Innholdsfortegnelse for March 5, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

JOHN ASHBERY ’s new collection of poems, Breezeway, will be published in May. IAN BURUMA is a professor at Bard. His new book is a collection of essays, Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War. His Year Zero: A History of 1945 is now out in paperback. FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. HUGH EAKIN is a Senior Editor of The New York Review and Editor of the NYRblog. Research for this article was supported by a grant from the Fritt Ord Foundation. PETER GREEN is Dougherty Centennial Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin and Adjunct Professor at the University of Iowa. His most recent book is The Hellenistic Age: A Short History.…

“Survivors pay with their conscience,” Sybille Bedford observed in her memoir, Quicksands, written in 2005, toward the end of her very long life. Born in 1911 outside of Berlin in Charlottenburg, Germany, she died in London in 2006, just a month before she would have turned ninety-five. She’d endured two world wars and the heedlessness preceding each of them as well as the Holocaust, though from afar, and the painful, impossible, and sometimes exhilarating reconstruction of several cultures: she understood firsthand the burdens of survival. Perhaps as a result she developed her remarkable talent for making the inchoate circumstances we retrospectively understand as “historical forces” seem real, palpable, human. So too “the small things men do to each other every day if they have the power and the lack of…

IRA Deadline: April 15, 2015 At Domini Social Investments, we recognize that all industries face sustainability challenges. Our environmental standards therefore apply to every company, in every industry.  We set standards for renewable and alternative energy sources; eco-efficiency and resources conservation; recycling, safer technologies, and lifecycle design; pollution control and abatement; and efforts towards long-term environmental sustainability. For example, we evaluate fuel efficiency for the auto and trucking industries, age of fleet for the airline industry, and alternative fuels and cogeneration for the electric utilities industry. We believe that companies working to address the long-term sustainability challenges of their industries make better long-term investments, for the environment and for their shareholders. For most industries, we seek to identify best practices, focusing on the specific challenges each faces. For some industries, however,…

The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington by Gregg Herken Knopf, 494 pp., $30.00 Here is an example of how things once worked in Washington. On July 30, 1958, Joseph Alsop, a leading pundit of the day whose column appeared in The Washington Post and the New York Herald Tribune, published an alarming commentary on the missile “gap” he said was about to open up between the Soviet Union and the United States. By the early 1960s, Alsop wrote, “the American government will flaccidly permit the Kremlin to gain an almost unchallengeable superiority in the nuclear striking power that was once our specialty.” Alsop cited statistics on Soviet missile production leaked to him by sources who were disclosing classified information. Alsop’s friend John F. Kennedy, a fellow…

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad, translated from the Norwegian by Sarah Death. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 526 pp., $26.00 (to be published in April) Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia by Sindre Bangstad. London: Zed, 286 pp., $95.00; $24.95 (paper) A Norwegian Tragedy: Anders Behring Breivik and the Massacre on Utøya by Aage Borchgrevink, translated from the Norwegian by Guy Puzey. Polity, 299 pp., $25.00 “The most dangerous enemy of truth and freedom among us is the compact majority.” —Dr. Stockmann in Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People 1. More Democracy, More Extremism? Last summer, on the evening of August 16, 2014, Norway’s largest tabloid, Verdens Gang, posted on its website an extended videotaped interview with Ubaydullah…

Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter by Cass R. Sunstein and Reid Hastie. Harvard Business Review Press, 252 pp., $27.00 Valuing Life: Humanizing the Regulatory State by Cass R. Sunstein. University of Chicago Press, 248 pp., $25.00 Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie’s recent book about how to make group decisions “wiser” has a strange text on its copyright page: the Harvard Business Review Press will, for large orders of the book from companies and corporations, provide special printings with the company logo displayed on a customized cover and with a letter from the CEO added to the front matter. Since the groups that are discussed here include government agencies and juries as well as companies and corporate boards, I imagine all American citizens receiving a copy of the…

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR, exurb. What were you driving at (when you said): Used to joke I’m in the retirement business. The snow is beginning to fall again. I’m wondering whether I should go out. How can you give orders when nobody is listening? A friend and two boys. Here where love was quiet it was possible to think discontinuously of the folds ahead, faith on a tricycle. Only it. Or she got a hole in her dress. It was a million to one it was something bad. The windows rattled as the train swept through at breakfast. You may want to rethink that decision. Bother the others . . . It was right there in his military book. You wood have too oracle snow. You knew that.…

Half-Life: The Divided Life of Bruno Pontecorvo, Physicist or Spy by Frank Close. Basic Books, 378 pp., $29.99 “I want to die as a great scientist, not as your chewed-up spy.” These words were spoken in Russian by Bruno Pontecorvo a year before his death in 1993, in reply to a Russian government official who was trying to arrange for a visiting historian to interview him. They come as close as Pontecorvo ever came to confirming the widespread belief that he had been spying for the Soviet Union when he was working at the Canadian nuclear reactor project in the 1940s. The words vash zhevanyi shpion describe the way he did not wish to be remembered. In Half-Life, his new biography of Pontecorvo, the particle physicist Frank Close translates them…

When George Balanchine choreographed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the New York City Ballet in 1962, he had been living with Shakespeare’s play for most of his life. He was fiftyeight years old and recalled playing an elf or bug in a production when he was a child in St. Petersburg in the years before the 1917 revolution. He liked to say that he knew the play “better in Russian than a lot of people know it in English,” and his dancers remember that he quoted the text in English freely from memory. It was a play, and as importantly a musical score—Felix Mendelssohn’s overture and incidental music—that seemed to follow him through life. Dream was the first original American full-length ballet ever created. The opening performances were on the…

On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss. Graywolf, 205 pp., $24.00 Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine by Paul A. Offit, M.D. Basic Books, 231 pp., $27.99 Even many years later, when my mother told the story, fear still showed on her face. One morning in 1954, at the age of two, I awoke and told her that my head hurt. I had a fever, and she put me to bed. Over the next days, my temperature rose, and my headache worsened. My parents called our pediatrician, who came to our small apartment in Astoria, Queens. He found that my neck was stiff and my legs were weak. Polio, he said, was a possible diagnosis. There were tens of thousands of cases of the paralytic illness each year…

The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence by David Bromwich. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 500 pp., $39.95 Edmund Burke, who died in 1797, remains a figure to reckon with more than two centuries later. He has been and still remains an inspiration to American conservatives, most strikingly to those lamenting the absence of an American cultural aristocracy early in the twentieth century, and to those at the height of the cold war who took their cue from his Letters on a Regicide Peace and sought the rolling back of communism by any means possible, including war. It is, on the other hand, a paradox of American conservatism at the present day that it celebrates an American Revolution that was enthusiastically promoted by Thomas…

A Voice Still Heard: Selected Essays of Irving Howe edited by Nina Howe with Nicholas Howe Bukowski, and with a foreword by Morris Dickstein. Yale University Press, 380 pp., $40.00 1. Irving Howe built three careers in one heroically productive life. From his high school years in the 1930s until his death at seventy-two in 1993, he was a political activist and polemicist, angry defender of the democratic-socialist faith against old-guard Communists and New Left firebrands, and founding editor of the still-lively political quarterly Dissent. In the 1940s he began writing the generous, sharply focused literary criticism that, together with his university teaching, gave him the greatest pleasure. Many of his later essays, notably “Writing and the Holocaust,” are grave, measured, even magnificent in their comfortless density and depth. Starting…