Innholdsfortegnelse for March 19, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

World Order by Henry Kissinger. Penguin, 420 pp., $36.00 America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Social Disorder by Bret Stephens. Sentinel, 269 pp., $27.95 1. Almost from the beginning of its history, America has struggled to find a balance in its foreign policy between narrowly promoting its own security and idealistically serving the interests of others; between, as we’ve tended to see it in shorthand, Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick and the ideals of Woodrow Wilson. Just as consistently, the US has gone through periods of embracing a leading international role for itself and times when Americans have done all they could to turn their backs on the rest of the world. Two new books now join this never-ending debate: Henry Kissinger’s World Order and America in Retreat…

Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others by David Sloan Wilson. Yale University Press/Templeton Press, 180 pp., $27.50 1. Altruism may seem a good thing—unless you happen to be an evolutionary biologist. Then it may seem a mixture of a mystery and a curse. The reason isn’t hard to see. How could a ruthless process like Darwinian natural selection give rise to altruistic organisms, human or nonhuman, that act in ways that are costly to themselves and helpful to others? Darwin himself was aware of the difficulty and offered some tentative solutions, but it was during the twentieth century that altruism became the subject of nearly fetishistic attention among evolutionary biologists. One imaginable solution is to deny that altruism really exists in nature or to claim that…

Le Suicide français by Éric Zemmour. Paris: Albin Michel, 534 pp., €22.90 (paper) 1. For three days the sirens never stopped in Paris. They began on the morning of January 7 right after two French Muslim terrorists infiltrated the offices of Charlie Hebdo in the Marais and killed twelve people. A police dragnet spread out as the killers veered through the city before they escaped in the direction of Rennes. The next morning a young policewoman was shot dead on a street near a Jewish school just outside the freeway ringing the city and again the police spread out. On January 9 television stations reported that another terrorist had taken hostages at a kosher grocery store near the Porte de Vincennes, and through the window of my office, which gives…

THE GUARDS I’m writing these notes because I want people who care about these things to know what I have personally experienced in prison. Over time I’ve turned from an ordinary victim into an interested observer, and I’ve discovered that for many people the prison world remains terra incognita. And yet in our country one in every hundred people is currently in prison; one in ten (maybe by now one in seven) of the male population passes through prison at some point in their lives. Moreover, prison has a terrible effect on the majority of both prisoners and guards. It’s not yet clear, in fact, which group is affected more. Society has to do something about this human tragedy. And for a start people need to know about it. This…

Never underestimate the persistence of opponents of President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Since the law was enacted in 2010, Republicans have introduced countless bills to repeal it, but have never had the votes to make their efforts anything but symbolic. Having lost in the legislature, Obama’s opponents—many of them the very same conservatives who have long decried judicial activism—turned to the courts. In 2012, they lost a constitutional challenge to the ACA, when Chief Justice John Roberts parted company with his conservative colleagues and wrote a majority opinion holding that Congress’s power to impose and collect taxes authorized it to require individuals either to purchase health insurance or to pay a tax. The decision roiled the conservative movement, not least because…

Hope: Entertainer of the Century by Richard Zoglin. Simon and Schuster, 565 pp., $30.00 When Bob Hope died in 2003 at the age of one hundred, attention was not widely paid. The “entertainer of the century,” as his biographer Richard Zoglin calls him, had long been regarded by many Americans (if they regarded him at all) “as a cue-card-reading antique, cracking dated jokes about buxom beauty queens and Gerald Ford’s golf game.” A year before his death, The Onion had published the fake headline “World’s Last Bob Hope Fan Dies of Old Age.” Though Hope still had champions among comedy luminaries who had grown up idolizing him—Woody Allen and Dick Cavett, most prominently—Christopher Hitchens was in sync with the new century’s consensus when he memorialized him as “paralyzingly, painfully, hopelessly…

Moral Imagination by David Bromwich. Princeton University Press, 350 pp., $27.95 A sound instinct prompted David Bromwich to publish Moral Imagination at the same time as his biography of Edmund Burke, and not only because the idea of “a moral imagination” is derived from Burke.1 These essays were written between 1995 and 2012, and although Burke is not the central figure in them, they shed much light on the frame of mind in which Bromwich approached the ambiguous figure of Burke in his biography, and even more on how Bromwich is relevant to the politics of our own times. He has been a fierce, not to say a savage, critic of both President Obama and his predecessor in the White House; but his essays on the exemplary figure of Lincoln…

The Dog by Joseph O’Neill. Pantheon, 241 pp., $25.95 The 1950s craze for science fiction, spurred by a combination of cold war paranoia, terror of the bomb, and a yearning for a bright, new, clean, and limitless world, threw up some wonderfully weird magazines. Most of the stories they contained were all too dispensable—or perhaps one was too young to appreciate them?—but who could forget their cover illustrations, depicting fantastical cities of the far future, with mile-high skyscrapers, viaducts soaring into the clouds, flying cars, and sky-borne trains. Nowadays, seeing photographs of the city of Dubai, we of the older generation rub our eyes in amazement. In this city in the desert, the future, that in our young days seemed impossibly far off, or just plain impossible, has already arrived,…

Iolanta an opera by Peter Tchaikovsky. Bluebeard’s Castle an opera by Béla Bartók. A double bill at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, January 26–February 21, 2015 It was a bold idea to stage Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle in a single evening. The length of the performance is not daunting—little more than three hours—but the juxtaposition of the two works leads to a bracing sort of dissonance. However closely they might be brought together through directorial conception, a fine frisson of incompatibility kept them vibrating in separate spheres. By the time Iolanta had reached its final resounding chorus in praise of God’s blessings (even if the chorus’s black uniforms and white aprons did make them look a bit like the waitstaff of a high-end mountain resort), it was…

Cuban Revelations: Behind the Scenes in Havana by Marc Frank. University Press of Florida, 325 pp., $29.95 The American novelist and historian Waldo Frank was an enthusiastic supporter of the Cuban Revolution. Through three decades of writing about Latin America, he had adapted some of the central themes of the Hebrew prophets to the region that so fascinated him. He came to see Central and South America as a possible new Promised Land where all the American republics could reencounter their political roots in “the democratic Judaeo-Christian vision of the whole man.” In January 1959, when Frank was nearly seventy, he saw the triumph of the Cuban Revolution as the fulfillment of his vision. In the autumn of 1959, the Cuban government, at the behest of Fidel Castro, signed a…

To the Editors: I have great respect for The New York Review of Books. Thus, I turned with anticipation to Darryl Pinckney’s recent piece on Selma, the event itself and the movie that depicts what happened [“Some Different Ways of Looking at Selma,” NYR, February 19]. I did this from the perspective of someone who, as an assistant to Senator and Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, was closely involved with the development and passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I regret to say that I was disappointed and puzzled. How is one to explain the series of factual errors I encountered? It’s Sheriff Jim Clark—Selma’s still-notorious brutal bully—not “Bill” Clark. Mr. Pinckney writes that King’s activist leader, James Bevel, was moved…