Innholdsfortegnelse for June 9, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

Zero K by Don De Lillo. Scribner, 274 pp., $27.00 In Zero K Don De Lillo has found the perfect physical repository for his oracular visions, his end-time reveries, his balladry of dread. The place is called the Convergence. It is a sealed, self-sufficient, subterranean cryogenic facility, funded by wealthy patrons and secret government agencies. Within are chambers in which the bodies of hundreds of wealthy patrons are frozen in gleaming pods. The essential organs are stored within smaller pods. The bodies and organs are to rest in a state of suspended animation until our inevitable, impending apocalypse has run its course. One character calls this “faith-based technology.” It requires several forms of faith: that the pods will remain frozen indefinitely; that future civilizations will be able to reanimate the…

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond by Sonia Shah. Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 271 pp., $26.00 Pandemics—the uncontrolled spread of highly contagious diseases across countries and continents—are a modern phenomenon. The word itself, a neologism from Greek words for “all” and “people,” has been used only since the mid-nineteenth century. Epidemics— localized outbreaks of diseases— have always been part of human history, but pandemics require a minimum density of population and an effective means of transport. Since “Spanish” flu burst from the trenches of World War I in 1918, infecting 20 percent of the world’s population and killing upward of 50 million people, fears of a similar pandemic have preoccupied public health practitioners, politicians, and philanthropists. World War II, in which the German army deliberately…

A Gushing Fountain by Martin Walser, translated from the German by David Dollenmayer. Arcade, 362 pp., $24.99 My Marriage by Jakob Wassermann, translated from the German by Michael Hofmann. New York Review Books, 277 pp., $15.95 (paper) Two recently translated autobiographical German novels—both about becoming a writer—are deeply unsettling. Martin Walser’s A Gushing Fountain begins in 1933; Jakob Wassermann’s My Marriage appeared in 1934. Now forgotten, Wassermann was a celebrated writer of the early twentieth century who came of age in the nineteenth. Walser is an important postwar novelist associated with Gruppe 47, the influential group of postwar German writers, like Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, who rejected the traditional language they’d inherited. Wassermann writes about an unruly marriage that intrudes on the narrator’s creative life (based on his own)…

Black Hole: How an Idea Abandoned by Newtonians, Hated by Einstein, and Gambled on by Hawking Became Loved by Marcia Bartusiak. Yale University Press, 237 pp., $27.50 The Hunt for Vulcan: . . .And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe by Thomas Levenson. Random House, 229 pp., $26.00 Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be!—and all was light. It did not last: the devil, shouting “Ho. Let Einstein be,” restored the status quo. —Alexander Pope, with a continuation by J.C. Squire 1. On Thursday, November 25, 1915, Albert Einstein, no longer a patent clerk and by then a respected university professor, presented his fourth and final lecture in a series at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin.…

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 210 pp., $28.00 According to the Census Bureau, the percentage of Americans living in poverty is higher today than it was in the late 1960s. Last year I argued in these pages that these “official” poverty statistics are extremely misleading.1 When the United States first explicitly defined an official poverty line in 1969, it was supposed to be adjusted every year to ensure that it represented a constant standard of living. However, two problems arose and were never fixed. First, the Consumer Price Index, which was supposed to be used to adjust the poverty line for inflation, turned out to have flaws that made it rise faster than the cost…

Bach’s Major Vocal Works: Music, Drama, Liturgy by Markus Rathey. Yale University Press, 234 pp., $35.00 One of the most interesting discoveries in Bach research recently is a series of text booklets for the composer’s sacred vocal works. Surfacing little by little in St. Petersburg since the 1970s, the booklets were printed during Bach’s years in Leipzig, where he served as cantor of the St. Thomas School from 1723 to 1750, and distributed to members of the Lutheran congregation just before performances of his cantatas and passions. It is not entirely clear how the booklets made their way to Russia, though several seem to have come via the plundered Zaluski Library in Poland. But no matter what their origin, they are of great interest because they confirm the performance dates…

In late April, Yale President Peter Salovey announced that the university would not change the name of Calhoun College, a residential college named after John C. Calhoun. Calhoun, a Yale graduate and a leading politician and political theorist of the nineteenth century, served as a member of the House of Representatives, senator, vice-president under Presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, secretary of war, and secretary of state. He was also an avowed defender of slavery, states’ rights, and nullification. Last fall, students of color and others launched protests about the lack of diversity and racial inclusion at Yale, one of many student protests across the nation. Among other things, Yale students asked for greater diversity in faculty and more resources for racially identified cultural centers and courses. (Of 655…

Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty by Ben Ratliff. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 259 pp., $26.00 1. In 1939, the American composer Aaron Copland published his music appreciation guide, What to Listen for in Music. Its presumptions were suggested by its title. “Listening” was an arduous exercise in concentration, best performed in optimal conditions: the concert hall, the quiet parlor. In fact, “listening” was not enough; Copland wanted his readers to “listen for” what he called the “sound stuff” of music: to clear the mind not only of external distractions and mental obstacles, but of all non essential sonic wadding that surrounded it. Music required targeted attention, the state of mind you might enter when doing a word-find or watching, through binoculars, for…

No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money by David Lough. Picador, 532 pp., $32.00 Clementine: The Life of Mrs. Winston Churchill by Sonia Purnell. Viking, 436 pp., $30.00 1. In 1930, Winston Churchill published My Early Life, which remains his most likable and authentic book. At its end he comes forward to September 1908 when, without mentioning Clementine Hozier by name or his proposing to her at his ancestral home of Blenheim Palace, his last line tells us in fairy-tale fashion that “I married and lived happily ever afterwards.” Their son Randolph also wrote a memoir, Twenty-One Years, an affable if flimsy account of his upbringing, published in 1965 just after his father died, which begins facetiously with his own birth in 1911 “to poor but honest parents.” Those parents…

To the Editors: Nicholas Kristof’s thoughtful review of two books about China’s one-child policy [“‘China’s Worst Policy Mistake?,’” NYR, April 7] is marred by his repetition of three myths: that Mao Zedong’s opposition prevented effective family-planning efforts until after his death, that declines in fertility prior to the launching of the one-child campaign in 1980 were achieved without coercion, and that the one-child policy averted perhaps 200 million births. Mao at times stated that a large and growing population was an asset for China. However, at other times he argued that a national program to promote birth control was urgently needed. And Mao was still very much in command in 1970 when a dramatic switch from voluntary to mandatory and coercively enforced birth limits occurred. That campaign limited urban families…