Innholdsfortegnelse for July 9, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

New York street photographers were among the great flaneurs of the twentieth century. These weaponized observers with their loaded metal boxes (so much more conspicuous than reporters with their pocket-sized notebooks) did their most striking work in the 1940s and 1950s. One thinks of Helen Levitt’s image, from 1940, of a man on a Sahara-like expanse of New York City asphalt, pulling tight his overcoat while twisting down toward his leg as if to locate and wipe off a stain. Levitt maintains an unobtrusive distance from the man, who is all shape and gesture, the shrouded, faceless inhabitant of his clothes. There’s a hint of the Surrealists in his aloneness—“the tensions and desolations of creatures in naked space,” James Agee wrote of Levitt’s work. But what Levitt is after is…

Boko Haram: Inside Nigeria’s Unholy War by Mike Smith. I. B. Tauris, 233 pp., $29.00 In early May, during the final days of the hot, dry season, I flew to Yola, the capital of Adamawa State in eastern Nigeria and an apparent safe haven from the Boko Haram insurgency. Over the past year, the radical Islamic fighters had taken over large swaths of territory in three northeastern Nigerian states, killing thousands, conscripting many young men, and kidnapping and raping young women and girls. But after a series of defeats at the hands of the insurgents, the Nigerian army had begun pushing them back. It had just liberated hundreds of women and children from captivity in the Sambisa Forest, a 23,000-squaremile reserve of savannah and nearimpenetrable bush in neighboring Borno State,…

1. Pronouncements like the following have become common currency: “The United States is falling behind in a global ‘race for talent’ that will determine the country’s future prosperity, power, and security.” In Falling Behind?, Michael Teitelbaum argues that alarms like this one, which he quotes, are not only overblown but are often sounded by people who do not disclose their motives. Teitelbaum vehemently denies that we are lagging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, now commonly abbreviated as STEM. Still, he writes that there are facts to be faced: • In less than 15 years, China has moved from 14th place to second place in published research articles. • General Electric has now located the majority of its R&D personnel outside the United States. • Only four of the top…

It is as though certain landscapes, including the Sweden of the writer Stig Dagerman (who died in 1954 when he was thirty-one), have their own sound. Northern landscapes such as his come to us without elaborate description or embellishment, or any display of easy feeling. Light is scarce and so too emotion is rationed, or held within and never made easy. The spirit is wary and the past comes haunting and much is unresolved. Mist, wind, clouds, short days, the proximity of the sea, the quickly changing weather, poverty or the memory of poverty, all suggest a world in which little can be taken for granted. In other places too such as Ireland, Scotland, Canada, Iceland, the northeast coast of the United States, novelists, short-story writers, and poets have mined…

Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate by Abdel Bari Atwan. London: Saqi, 256 pp., ￡16.99 (to be published by University of California Press in September) In November 2001, two months after the al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, James Buchan, a novelist and a former Middle East correspondent, published an article in the London Guardian in which he imagined the triumphant entry into Mecca of Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist: It was no ordinary evening, but possibly the holiest in the holiest month of Islam, the so-called Lailat al-Qadr, or the Night of Power, on which, according to the Koran, God’s revelation was sent down to the Prophet Mohammed. . . . More than 50,000 people had gathered on the hot pavement of the…

International cooperation is in decline both in the political and financial spheres. The UN has failed to address any of the major conflicts since the end of the cold war; the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference left a sour aftertaste; the World Trade Organization hasn’t concluded a major trade round since 1994. The International Monetary Fund’s legitimacy is increasingly questioned because of its outdated governance, and the G20, which emerged during the financial crisis of 2008 as a potentially powerful instrument of international cooperation, seems to have lost its way. In all areas, national, sectarian, business, and other special interests take precedence over the common interest. This trend has now reached a point where instead of a global order we have to speak of global disorder. In the political sphere…

The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 293 pp., $26.00 There are many illuminations in Andrew O’Hagan’s ambitious light show of a novel. It’s set partly in Scotland and partly in Afghanistan. But in every part of the British Isles “the Illuminations” is a reference to Blackpool, that old proletarian seaside resort in northwest England that switches on its multicolored light show once a year. O’Hagan uses Blackpool as a stage set that becomes steadily more important in his drama. It’s at first a place where darkness and the forgettings of dementia obscure the old doings of his characters. But then, toward the end, the metaphorical lights switch on to reveal the relics of a touching, shocking past. Lights are also felt by O’Hagan’s characters to mean a…

The Barefoot Lawyer: A Blind Man’s Fight for Justice and Freedom in China by Chen Guangcheng. Henry Holt, 330 pp., $30.00 In early 2012, Chen Guangcheng, a self-taught lawyer who had been blind since infancy, lived with his wife and two children in the village of Dongshigu, where he’d been raised, on the eastern edge of the North China plain. They were not there by choice. For a little over a decade, Chen had waged a public campaign against corruption, pollution, forced abortion, and other abuses of power. Officials had responded with escalating punishments. After he completed a four-year jail sentence on a charge of “obstructing traffic,” Chen and his family were confined to his ancestral home in a form of undeclared and indefinite house arrest. The local government covered…

In the popular imagination, the Nazi concentration camp now features mainly as a place where Jews were taken to be gassed. In a recent German opinion poll, most respondents associated the camps with the persecution and murder of Jews; under 10 percent mentioned other categories of camp prisoners, such as Communists, criminals, or homosexuals. The power of the “Holocaust” as a concept has all but obliterated other aspects of the crimes of the Nazis and the sufferings of their victims and driven the history of the camps from cultural memory. No crime in human history outdoes the genocidal extermination of six million European Jews on the orders of the leader of Germany’s selfstyled “Third Reich.” Yet the majority of the Jewish victims of Nazi mass murder were not killed in…

Collected Poems by Mark Strand. Knopf, 520 pp., $30.00 1. Mark Strand died in November, at the age of eighty, leaving behind his newly published Collected Poems. This seems a bad deal: a man in exchange for a book. But Strand had long explored the feeling of having somehow disappeared into his art, which returned to him a version of himself, much altered in the process. The poems hold their author at some distance, with feelings of amusement and pity; all along those poems suspected their author to be just a ghost moving warily through them. We knew what life without Strand might be like: the poems regarded him posthumously, as though already dwelling in the life without him their maker had arranged. The poems are cautious about large claims,…

Life’s Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable by Paul G. Falkowski. Princeton University Press, 205 pp., $24.95 A New History of Life: The Radical New Discoveries About the Origins and Evolution of Life on Earth by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink. Bloomsbury, 391 pp., $30.00 In 1609 Galileo Galilei turned his gaze, magnified twentyfold by lenses of Dutch design, toward the heavens, touching off a revolution in human thought. A decade later those same lenses delivered the possibility of a second revolution, when Galileo discovered that by inverting their order he could magnify the very small. For the first time in human history, it lay in our power to see the building blocks of bodies, the causes of diseases, and the mechanism of reproduction. Yet according to Paul Falkowski’s Life’s…

Death may be the great equalizer, but Americans have long believed that during this life “the spread of education would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society.” These words come from Horace Mann, whose goal was to establish primary schooling for all children—no small ambition when he announced it in 1848. Others had already raised their sights higher. As early as 1791, exulting in the egalitarian mood of the new republic, one writer declared it “a scandal to civilized society that part only of the citizens should be sent to colleges and universities.”1 How that part has grown is a stirring story. It begins in the colonial period with church-funded scholarships for the sons of poor families. It continued after the Revolution with the founding…

The Lunatic by Charles Simic. Ecco, 84 pp., $22.99 The Life of Images: Selected Prose by Charles Simic. Ecco, 338 pp., $27.99 Charles Simic is one of our most celebrated living poets. He has won a Pulitzer, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Wallace Stevens award, the Frost Medal, the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, and served as the US poet laureate. What’s striking is that his distinctive poetic style continues to feel modest, seemingly casual, with a built-in shrug of bemused puzzlement before life’s anomalies. Most of the time it’s a good-humored shrug, though there are moments when ferocity breaks in, along with an Eastern European recognition of historical tragedy, as befits “someone like me who had the unenviable luck of being bombed by both the Nazis and the Allies.” With…

After Django: Making Jazz in Postwar France by Tom Perchard. University of Michigan Press, 297 pp., $80.00; $39.95 (paper) Free Jazz/Black Power by Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli, translated from the French by Gregory Pierrot. University Press of Mississippi, 256 pp., $65.00 Jazz is an art that inspires possessive devotion, and nowhere more so than in France. That proud sense of ownership is understandable: Paris opened its arms to jazz when it was a motherless child back home, a music associated with brothels, race mixing, and other vices. The American clarinetist Sidney Bechet was declared a genius when he came to Paris in 1919 with Will Marion Cook’s Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Darius Milhaud was so fascinated by what he heard in Harlem that he composed music for a ballet rich…

Before and During by Vladimir Sharov, translated from the Russian by Oliver Ready. Dedalus, 348 pp., $19.99 (paper) In the bloody summer of 2014 Vladimir Sharov’s eighth novel, Return to Egypt, was shortlisted for “The Big Book,” Russia’s most prestigious literary award (and the world’s most remunerative after the Nobel Prize for Literature). 1 It won the Russian Booker Prize several months later. Its hero, a Soviet agronomist descended from Nikolai Gogol, takes upon himself the task of completing his ancestor’s unfinished masterpiece, Dead Souls, and leading the Russian people to salvation. In September, Sharov gave a long interview to Rossiyskaya gazeta, the Russian government’s newspaper of record. “Your main themes, from book to book, are God, History, Motherland, art,” the interviewer commented. Lamenting the lack of escape these days…