Innholdsfortegnelse for April 3, 2014 i The New York Review of Books

There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: “The new normal.” “It’s the new normal,” I think, as a beloved pear tree, half-drowned, loses its grip on the earth and falls over. The train line to Cornwall washes away—the new normal. We can’t even say the word “abnormal” to each other out loud: it reminds us of what came before. Better to forget what once was normal, the way season followed season, with a temperate charm only the poets appreciated. What “used to be” is painful to remember. Forcing the spike of an unlit firework…

Bark: Stories by Lorrie Moore Knopf, 192 pp., $24.95 Who could have guessed that the terse, rather rude-sounding monosyllable bark might have such resonance? There is the harsh, heart-tripping bark of an excited or angry dog, and there is the equally harsh and heart-tripping bark of a human being speaking in anger; there is the bark of a tree, a sort of tough, calcified skin from which tenderness has vanished; there is the ominous, archaic bark—a fragile vessel to transport us on a river journey, just possibly on the River Styx. There is also the embarrassment of barking up the wrong tree—like the self-deluded, aging pop singer of Lorrie Moore’s “Wings”: “She’d spent a decade barking up the wrong tree—as a mouse!” There is the “outer bark of the brain—and…

Ninety Percent of Everything: Inside Shipping, the Invisible Industry That Puts Clothes on Your Back, Gas in Your Car, and Food on Your Plate by Rose George Metropolitan, 287 pp., $28.00 Imagine the Empire State Building. Now imagine tipping it on its side, nudging it into the Hudson, and putting out to sea. That was the scale of thing I contemplated one day in late November, as I gaped at the immense navy hull of CMA CGM Christophe Colomb, one of the world’s largest container ships, which stretched above and out of sight on either side of me, on a quayside in Hong Kong. Nearly twelve hundred feet long, it’s bigger than an aircraft carrier and longer than the world’s largest cruise ships. On Christophe Colomb, all of that space…

In Paradise by Peter Matthiessen Riverhead, 246 pp., $27.95 In 1991 I agreed to translate from the Italian a book called There Is a Place on Earth: A Woman in Birkenau, by Giuliana Tedeschi. It began: Giving almost no personal biography, no political history, no statistics, in short, no relief, Tedeschi recounts her own ten months in Birkenau from day one to liberation, focusing on the devastating labor routines, the endless humiliations, the dread of “selection,” the mutual hatred between members of different national, ethnic, and religious groups, and the daily degradation of body and psyche, particularly the female body and psyche. Having taken on the translation as an ordinary work project, I soon found it impossible to put in the hours I normally would. How can one concentrate on…

The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish Liveright, 534 pp., $35.00 In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith created high drama from imposture: the almost unbearable tension of suspense that comes with living a double life. That novel seems to have inspired Evelyn Barish’s notion of how to write the biography of Paul de Man. “With every passing year,” she tells us of de Man in the 1950s, “he felt a little more safe, but the stakes were high and the anxiety never left him.” That’s a good novelistic premise. A biographer has to earn it. What sets Barish in pursuit of the “double life” of the impostor is of course the revelation that came four years after de Man’s death in 1983—he was then Sterling Professor…

How to Create the Perfect Wife: Britain’s Most Ineligible Bachelor and His Enlightened Quest to Train the Ideal Mate by Wendy Moore Basic Books, 343 pp., $27.99 Wendy Moore has written an account of a crazed attempt by the eighteenth-century poet and philosopher Thomas Day to educate two foundling girls, so that one might become the ideal wife. Her book reads at times like a historical novel. Yet it is underpinned by meticulous research, and raises a host of questions about eighteenth-century attitudes toward women, love, and power, both personal and political. The story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who falls in love with his statue of a beautiful woman and begs the gods to bring her to life, so vividly told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, exercised an odd fascination…

The Elimination: A Survivor of the Khmer Rouge Confronts His Past and the Commandant of the Killing Fields by Rithy Panh with Christophe Bataille, translated from the French by John Cullen Other Press, 271 pp., $22.95 S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine a film by Rithy Panh Duch: Master of the Forges of Hell a film by Rithy Panh Sometime early in the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, Rithy Panh, who was thirteen years old, was digging a ditch on one of the regime’s brutal collective farms when he hit his foot with a pick-ax. His wound didn’t seem very serious at first, but “what with the damp earth, the dust, the perspiration, the mud, the stagnant water, and the lack of…

Decision Points by George W. Bush Broadway, 497 pp., $18.00 (paper) 
Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman Penguin, 493 pp., $18.00 (paper) 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 hreshold, 565 pp., $16.00 (paper) 1. Almost exactly a decade ago, Vice President Dick Cheney greeted President George W. Bush one morning in the Oval Office with the news that his administration was about to implode. Or not quite: Cheney let the president know that something was deeply wrong, though it would take Bush two more days of increasingly surprising revelations, and the near mass resignation of his senior Justice Department and law enforcement officials, to…

To the Editors: The book [Brilliant Blunders, by Mario Livio, reviewed by Freeman Dyson, NYR, March 6] purports to identify blunders made by five scientists. However, the events described are often not blunders, and the reviewer only adds to the muddle. I comment on three scientists. Darwin’s blunder is claimed to be the blending theory of inheritance. But it was just the theory of inheritance of his time, not his theory. Later Darwin adopted another theory that was popular, pangenesis. This was another error, but not a blunder. Finally Darwin is accused of blundering because he didn’t discover Mendel’s theory of inheritance of discrete traits even though he observed discrete inheritance of flower traits in snapdragons. Here Dyson claims that Darwin’s blunder was lack of an understanding of statistics, and…

The Loudest Voice in the Room: How the Brilliant, Bombastic Roger Ailes Built Fox News—and Divided a Country by Gabriel Sherman Random House, 538 pp., $28.00 President Obama thumped Mitt Romney in the 2012 election by excelling with the voters who are most likely to influence future American elections. Obama won 55 percent of votes by women, who go to the polls in larger numbers than men. The president attracted 71 percent of Hispanic voters and 73 percent of Asians, groups that are growing as a share of the population. Among voters under thirty, Obama won 60 percent. Romney, on the other hand, did very well with older white men. The 2012 race looked winnable for Romney at times because of persistent high joblessness. Yet not only did he lose,…

The Rise of Turkey: The Twenty-First Century’s First Muslim Power by Soner Cagaptay Potomac, 168 pp., $25.95 Gülen: The Ambiguous Politics of Market Islam in Turkey and the World by Joshua D. Hendrick New York University Press, 276 pp., $49.00 I˙mamin Ordusu [The Imam’s Army] by Ahmet Şık 298 pp., available at theopinions.info/thearmyoftheimam.htm These are lines from a recent newspaper column by Can Dündar, a Turkish journalist, and I can think of no clearer aid to understanding the perverse, avoidable, almost cartoonish confrontation that has engulfed Turkey since last December, and that threatens to undo the political and economic gains of the past decade. The parties to the confrontation are the prime minister, sixty-year-old Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and a Turkish divine, Fethullah Gülen, thirteen years his senior. Erdoğan leads the…

The following was written on the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s film “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Stanley Kubrick began taking pictures for Look magazine in high school. He became a full-time staff photographer while in his teens, and you can find some of his extraordinary work of the late 1940s online: black-and-white shots of New Yorkers at their occupations of craft or commerce—dancers at a mirror before a nightclub show; a boxer refitting his mouthpiece between rounds; a small girl staring up at a roller coaster—“the scrimmage of appetite” in the most far-flung postures of idleness or wonder. Kubrick said in an interview that setting up his darkroom was good practice; he thought the right preparation for any line of work…

It’s not clear what the British architect of Uganda’s Parliament envisioned when he designed the building shortly before independence in 1962. Sitting askew on a hill in downtown Kampala, with its angular white columns it could be a modernist African Parthenon. But inside, it’s a warren of hallways and balconies with AK-47-toting security guards lurking everywhere. On the wall outside the visitors’ gallery looms a row of painted portraits of the thugs and generals—Idi Amin, Milton Obote, and others—who have ruled this country during the past fifty years, alternating with a professor and a lawyer who were ousted from power within months. “This one toppled that one, and that one toppled this one...,” a tour guide explained as he showed me around. I teach and write about public health and…

Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes by Svante Pääbo Basic Books, 275 pp., $27.99 The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals by Thomas Suddendorf Basic Books, 358 pp., $29.99 My wife has always worried about me going bald, because I have a bump on the back of my skull that if exposed would make me look like a Neanderthal. Common knowledge still maintains that Neanderthals were rather stupid when compared to Homo sapiens, the species we all belong to today. There is, or was, a “gap” between them and us, rather like the gap that Thomas Suddendorf writes about when comparing the mental abilities of modern humans and the great apes. When I used to lecture on human evolution, my hand would involuntarily stroke my…

Sharing the Prize: The Economics of the Civil Rights Revolution in the American South by Gavin Wright Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 353 pp., $35.00 1. In the spring of 1945, a president from Missouri implored a political scientist from Texas to undertake a major examination of southern politics. Writing “to voice my opinion that the project is an important one,” Harry Truman sought to convince the reluctant V.O. Key Jr., a thirty-seven-year-old assistant professor at Johns Hopkins, to lead a University of Alabama appraisal of the South’s political rules and behavior.1 The result was a book of enduring importance, Southern Politics in State and Nation, which systematically analyzed how the region’s arrangements of power, patterns of voting, procedures for exclusion, and distinctive identity “in the last analysis...go back to the…

Custer by Larry McMurtry Simon and Schuster, 178 pp., $35.00; $20.00 (paper) A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The Pictographic “Autobiography of Half Moon” by Castle McLaughlin Houghton Library/Peabody Museum Press, 355 pp., $50.00 (paper) (distributed by Harvard University Press) In June 1876, Colonel George Armstrong Custer and five companies of the Seventh United States Cavalry were killed to the last man by Lakota and Cheyenne Indians on the hills overlooking the Little Bighorn River in what later became Montana. Americans are still asking how this could have happened, and it was probably inevitable that Larry McMurtry, the country’s leading western writer for at least a generation, would come to Custer at last, as a mountain climber might come to Everest. But he approaches the stubborn questions of…

To the Editors: In R.J.W. Evans’s review of books on the origins of World War I [NYR, February 6], there is no mention of the extensive discussion and debate at the time among European Marxists belonging to the social democratic parties of various countries. Books were written on the question by notable figures like Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Nikolai Bukharin, and Vladimir Lenin, and many other socialists wrote analytical and theoretical articles. Several dozen of the latter are collected in the recent volume Discovering Imperialism—Social Democracy to World War I, edited by Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido (Brill, 2011). As Marxists, they focused on economic propulsions underlying the drive to war. Here is one excerpt, by the Dutch socialist Anton Pannekoek: Professor Evans writes of the world…

Why did they send us to summer camp—were they being parental? Swimming pools—any gathering place—were considered plague central. Everywhere you went, billboards displayed the smiling faces March of Dimes kids offered up to go with their metal leg braces. Imagine being inside an iron lung and having to swallow the rotten truth That life was going to be one long bad connection inside a telephone booth, And that you’d been really unlucky and would never walk Because it had happened before there was vaccine from Jonas Salk. Truman was in the White House but polio was the president In the years of the plague, when our American atom bombs were pubescent. The milkman delivered the milk in unsterilized glass bottles. Aunt Edna served home-killed fried chicken, wobbling her…

John Ruskin: Artist and Observer an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, February 14–May 11, 2014, and the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, July 4–September 28, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition by Christopher Newall, with contributions by Christopher Baker, Ian Jeffrey, and Conal Shields National Gallery of Canada/ Paul Holberton, 376 pp., $60.00 (paper) Though John Ruskin is generally thought of as a great prose stylist, social reformer, and art critic, few consider him a great painter. But Conal Shields does. In the catalog to a stunning exhibition now in Ottawa and headed for Edinburgh—“John Ruskin: Artist and Observer”—Shields places him “among the greatest of English painters and draftsmen,” and wonders at “the relative neglect of his achievement.” Going through the 140 artworks collected here—some from private collections,…

Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans by Simon Head Basic Books, 230 pp., $26.99 1. The entire thesis of Simon Head’s arresting new book is contained in the subtitle. It goes all the way back to Adam Smith’s telling observation that the division of labor in a pin factory, while doing wonders for productivity (output per worker), would make workers as “stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be.”1 This was because no worker needed to know how to make a pin, only how to do his part in the process of making a pin. Artisan production was on the point of becoming industrial production; industrial production would destroy work skills. By the start of the twentieth century, and after the Industrial Revolution,…

You’ve probably never heard of Roman Khabarov—which is a pity, because he’s potentially one of the most important opposition activists in Russia today and he was arrested during the recent Olympics, when few would notice. Khabarov is a former cop from the city of Voronezh (some four hundred miles north of Sochi). During his eighteen years in the police force Khabarov “was openly critical of the government’s law enforcement policies and cooperated with human rights activists,” according to a recent brief by Human Rights Watch. In 2011, his bosses finally kicked him off the force, and Khabarov started a new life as a legal consultant to victims of police abuse. Shortly after his firing three years ago, he jolted his hometown by publicly accusing the Voronezh police force of widespread…

Harlem: The Unmaking of a Ghetto by Camilo José Vergara, with a foreword by Timothy J. Gilfoyle University of Chicago Press, 364 pp., $55.00 Old heads in Harlem will tell you that in the 1960s, particularly after the riot of 1964, white policemen were afraid of walking an uptown beat. They were reluctant to come through even in patrol cars. Those who did were often on the take. White landlords would try to collect the rent, guns at their hips. Their black tenants defied them and in many cases the landlords walked away from their buildings, left them to run down. Harlem was the place where you could do or get anything and get away with it. People would disappear for days into the cathouses and shooting galleries. One guy…

American Songbook by Michael Ruby Ugly Duckling, 139 pp., $17.00 (paper) Go Giants by Nick Laird Norton, 69 pp., $15.95 (paper) Nothing by Design by Mary Jo Salter Knopf, 108 pp., $26.95 One big intervention modern poetry made was to change our sense of the word “song,” which for aeons was a relatively uncomplicated synonym for “poem.” Surely poets couldn’t simply “sing” in the midst of war, chaos, historical belatedness, mass production, bottomless anxiety—all the bad things that supposedly came into the world after the moment in 1910 when, as Virginia Woolf put it, “human character changed.” It was about that time that the onslaught of anti-songs began: Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Pound’s discordant Cantos, Frost’s “The Oven Bird” who knows “in singing not to sing.”…

The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters by Anthony Pagden Random House, 501 pp., $32.00 Solomon’s Secret Arts: The Occult in the Age of Enlightenment by Paul Kléber Monod Yale University Press, 430 pp., $45.00 What are we to make of the eighteenth- century Enlightenment? For over two hundred years the legacy of its most prominent thinkers, from Locke and Newton to Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, and Kant, has been the subject of bitter debate. Its supporters hail it as the source of everything that is progressive about the modern world. For them, it stands for freedom of thought, rational inquiry, critical thinking, religious tolerance, political liberty, scientific achievement, the pursuit of happiness, and hope for the future. By contrast, its enemies accuse it of “shallow” rationalism, naive optimism, unrealistic universalism,…

To the Editors: Judge Jed Rakoff raises an issue that is well worth discussion, especially as we consider how best to avoid a repetition of the 2008 financial crisis [“The Financial Crisis: Why Have No High-Level Executives Been Prosecuted?,” NYR, January 9]. However, what his article does not say is just as notable as what it does say. As both a corporate lawyer and adjunct law teacher who has thought and written extensively in law reviews about these matters, I feel compelled to respond to his analysis. Judge Rakoff fails to mention that one reason there have not been more criminal prosecutions involving mortgage-backed securities is that the one case that was brought resulted in an acquittal of the defendants on all charges. This case was brought in the Southern…