Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

American Sniper a film directed by Clint Eastwood American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in US Military History by Chris Kyle with Jim DeFelice and Scott McEwen. William Morrow, 379 pp., $15.99 (paper) Thomas Powers If the guys are tired of talking football at a bar near a military post where enlisted men from elite military units do their drinking on a Saturday night, you might get an argument going with a different sort of question, like what, exactly, was the greatest single rifle shot ever made by an American marksman in combat? The celebrated American sniper Chris Kyle was not history-minded but he was born and died in Texas and I imagine that Texas pride and his own modesty might have prompted him to say: Why,…

Egon Schiele: Portraits an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, October 9, 2014–April 20, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Alessandra Comini. Neue Galerie/Prestel, 295 pp., $65.00 Standing in front of Egon Schiele’s full-length portrait of Edith—one of the most striking pictures at the Neue Galerie’s exhibition of Schiele portraits— I thought what a peculiar tribute this was to the young woman he had just married (see illustration on page 22). He had begun a courtship of Edith (as well as her sister Adele) in the spring of 1914, and she became Schiele’s wife, much against the wishes of her family, in 1915. The painting was done the same year. (Another fine portrait in sombre autumn colors, displayed in the same show, of Edith’s father, Johann Harms,…

“Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions by Ian S. MacNiven. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 584 pp., $37.50 The Collected Poems of James Laughlin edited with an introduction and notes by Peter Glassgold. New Directions, 1,214 pp., $ 49.95 It’s not often that a biographer is as fortunate with his subject as Ian S. Mac-Niven has been with James Laughlin. As the founder and publisher of New Directions, the most prominent press in this country of modernist American and foreign literature, Laughlin not only had an interesting life, or more accurately several lives that he somehow managed to lead concurrently, he also exchanged thousands of letters with writers he published, friends, and family members, thus leaving behind an astounding amount of material for his…

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. Knopf, 317 pp., $26.95 “Could they perform the task more slowly were they painted figures in a picture?” This authorial comment, in the concluding pages of Kazuo Ishiguro’s enigmatic new novel, is an acknowledgment of both the extra ordinarily slow pace of The Buried Giant and its highly stylized, artificial tone. The book is set in post-Roman England at a time when the shadow of King Arthur “still falls across the land,” and Christianity seems very tentatively to have been established among Britons and Saxons. The Buried Giant is not strong in historical verisimilitude; its characters are so thinly drawn as to suggest figures in an ancient tapestry, or in an allegorical fable like Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. With the first paragraph Ishiguro strikes a…

Islam and Nazi Germany’s War by David Motadel. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 500 pp., $35.00 Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination by Stefan Ihrig. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 311 pp., $29.95 In 1941, a Harvard University anthropology professor named Carleton S. Coon traveled to Morocco, ostensibly to carry out field research. His true mission was to smuggle weapons to anti-German rebels in the Atlas Mountains, on behalf of the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime precursor to the CIA. The following year, as the United States prepared to invade North Africa, Coon and an OSS colleague, Gordon Brown, drafted propaganda pamphlets intended to soften up local reaction to the coming swarms of GIs. They settled on a religious idiom: “Praise be unto the only God. . . . The American Holy…

On Further Reflection: 60 Years of Writing by Jonathan Miller. New-bold on Stour: Skyscraper, 326 pp., £20.00 The usual cliché “polymath” does not do justice to the peculiar case history that is the life of Jonathan Miller. In his own telling, he begins as an unremarkable schoolboy at a semi-mystical progressive school dedicated to something called “leading-out,” where wet paper was insisted upon in art class. “It had to be wet paper,” he reports, “for dry paper gave hard lines and the art mistress explained that there were no hard lines in nature. ‘Moisten your papers,’ she would cry flutily, and the class would set about the ritual douche.” The resulting blurring was intended to express “the confluence of the great subconscious.” Miller sums this period up thus: After six…

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr. Norton, 276 pp., $26.95 In September 2013, about a year before Nicholas Carr published The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, his chastening meditation on the human future, a pair of Oxford researchers issued a report predicting that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be lost to machines within the next twenty years. The researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, looked at seven hundred kinds of work and found that among those occupations, the most susceptible to automation were loan officers, receptionists, paralegals, store clerks, taxi drivers, and security guards. Even computer programmers, the people writing the algorithms that are taking on these tasks, will not be immune. By Frey and Osborne’s calculations, there is about a…

I slide my swastika into your lubricious Place Clichy. I like my women horizontal and when they stand up vicious and Vichy. I want to jackboot rhythmically down your Champs-Élysées With my behind behind me taking selfies of the Grand Palais. Look at my arm raised in the razor salute of greeting. I greet you like a Caesar, Heil! for our big meeting. My open-top Mercedes creeps through the charming, cheering crowd. I greet you, lovely body of Paris, you who are so proud, And surtout you French artists and French movie stars who Are eager to collaborate and would never hide a Jew. My oh my. How times have changed. But the fanatics have gotten even more deranged. Seventy-five years after Hitler toured charming, cheering Paris, Parisians say They…

1. No one should be surprised to read that in Pakistan the army has taken charge, established military courts, derailed democracy, brought television and other media under military control. Nor should one be surprised to learn that foreign policy and national security were being directly run by the army. Many similar situations have occurred in Pakistan since 1958, when the army first came to power in a gradual coup, declared martial law, and ruled for a decade. The country has for years been under partial military rule, outright martial law, or military authority disguised as presidential rule. But the arrangement that has evolved over the last six months is the strangest so far: the elected government remains in place but has few powers, and no longer rules the country. The…

I stand, legs astride, a colossus— or dancer in fifth position, wide port de bras. Polymorph strayed into English, sometimes pronounced like Americans’ z, in French I’m often silent; in Pirahã the glottal stop; a fricative in Somali. Vector, Cartesian axis, chromosome, bowling-strike. Pirate-map cynosure; at a letter’s close, a kiss. I do plebeian duty in tic-tac-toe, range marble façades. Paired with y, I dodge— variable incognito. I lend myself to comets of cryptic orbit, ally with rays that pierce time’s edge. I’m default sci-fiplanets. In my Roman hours, I was ten. —Later, the name of millions: those never granted an alphabet’s power.…

Novels and Stories of the 1940s & 50s by Bernard Malamud, edited by Philip Davis. Library of America, 712 pp., $35.00 Novels and Stories of the 1960s by Bernard Malamud, edited by Philip Davis. Library of America, 916 pp., $35.00 1. Bernard Malamud gave many answers to the question asked by an Italian thief of a Jewish grocer in The Assistant (1957): “What I like to know is what is a Jew anyway?” In lectures titled “Imaginative Writing and the Jewish Experience” or “Hunting for Jewishness,” or in his acceptance speech for B’nai B’rith’s Jewish Heritage Award, his answers were straightforward and uplifting: Jews, through their sufferings, “know that . . . the rewards of life . . . are centered about the development of a spirituality that raises man…

In Italy on February 21, about fifty authors who work with Bompiani (and other publishing houses) publicly protested Mondadori’s proposed acquisition of the RCS Group. Let’s try to see clearly here. Mondadori is certainly the largest Italian publishing group (it includes, for example, such prestigious houses as Einaudi) and it belongs to the Berlusconi family. RCS, that is, Rizzoli –Corriere della Sera, is the second-largest Italian group and it includes a major daily, various other publications, and most important a series of book publishers such as Bompiani, Adelphi, Fabbri, Rizzoli, Archinto, BUR, Lizard, Marsilio, and Sonzogno. This is the assortment of publishing houses that the RCS board, faced with steep debt, wants to sell to Mondadori. At first there was talk of a new group, assembled through a merger of…

Soumission by Michel Houellebecq. Paris: Flammarion, 300 pp., €21.00 (paper) (a translation from the French by Lorin Stein will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October) The best-selling novel in Europe today, Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission, is about an Islamic political party coming peacefully to power in France. Its publication was announced this past fall in an atmosphere that was already tense. In May a young French Muslim committed a massacre at a Belgian Jewish museum; in the summer Muslim protesters in Paris shouted “Death to the Jews!” at rallies against the war in Gaza; in the fall stories emerged about hundreds of French young people, many converts, fighting with ISIS in Syria and Iraq; a French captive was then beheaded in Algeria; and random attacks by unstable men…

The Peripheral by William Gibson. Putnam, 485 pp., $28.95 William Gibson has spent his career in the shadow of his first novel, Neuromancer, which was published in 1984 and greeted as at once a punk revolt against traditional science fiction and a crystallization of the anxieties of the age. The book depicted a future in which identity was dictated by technology, the natural world had been subsumed by cities, and the geographic distinction of borders had given way to a frenetically visual monoculture dominated by the neon ads of multinational corporations. Critics found resonances with Guy Debord’s attack on “mechanical civilizations” and Jean Baudrillard’s recently promulgated concept of the hyperreal, particularly in Gibson’s forecasting of the Internet—which at the time of his writing was still inchoate, text-based, and the insular…

Confessions of an Italian by Ippolito Nievo, translated from the Italian by Fredericka Randall, with an introduction by Lucy Riall. Penguin Classics, 884 pp., $25.00 (paper) It would be hard to think of a novel, certainly such a long and unfailingly lively novel, that has more instances of psychosomatic malaise, more accounts of attempted suicide, than Ippolito Nievo’s Risorgimento classic Confessions of an Italian (originally published in 1867 and only this year available unabridged in English). To understand the place of those illnesses and moments of desperation in the overall arc of this 860-page masterpiece is to get close to the spirit that drove the campaign for the unification of Italy. Behind it all lies the intuition that for the modern individual there can be no free and fulfilled personal…

GOOD FAITH & THE SCHOOLS To the Editors: Jonathan Zimmerman reviews my book about school reform in New York City under Michael Bloomberg, Lessons of Hope [NYR, March 5], and finds that we inherited a “profoundly ineffective” system and got “results”: by “almost every way we can measure, the overall quality of New York’s schools improved.” What’s not to like? For Zimmerman, it’s that we alienated core constituencies in the process. Unfortunately, that’s the heart of the problem. You can’t do major reform without upsetting these interests. The teachers union, bureaucrats, and local politicians who controlled the prior system—and ran it to their advantage—inevitably push back hard. Power doesn’t give up prerogative cheerfully. Zimmerman appears most concerned that I “alienate[d] a substantial fraction of [the teachers].” Here, I partially agree,…