Innholdsfortegnelse for June 4, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

CHRISTOPHER DE BELLAIGUE’s most recent book is Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup. ALFRED BRENDEL is a pianist and author of several books of essays and poetry. A new edition of his collected musical essays is due to be published this summer. IAN BURUMA is a professor at Bard. His new book is a collection of essays from these pages, Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War. ELIZABETH DREW is a regular contributor to The New York Review. She is the author of several books about money in politics, including Politics and Money: The New Road to Corruption, The Corruption of American Politics: What Went Wrong and Why, and Citizen McCain. MASHA GESSEN’s new book, about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is The Brothers:…

In 1619, at the ripe age of twenty, Gian Lorenzo Bernini set himself the seemingly impossible challenge of carving the human soul in marble. Two souls, in fact: a blessed soul bound for Heaven and a wicked soul newly damned to Hell, the most insubstantial of beings portrayed in solid stone from the neck up. These two remarkable images, preserved since the seventeenth century in the Spanish embassy in Rome, recently provided the focus for a small but choice exhibition at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. The Blessed Soul is female, with a classical profile and a classical coiffure, crowned with a garland of roses frozen forever. Between her parted lips we can just detect a row of perfect teeth, a feat of detailing that the ancient Greeks and…

The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems by John Berryman, edited and with an introduction by Daniel Swift. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 179 pp., $26.00 The Dream Songs by John Berryman, with an introduction by Michael Hofmann. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 427 pp., $19.00 (paper) 77 Dream Songs by John Berryman, with an introduction by Henri Cole. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 84 pp., $15.00 (paper) Berryman’s Sonnets by John Berryman, with an introduction by April Bernard. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 115 pp., $15.00 (paper) On October 25, 1914, just over one hundred years ago, the remarkable poet John Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma. In honor of this anniversary, Farrar, Straus and Giroux offers The Heart Is Strange: New Selected Poems and is reissuing The Dream Songs, 77 Dream Songs,…

Boswell’s Enlightenment by Robert Zaretsky. Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 278 pp., $26.95 The Boswell family tomb lies beneath an old building in the Scottish town of Auchinleck. When you go down the steps into the black vault, you are immediately enclosed in a coldness that troubles your own bones. The air is damp—a struck match goes out, then a second—and the experience is less of visiting a grave than occupying one. The other day, I blindly felt the walls and touched a metal plaque before remembering my phone has a flashlight. “Sir Alexander Boswell, Bart,” it says on the plaque, giving the date of his death. This man, I knew, was the eldest son of the famous biographer. He died in a duel in 1822, at Auchtertool in Fife, after…

We drank our faces off until the sun arrived,Night after night, and most of us survivedTo waft outside to sunrise on Second Avenue,And felt a kind of Wordsworth wonderment—the morning new,The sidewalk fresh as morning dew—and us new, too. How wonderful to be so magnified.Every Scotch-and-soda had been usefully applied.You were who you weren’t till now.We’d been white Harvard piglets sucking on the whisky sowAnd now we’d write a book, without having to know how. If you didn’t get a hangover, that was one kind of badAnd was a sign of something, but if you hadTranquilizers to protect yourself before you went to work,Say as a doctor interning at nearby New York Hospital, don’t be a jerk,Take them, take loads of them, and share them, and don’t smirk. We smoked…

Frank: A Life in Politics from the Great Society to Same-Sex Marriage by Barney Frank. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 387 pp., $28.00 Barney Frank, who looks like Barney Rubble and talks like a speeded-up Will Rogers, was keeping something from us—not just, for a long time, his sex life, but his hidden formation as a professor. As a stellar graduate student at Harvard, he completed all the requirements for a Ph.D. except the dissertation, for which he had chosen a subject (the legislative process) and a director (Samuel Huntington). Later he added a Harvard law degree to his academic achievements. The models he had chosen to follow on the Harvard campus were John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Even as a teenager, Frank knew that he was irrevocably dedicated…

On the evening of Saturday, February 28, about one hundred people gathered in a conference room at CUNY’s Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies in midtown Manhattan to salute Steven Greenhouse on the occasion of his retirement from The New York Times. For thirty-one years, Greenhouse had worked at the paper, the last nineteen of them covering labor. In December, he had taken a buyout— part of a cost-cutting campaign aimed at eliminating one hundred positions from the newsroom—and the tribute to him was one of a series of doleful farewells held to mark the exodus of so many veteran reporters. Not all was gloom, however. After the announcement of Greenhouse’s departure, the Times had come under intense pressure to fill the labor beat, and in mid-February it…

Let Me Heal: The Opportunity to Preserve Excellence in American Medicine by Kenneth M. Ludmerer. Oxford University Press, 431 pp., $34.95 In the 1890s, Sir William Osler, now regarded as something of a demigod in American medicine, created at the Johns Hopkins Hospital a novel system for training physicians after graduation from medical school. It required young physicians to reside in the hospital full-time without pay, sometimes for years, to learn how to care for patients under the close supervision of senior physicians. This was the first residency program. Despite the monastic existence, the long hours, and the rigid hierarchy, Osler’s residents apparently loved it. They felt exalted to be able to learn the practice of medicine under the tutelage of great physicians who based their teachings on science, inquiry,…

The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions by Michael Walzer. Yale University Press, 172 pp., $26.00 Michael Walzer turned eighty this year, as vital, productive, and intellectually alive as ever. After twenty-eight books, hundreds of articles, decades of teaching at Princeton and Harvard, editing Dissent as a nonsectarian voice of the democratic left, his work remains an essential reference point in academic and public discussion of the most pressing ethical dilemmas in international politics. You can’t teach a class about just war and the ethics of intervention without using his Just and Unjust Wars (1977); you will not think clearly about whether justice is local and national or universal and cosmopolitan unless you have read his Spheres of Justice (1983); you can’t understand the vexed relationship between religion…

Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 by Marwa Elshakry. University of Chicago Press, 439 pp., $45.00 During the spring of 1910 a young Iranian who was studying to be a mullah would climb to the roof of his house to observe a mysterious projectile as it moved across the night sky. Ahmad Kasravi did not know what he was seeing but he was instinctively skeptical of the belief, prevalent in his poor, backward province, that this “tailed star” was somehow connected with Iran’s political turbulence, and that it augured the destruction of the earth. On the contrary, Kasravi’s nocturnal observations filled him with happiness, and he was even happier when he came across an Arabic journal, al-Muqtataf (“The Digest”), that told him that the object was not an augury but a…

The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915–1964 by Zachary Leader. Knopf, 812 pp., $40.00 There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction by Saul Bellow, edited by Benjamin Taylor. Viking, 532 pp., $35.00 Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein—included in the Library of America’s final volume of Saul Bellow’s complete novels—is a eulogy in novel form for his friend Allan Bloom. But it also contains a kind of eulogy for Bellow himself. A shift in emphasis occurs about halfway through when Ravelstein, close to death, predicts that Chick (more or less Bellow’s alter ego) will soon follow him to the grave. Before long Ravelstein is dead and Chick is hospitalized for a potentially fatal case of food poisoning. Chick spends much of the latter part of the novel…

Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge. Knopf, 502 pp., $29.00 Is Schubert, among great composers, the most immediately moving? I would think so. But he was also the most phenomenal in the amount of work he produced. Even next to the prodigious output of Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schubert’s accomplishments seem truly inconceivable, considering that he lived for only thirty-one years, and that the quality of many of his works is so remarkable. Already by the age of seventeen he had written some of his greatest songs, while the mounting distinction of his later instrumental works, up to the great String Quintet— his last chamber work—is staggering. In his well over six hundred songs he was able to elevate the genre to its highest…

Time Ages in a Hurry by Antonio Tabucchi, translated from the Italian by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani. Archipelago, 140 pp., $18.00 (paper) Sometime in the late 1980s, while living in Verona, Italy, I received a call from a publisher in London asking me if I would speak rather urgently to the Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi (1943–2012). I had translated four of Tabucchi’s books. The publisher had invited the author to London for a celebratory dinner and various readings. However, having arrived at the airport in Pisa, Tabucchi was refusing to board his plane and though he had called the publishers to explain himself, his English was poor and they couldn’t understand his decision. The publishers gave Tabucchi my number and he called me. He had agreed to go to…