to Beijing. Nixon had long admired the bluff, no-nonsense manners of the Pakistani military and the dictators it spawned, whereas he disliked the condescension he detected in Indian leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi, the prime minister in 1971. Whereas the Pakistanis had willingly signed…

Scotland’s Future: Your Guide to an Independent Scotland by the Scottish Government 649 pp., available at scotreferendum.com The Road to Independence?: Scotland in the Balance by Murray Pittock, with a foreword by Alex Salmond Reaktion/University of Chicago Press, revised and expanded second edition, 261 pp., $28.00 1. On September 18, Scots will be asked to say yes or no to the following question: “Should Scotland be an independent country?” It is a beguilingly simple query, a model of clarity compared to, say, the 106-word essay put to the people of Quebec in a 1980 referendum that asked if they wished to break away from Canada, phrased in so convoluted a manner that many barely understood the question. Much will hang on the Scots’ answer. Other states have recently broken up—the…

To the Editors: Elizabeth Kolbert’s response to Jane D. Saxton’s query about the pre-Columbian presence of vast numbers of passenger pigeons [Letters, NYR, February 20] surprised me in light of Charles C. Mann’s discussion of the subject in his book 1491 (Knopf, 2005, pp. 363–371). Mann cites Thomas W. Neumann, who concluded from the sparsity of passenger pigeon bones at Indian burial sites that they were not as numerous before Columbus: “What happened was that the impact of European contact altered the ecological dynamics in such a way that the passenger pigeon took off.” Mann compares the phenomenon to the extraordinary herds of bison observed by La Salle in the seventeenth century—but not by De Soto in the sixteenth. Robert Dankoff Professor Emeritus of Turkish and Islamic Studies University of…

To the Editors: The above book title appeared in the “Letters” section [NYR, February 6] in response to Kevin Madigan’s review. In that section, Edmund Levin noted that Lawler’s Julian-Gregorian calendar conflation was “an honest mistake.” In fact, it was based on Maurice Samuel’s Blood Accusation (1966): “The sessions...ran for thirty-four days (September 25–October 28, 1913)....” The Jewish Virtual Library was also wrong: “The trial of Beilis took place in Kiev from September 25 through October 28, 1913.” Madigan remains unconvinced: “Lawler’s use of the Gregorian calendar led him to that thoroughly amateurish chronological mistake, which completely undermines his critique of Kertzer.” Unfortunately, there’s no way chronology interfered with David Kertzer’s concealment of the Russian ambassador so that blame would fall on Cardinal del Val. Of this deed, the members…

To the Editors: I'm preparing an anthology of American antiwar and peace writing for the Library of America, and would be grateful for readers' suggestions of texts to consider for inclusion. The anthology will include not only narrative fictions and plays and poems but also memoirs, essays, scriptures, speeches, letters, histories, works of journalism, treatises, and song lyrics. Lawrence Rosenwald Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English Co-Director, Program in Peace & Justice Studies Wellesley College Wellesley, Massachusetts…

The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation by David Brion Davis Knopf, 422 pp., $30.00 Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation’s history. And that revolution has taken place largely because of a remarkable generation of historians who, inspired by the changing meanings of freedom and justice in their own time, began to ask new questions about the origins of the racial inequality that continued to permeate our segregated society nearly a century after slavery’s end. Published in 1956, just two years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision called for school integration, Kenneth Stampp’s pathbreaking The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in…

This article will appear in the coming March 20, 2014 issue of The New York Review. The students were the first to protest against the regime of President Viktor Yanukovych on the Maidan, the central square in Kiev, last November. These were the Ukrainians with the most to lose, the young people who unreflectively thought of themselves as Europeans and who wished for themselves a life, and a Ukrainian homeland, that were European. Many of them were politically on the left, some of them radically so. After years of negotiation and months of promises, their government, under President Yanukovych, had at the last moment failed to sign a major trade agreement with the European Union. When the riot police came and beat the students in late November, a new group,…

My name is Leila Seth. I am eighty-three years old. I have been in a long and happy marriage of more than sixty years with my husband Premo, and am the mother of three children. The eldest, Vikram, is a writer. The second, Shantum, is a Buddhist teacher. The third, Aradhana, is an artist and filmmaker. I love them all. My husband and I have brought them up with the values we were brought up with—honesty, courage, and sympathy for others. We know that they are hardworking and affectionate people who are trying to do some good in the world. But our eldest, Vikram, is now a criminal, an unapprehended felon. This is because, like many millions of other Indians, he is gay; and last month, two judges of the…

No Exit from Pakistan: America’s Tortured Relationship with Islamabad by Daniel S. Markey Cambridge University Press, 248 pp., $27.99 (paper) The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth by Mark Mazzetti Penguin, 400 pp., $29.95 Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding by Husain Haqqani PublicAffairs, 415 pp., $28.99 The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics by Andrew Small Hurst, 288 pp., $67.00 Karachi: Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City by Laurent Gayer Oxford University Press, 256 pp., $28.50 The Prisoner by Omar Shahid Hamid New Delhi: Pan Macmillan, 352 pp., Rs 350.00 (paper) How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid Riverhead, 228 pp., $16.00 (paper) Daniel Markey takes…

Reflections on Judging by Richard A. Posner Harvard University Press, 380 pp., $29.95 1. In ancient times, in the Middle Ages, and in the early Renaissance, people wrote books known as “mirrors of princes.” They would describe the life and character that a princely ruler ought to have, providing a catalog of princely virtues, and setting out tips and recipes for a princely education and the organization of a prince’s household. All of this an actual ruler could consider as an ideal, comparing it point by point with the way he ran his kingdom or principality. The best-known example of a mirror of princes is Machiavelli’s Il Principe, published in 1532, though it is arguable that Machiavelli actually intended to subvert the genre, upending as he did the list of…

The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present by David Runciman Princeton University Press, 381 pp., $29.95 “For most of us,” writes David Runciman, “democracy is still the only game in town.” A professor of politics at Cambridge who is noted for showing how apparently contradictory propositions can make sense in politics, Runciman argues that democracies survive crises without having any clear insight into how they manage this feat. The experience of overcoming seemingly intractable difficulties poses a danger, for it leads democratic leaders and publics to imagine they can understand their past and shape the future when in fact they often lack the ability to do either of these things. Yet such dangerous confidence may also be useful: while the faith…

To the Editors: Dr. Jerome Goopman lays out a balanced and thorough coverage of the past, current, and very possibly the future matter of marijuana as medicine [NYR, February 20]. Indeed, he should be commended for his knowledge, wisdom, lack of bias, and pedagogical dexterity. But every review of the history of the healing powers of marijuana should be issued a warning, much like the one on packs of cigarettes: “Warning: Shen Nung was a mythical figure—a legendary and nonexistent emperor. Indeed, historians trace back the rule of a more or less unified China by emperors to the third century BCE; hence, 2737 is a bogus date. Moreover, Chinese writing was not devised and systematized until between the seventeenth to the eleventh century BCE, paper did not exist until two…

To the Editors: Kenneth Roth’s support for an effective International Criminal Court [NYR, February 6] is persuasive, but he makes a misleading claim about civil society’s reactions to the court in Uganda. “In five of the eight countries where it is actively prosecuting suspects,” he says, “Uganda, Mali, Ivory Coast, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—the African state in question asked the court to intervene, often with significant encouragement from victims and local rights groups.” In fact, advocates for peace in Acholiland (where Joseph Kony perpetrated many of his atrocities) denounced the court’s arrest warrants for Kony and his deputies. These included the Acholi paramount chief, the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative NGO (ARLPI), and Betty Bigombe, the former chief mediator in talks between the government…

To the Editors: In his review of Richard Powers’s Orfeo [NYR, February 20], Nathaniel Rich mentions that the novel’s protagonist, composer Peter Els, “has become fascinated by the nascent field of biocomposing, a field so cutting edge that it doesn’t quite exist in our own reality, at least not yet. A biocomposer turns nature into music.” I’m not as up-to-date on these things as I once was, but I do remember Charles Dodge’s 1970 piece Earth’s Magnetic Field, which does exactly that, using data from the changes in that field to trigger sonic events. I’m also pretty sure there were more such compositions, and that poking around in, say, the Ars Electronica archives in Linz would unearth more of them. Ed Ward Austin, Texas…

To the Editors: Veterans and supporters of the 1964 Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, are invited to return to campus for the fiftieth anniversary reunion and commemoration activities: September 26$#8211;October 1, 2014. If interested, please e-mail FSM50th@gmail.com for further information. Jack Weinberg, Bettina Apthecker, Jackie Goldberg, Lynne Hollander Savio, FSM Archives Board of Directors Lee Felsenstein, Chairperson…

Six months ago, as a result of information from Edward Snowden about the workings of the American intelligence services, we were forcefully confronted with questions of data security. No one who bears political responsibility can seriously deny that the work of the intelligence services is essential for our security and for the protection of our citizens. No one who bears political responsibility can seriously deny that in an age of asymmetrical threats, of which September 11 is the best example, the work of the intelligence services has become more important than ever before. Precisely in order to avert these dangers, not only is the work of our own intelligence services extremely significant for us, but so is our cooperation with the intelligence services of our allies and partners. It cannot…

The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World by Alison Wolf Crown, 393 pp., $26.00 In just the past two or three decades, women in more than token numbers have taken their place alongside men at the upper levels of government, the professions, and business. They now earn more than half of all college degrees, and they will shortly make up a majority of lawyers, doctors, and college faculty. While they still account for only a small minority of political and business leaders, that, too, is changing. The rapid ascension of women to the most influential sectors of society—occurring in all advanced Western countries—is likely to have profound implications for public policy, and perhaps even more for the way families construct their…

Through love’s great power to be made whole In mind and body, heart and soul— Through freedom to find joy, or be By dint of joy itself set free In love and in companionhood: This is the true and natural good. To undo justice, and to seek To quash the rights that guard the weak— To sneer at love, and wrench apart The bonds of body, mind and heart With specious reason and no rhyme: This is the true unnatural crime. This poem and the accompanying essay may be reproduced free of charge by any person or publication, without permission from The New York Review or either of the authors.…

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert Holt, 319 pp., $28.00 The better we understand the earth’s natural systems, the more dynamic they appear to be. (The same could be said of the universe itself.) Two and a half centuries ago earth looked like a planet of remarkable fixity and a short time scale. Since then, of course, the past has deepened or widened or lengthened enormously, depending on how you think of it. The planetary time scale has expanded from several thousand years to some 4.5 billion years, and now we know that this one earth is really a seemingly endless succession of earths. Continents roam, climate changes, oceans warm and cool, species come and go. The old idea of an earth with relatively static natural systems…

Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights by Marina Warner Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 540 pp., $35.00; $19.95 (paper) One Thousand and One Nights a retelling by Hanan al-Shaykh, with a foreword by Mary Gaitskill Pantheon, 288 pp., $26.00 On June 24, 1911, the fashion designer Paul Poiret held a much-anticipated costume party in Paris, which he promised would “be the Thousand and Second Night.” The guests, who had received invitations designed by Raoul Dufy, were led past a huge golden cage, in which Madame Poiret was imprisoned, along with a harem of friends singing Persian songs. In another room, the actor Édouard de Max, lounging on embroidered cushions, recited select tales from Joseph Mardrus’s recent translation of the Thousand and One Nights. Mardrus, the Cairo-born friend of Gide,…

Prince Igor an opera by Alexander Borodin, directed by Dmitri Tcherniakov Metropolitan Opera, New York City, February 6–March 8, 2014 It is only one of the peculiarities of Borodin’s Prince Igor that it begins where many another opera might end, with a triumphal chorus proclaiming “Slava! Slava!” to the glory of the titular prince. Resonantly conjuring the sound of cathedral bells, it is music that sounds like a fulfillment. Here we would expect the curtain to fall, on a hard-won note of jubilation. But the curtain has just gone up; the troops are not arriving but departing. Prince Igor addresses the chorus with a droning exhortation—“Let’s march into battle against the enemies of Russia!”—setting off a liturgical call-and-response on the theme of crushing the foe and washing away wrongs with…

To the Editors: Paul Wilson, in his review of Ivan Klíma’s memoirs [NYR, January 9], erroneously states that William Styron was among the American writers whose visits and expressions of solidarity “buoyed” Klíma. That was true of Klíma’s encounters with Philip Roth and Arthur Miller but not Styron, whose clichés about the evils of American consumer society irritated and dismayed Klíma, especially as they combined with his ignorance of the Soviet system. Klíma wrote: Surely these remarks do not suggest that Styron made a favorable impression on Klíma, let alone “buoyed” him. Instead, they confirmed Klíma’s impression that for many Western intellectuals it was difficult to grasp the nature of Communist systems and their impact on their citizens. I also wonder about the reviewer’s judgment of the translation as “precise…

To the Editors: Frank Rich is correct to sum up JFK as contradictory and elusive as well as inspiring [NYR, February 20]. While Kennedy projected a hopeful idealism, he remained deeply conservative on China, bearing out part of Ira Stoll’s case. As the Truman-Acheson White Paper of 1949 on the “loss of China” unleashed a furious postmortem, JFK, then in the House of Representatives, wrote a letter out of the blue to Professor John [King] Fairbank of Harvard, later my teacher. “I feel that the policies of yourself and others in the State Department contributed much more heavily than the White Paper would indicate to the downfall of our position in China. Therefore in view of the sorry record I cannot put any degree of faith in your plans for…

To the Editors: Your readers may be interested to know that this spring’s LIVE from the New York Public Library 2014 season, which begins on February 27, features conversations with Wes Anderson, Sarah Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Ricky Jay, Katherine Boo with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Douglas Coupland with Chuck Palahniuk, Steve Hindy, George Prochnik, Kara Walker, Rivka Galchen with Karen Russell, John Waters, Karl Ove Knausgaard with Jeffrey Eugenides, and Geoff Dyer. For more information, please visit www.nypl.org/live. Paul Holdengräber Director, LIVE from the NYPL The New York Public Library New York City…