Innholdsfortegnelse for August 13, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

ANONYMOUS is a former official of a NATO country with wide experience in the Middle East. ROBERT BADINTER was France’s Minister of Justice from 1981, when he was instrumental in abolishing the death penalty, to 1986, and President of the Constitutional Council from 1986 to 1995. The article in this issue originally appeared in Le Monde. ANTONY SHUGAAR is a translator and a contributing editor at Asymptote journal. His translation of 100 Days of Happiness by Fausto Brizzi will be published in August. BERNARD BAILYN is Adams University Professor Emeritus at Harvard. His most recent books are The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America—The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600 –1675 and Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History. CHRISTOPHER R. BROWNING is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus…

Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World an exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, March 14–June 21, 2015; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, July 28–November 1, 2015; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., December 13, 2015–March 20, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin. Getty Publications, 368 pp., $65.00 Piccoli Grandi Bronzi an exhibition at the National Archaeological Museum, Florence, March 20–August 31, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Barbara Arbeid and Mario Iozzo. Florence: Edizioni Polistampa, 234 pp., €34.00 (paper) Serial Classic an exhibition at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, May 9–August 24, 2015 Portable Classic an exhibition at the Fondazione Prada, Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice, May 9–September 13, 2015 Serial/Portable Classic: The Greek Canon and Its…

The Contender: Andrew Cuomo, A Biography by Michael Shnayerson. Twelve, 529 pp., $30.00 All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life by Andrew M. Cuomo. Harper, 517 pp., $29.99 At his inauguration in January 2011, Andrew M. Cuomo declared that he was taking office as the new governor of New York with an attitude of “constructive impatience with the status quo of Albany.” Six months later, Cuomo engineered passage of a law that recognized same-sex marriage. It was an utterly unexpected bloom in the political tundra. No state had moved on same-sex marriage in the previous two years. California’s Supreme Court decision in 2008 recognizing it was frozen by referendum and litigation. The New York State Assembly had approved same-sex marriage legislation three times in 2007 and 2009,…

The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry by Helen Vendler. Harvard University Press, 444 pp., $35.00 “The critics always get everything wrong,” John Ashbery said. Well, some do and some don’t. They get on poets’ nerves, of course. Not just for the obvious reason that critics can find poems wanting, but even when they admire them, the way they read their poems often makes poets scratch their heads. Big deal, you may be thinking, who reads reviews of poetry books anyhow? If your name is Helen Vendler, thousands do, since her reviews have appeared regularly over the years in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic, reassuring readers that good poetry continues to…

Major Works on Religion and Politics by Reinhold Niebuhr, edited by Elisabeth Sifton. Library of America, 962 pp., $40.00 This selection of Reinhold Niebuhr’s work, edited by his daughter Elisabeth Sifton, is the 263rd volume in the Library of America; and it is possible that the single sentence that appears on page 705 is known to more people, and has affected them more deeply, than anything else the library has ever published: God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other. This is the original version of what has come to be known in many slight variations as the Serenity Prayer, under which name it can…

Why did I write? What sin to me unknown Dipt me in Ink, my Parents’, or my own? Alexander Pope’s great “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1735) asks this question both playfully and seriously. Why did the child Pope take to verse at so young an age, telling us, as many a poet might tell us, with the kind of modesty that enormous self-confidence can generate, “I lisp’d in Numbers, for the Numbers came,” by which the poet means an intuitive, instinctive, “inborn” sense of scansion and rhyme for which some individuals have the equivalent of “perfect pitch” in music: you are born with it, or you are not. For sheer virtuosity in verse, Pope is one of the great masters of the language; his brilliantly orchestrated couplets lend themselves ideally…

The Musical Brain and Other Stories by Cesar Aira, translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. New Directions, 351 pp., $29.95 He had to keep fleeing forward, but to where? What would become of him? Was he destined to be an eternal fugitive, eternally forbidden to look back? —Shantytown, 2001 The Argentinian writer Cesar Aira’s stories tend to begin with a flat assertion. At its flattest this can be a statement of the most unthreatening ordinariness: I was in a bus, sitting by the window, looking out at the street. As a kid, in Pringles, I went to the movies a lot. Sentences like this make up the primary layer of his writing, sentences that with minor variations might form part of any reader’s own autobiography. The straightforward unemphatic clarity…

The prospect of new leadership at the Library of Congress—after the recent resignation of its longtime director— opens up great possibilities for democratizing access to culture. America has led the world in making digital communication part of everyday life, yet it has lagged behind other countries in making the holdings of its greatest library available online and free of charge. A new regime at the Library of Congress (LOC) could digitize its collections and link them with collections in other libraries, archives, and museums so that everyone has access to the resources that are everyone’s heritage. Until now, digital development has taken place primarily in the private sector. While corporations such as Google were dominating the Internet, the public interest in the digital realm was left to private initiative. The…

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. Ecco, 392 pp., $28.99 In 1989, an eighteen-year-old South African named Elon Musk approached a girl at a party in Canada, where he was attending college, and said, “I think a lot about electric cars. Do you think about electric cars?” That anecdote, one of scores that make up Ashlee Vance’s chatty, eponymous biography of the forty-four-year-old entrepreneur, is telling. Long before Musk parlayed the $165 million he made for his part in developing the Internet banking giant PayPal into the more than $11 billion that underwrite Musk Industries today, he was thinking ahead, envisioning a world that merged science with science fiction, a real world that he, the hero of this story, would bring to…

The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite of Valois, and the Betrayal That Ignited a Kingdom by Nancy Goldstone. Little, Brown, 434 pp., $30.00 There are figures in French history who tower like monuments. Saint Louis, the Capetian king, a symbol of justice, Joan of Arc, warrior and martyr, and Henry IV, the great peacemaker, are three unmistakable paragons who personified a certain idea of French greatness. Oddly enough, Henry IV’s first wife, Marguerite of Valois, remembered as Queen Margot, also enjoys a high place in the popular imagination, although she had no political influence and her life was often threatened in the era’s turmoil; unlike her sister-in-law, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, she never wore the halo of martyrdom. In France, nonetheless, she remains a popular presence…

The Governance of China by Xi Jinping. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 515 pp., $16.95 (paper) Chinese Politics in the Era of Xi Jinping: Renaissance, Reform, or Retrogression? by Willy Wo-Lap Lam. Routledge, 323 pp., $145.00; $50.95 (paper) In the almost one-hundred-year existence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), its current general secretary, Xi Jinping, is only the second leader clearly chosen by his peers. The first was Mao Zedong. Both men beat out the competition, and thus secured a legitimacy their predecessors lacked.1 Why was Xi chosen? The Beijing rumor mill had long indicated that the outgoing elders were looking for a “princeling” successor, that is the son of a senior firstgeneration revolutionary. Princelings, it was apparently felt, had a bigger stake in the revolution than most people, and thus…

Revolutions Without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World by Janet Polasky. Yale University Press, 371 pp., $35.00 Janet Polasky’s Revolutions Without Borders does three things, and does them well. It identifies and traces the fortunes of the most zealous promoters of the “universal cry of liberty” in the tumultuous twenty-eight years after 1776. It demonstrates the importance of understanding the failures, the dead ends, the unrealized dreams, as well as the successes of past eras. And it contributes to our knowledge of Atlantic history. That subject—the common, comparative, and interactive aspects of the lives of the people in the four continents that surround the Atlantic basin, which lies at the heart of Polasky’s book—has had a remarkable recent history. Based on the concept that the Atlantic region…

The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family by Roger Cohen. Knopf, 304 pp., $27.95 In August 1945, Bert Cohen, an uncle of Roger Cohen, visited a refugee camp in Padua. Raised in South Africa, the son of immigrants from Lithuania, he had spent World War II serving with the South African army in North Africa and Italy. Among the refugees were nearly a thousand Jews liberated from Dachau. Cohen was shocked by their condition—emaciated, sleeping on a bare stone floor, scrambling for cigarettes—and by the contempt he saw in their eyes for his own prosperous state, “well dressed and well fed.” He was ashamed to feel no sympathy for these creatures “less human than animal,” he wrote in his wartime diary. “I could not feel…

Léon Blum: Prime Minister, Socialist, Zionist by Pierre Birnbaum, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer. Yale University Press, 218 pp., $25.00 When Leon Blum became president of the Council of Ministers of France— in effect, prime minister—on June 6, 1936, a world was turned on its head. He was the first socialist ever to occupy that position in France, and the first avowed Jew to head a major modern government anywhere (Benjamin Disraeli had converted at the age of twelve to the Church of England). Many admired his creative leadership of the Popular Front government from June 1936 until June 1937. Others reviled him almost hysterically as the embodiment of the “Judeo-Bolshevik peril.” He left no one indifferent. Pierre Birnbaum, a French political sociologist who has written prolifically and…

THE BUGGED CLASSROOM To the Editors: Readers of David Bromwich’s excellent article “Trapped in the Virtual Classroom” [NYR, July 9] that contrasts an online with a physical-space classroom need to think about an additional issue that so far is not receiving much, if any, notice. The online classroom, by virtue of its digital medium, is a surveilled classroom. Teachers and students both will have no privacy there. Because backup is permanent (and many efforts to individualize instruction and provide feedback depend upon the ability to mine the data generated), it will be risky for both faculty and students to explore the outer reaches of ideas, speculate on consequences, examine uncommon or dissident ideas or those subject to intellectual property constraints. When data and information are confused with knowledge, the mere…