Innholdsfortegnelse for August 18, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

1. Britain’s vote to leave the European Union has plunged the country into its greatest crisis since 1945. It prompted the immediate resignation of the prime minister and a revolt against the leader of the opposition, leaving both main parties headless. It plunged the economy into a nosedive, as the pound crashed to its lowest level in thirty years and $2 trillion was wiped off global stocks in a single day. And it brought a warning from the first minister of Scotland that, since Scottish voters had bucked the trend and overwhelmingly opted to remain in the EU rather than leave, a repeat of the 2014 attempt to make Scotland independent of the UK was “highly likely,” if that’s what it took to remain inside the European club. The deputy…

Drone: Remote Control Warfare by Hugh Gusterson. MIT Press, 199 pp., $24.95 The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program by Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept. Simon and Schuster, 234 pp., $30.00 Drones and the Future of Armed Conflict: Ethical, Legal, and Strategic Implications edited by David Cortwright, Rachel Fairhurst, and Kristen Wall. University of Chicago Press, 295 pp., $45.00 Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy edited by Peter L. Bergen and Daniel Rothenberg. Cambridge University Press, 478 pp., $34.99 (paper) 1. On March 5, the United States used unmanned drones and manned aircraft to drop bombs on a group of what it described as al-Shabab militants at a camp about 120 miles north of Mogadishu, Somalia, killing approximately 150 of them. The administration…

Why Only Us: Language and Evolution by Robert C. Berwick and Noam Chomsky. MIT Press, 215 pp., $22.95 Noam Chomsky’s long-standing engagement with American politics—recently described in these pages*—has tended to obscure his seminal work as a scholar. Yet for him, academe has been anything but a tranquil retreat from the hurly-burly of public life. His principal (but far from exclusive) field of linguistics was already a hotbed of controversy long before he arrived on the scene; so much so that as early as 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris specifically banned discussion of the origin of language as being altogether too disruptive for the contemplative atmosphere of a learned association. And on assuming an assistant professorship of linguistics at MIT in 1956, Chomsky lost no time in throwing yet…

Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, April 27–July 24, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Sheila R. Canby, Deniz Beyazit, Martina Rugiadi, and A.C. S. Peacock. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 365 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) We have every reason to be grateful to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the way its curators have been presenting major exhibitions on hitherto neglected periods and societies. They do not only put Golden Ages on show. They also give careful attention to baffling moments of transformation— such as the great transition between Christianity and Islam in the late antique Middle East or the little-known opening phases of the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism in Southeast…

Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick. Viking, 427 pp., $30.00 The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789 by Joseph J. Ellis. Knopf, 290 pp., $27.95 1. “I heartily wish some person would try an experiment upon him,” wrote an army physician at Fort Ticonderoga about the enigma that was Brigadier General Benedict Arnold, “to make the sun shine through his head with an ounce ball; and then see whether the rays come in a direct or oblique direction.” Military colleagues described Arnold as bullheaded, tactless, volatile, and imperious, always ready to ridicule those with whom he disagreed. When an officer doubted his authority to command a naval fleet on Lake Champlain, Arnold, as one witness observed, proceeded to “kick…

Germany’s Response to the Refugee Situation: Remarkable Leadership or Fait Accompli? a report by Matthias M. Mayer in Newpolitik, Bertelsmann Foundation, May 2016, available at www.bfna.org The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis by Patrick Kingsley. London: Guardian Books/Faber and Faber, 350 pp., £14.99 (paper) (to be published in the US by Liveright in January 2017) In June I visited Tempelhof Airport in the heart of Berlin, once a showpiece of the Nazi regime and the site of the Berlin Airlift of 1948–1949. The airport stopped operating eight years ago; but in December, with eight hundred Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, and other “unofficial immigrants” pouring into the German capital each day and municipal officials confronting an acute shortage of places to shelter them, Tempelhof became Berlin’s largest refugee camp.…

The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith. Hogarth, 188 pp., $21.00 This year the prestigious English Man Booker International Prize was given to the Korean writer Han Kang for The Vegetarian, a short, absorbing novel that readers and reviewers have declared to be about—besides meateating— marriage, obedience, caregiving, adultery, art, human violence, post-human fantasy, taboos, the resolution of the desperate, “the crushing pressure of Korean etiquette,” and much more. One of the glories of novels is that their complexity allows for different interpretations, and perhaps this partly explains The Vegetarian’s appeal for judges specialized in literature and translation from various language traditions and with, no doubt, different preoccupations. There are metaphorical constructs so flexible and capacious as to allow for all of these meanings; generally,…

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales. Knopf, 404 pp., $26.95 Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape by Peggy Orenstein. Harper, 301 pp., $26.99 By some measures, girls appear to be faring rather well in twenty-firstcentury America. Teenage pregnancy rates have been in steady decline since the 1990s. Girls have higher graduation rates than their male counterparts at all educational levels. The popular culture abounds with inspirational images and anthems of girls “leaning in” and “running the world.” But according to two new, rather bleak books, these official signs of progress have given us an unduly rosy impression of the modern girl’s lot. In American Girls, a study based on interviews with more than two hundred girls, Vanity Fair writer Nancy…

Chronicle of a Last Summer: A Novel of Egypt by Yasmine El Rashidi. Tim Duggan Books, 181 pp., $22.00 The unnamed narrator of Yasmine El Rashidi’s short first novel, Chronicle of a Last Summer, records her conversation in 2014 with a young Cairene record salesman named Mohamed: He tells me the revolution has connected us to a past that preceded us. I nod, tell him I’ve gone back into our history books to understand. I’ve read everything. I can’t believe all this I didn’t know. You might not believe me, he says, but I have too. He’s learning that history is repeating itself. We talk about Nasser. The first revolution. 1919. The Wafd revolting against the British. What El Rashidi attempts in her deceptively quiet, adamantine novel is no less…

Political drama on television is finished. No fictional version could match the vicious infighting in both main political parties in Britain that followed the vote on June 23 by the British people to leave the European Union. What the vote revealed—and the winning margin was larger than in three of the past four US presidential elections—is a growing and dangerous divide between the political class, often a metropolitan elite, and a large number of people who feel left out of the economic prosperity centered on London and disenfranchised by “political correctness.” Among the latter, insecurity has been growing for years, the result in part of the impact of globalization on real wages and of high levels of immigration. 1 It is a problem afflicting many industrialized countries. Yet the political…

The pudgy cheeks and flaring hairdo of North Korea’s young ruler Kim Jong-un, his bromance with tattooed and pierced former basketball star Dennis Rodman, his boy-on-a-lark grin at missile firings, combine incongruously with the regime’s pledge to drown its enemies in a “sea of fire.” They elicit a mix of revulsion and ridicule in the West. Many predict that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea cannot survive much longer, given its pervasive poverty, genocidal prison camp system identified by a UN commission of inquiry as committing crimes against humanity,* self-imposed economic isolation, confrontations with all of its neighbors, and its leader’s youth and inexperience. The Obama administration has adopted a position of “strategic patience,” waiting for intensifying international sanctions to force North Korea either to give up its nuclear weapons…

How is a statesman to advance his nation’s interests? For as long as states have existed, diplomats have grappled with this question. And among US diplomats, Henry Kissinger is most associated with the realpolitik approach, arguing that the job of the statesman is to manage relationships—with allies and adversaries alike—to maximize his nation’s security, prosperity, and power. In Kissinger’s view, America’s tragic flaw has been believing that our principles are universal principles, and seeking to extend human rights far beyond our nation’s borders. This “messianic” belief, as he has characterized it, has repeatedly led American statesmen to make decisions that have undermined our interests and weakened our standing in the world—from pursuing costly humanitarian interventions to abandoning leaders who, while perhaps repressive, helped safeguard our security. “No nation,” Kissinger wrote…

Back in the old neighborhood in North West London after a long absence, I went past the local primary school and noticed a change. Many of my oldest friends were once students here, and recently—when a family illness returned us to England for a year—I enrolled my daughter. It’s a very pretty redbrick Victorian building, and was for a long time in “special measures,” a judgment of the school inspection authority called Ofsted, and the lowest grade a state school can receive. Many parents, upon reading such a judgment, will naturally panic and place their children elsewhere; others, seeing with their own eyes what Ofsted—because it runs primarily on data—cannot humanly see, will doubt the wisdom of Ofsted and stay put. Still others may not read well in English, or…

Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America’s Democracy by David Daley. Liveright, 257 pp., $26.95 Political paralysis. Hyperpartisanship. Decline of political civility. Denial of voting rights to groups that support the opposition. Low voter turnout. There may be other valid grievances about what’s become of our democracy, but that’s a useful list to start with. To mention them raises the question of where to begin to resolve at least some of our political problems. I’m not alone in thinking that the single problem most worth attacking first, the solution to which could go a long way toward untangling our political morass, is the blatantly partisan manipulation of our system of decennial redistricting by the states. Redistricting works in a circular fashion by which the states get…

The United States and Fascist Italy: The Rise of American Finance in Europe by Gian Giacomo Migone, translated from the Italian and with a preface by Molly Tambor. Cambridge University Press, 405 pp., $110.00 In the early 1960s, in the full flush of postwar Atlanticism, Gian Giacomo Migone, the scion of a cosmopolitan family of Italian diplomats, arrived at Harvard to study history. As a liberal Catholic, a follower of John F. Kennedy, and a fan of Pope John XXIII, Migone was escaping the conservatism and neo fascism of the postwar Italian universities. He came to the United States in search of the promise of democracy and new developments in scholarship. What he found was something more complicated. It was the heyday of the civil rights struggle and he and…

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The US Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon. Princeton University Press, 762 pp., $39.95 Robert Gordon has written a magnificent book on the economic history of the United States over the last one and a half centuries. His study focuses on what he calls the “special century” from 1870 to 1970—in which living standards increased more rapidly than at any time before or after. The book is without peer in providing a statistical analysis of the uneven pace of growth and technological change, in describing the technologies that led to the remarkable progress during the special century, and in concluding with a provocative hypothesis that the future is unlikely to bring anything approaching the economic gains of the…

Black people in America have been under surveillance ever since the seventeenth century, when enslaved Africans were forced to labor in the tobacco and rice fields of the South. Colonial law quickly made a distinction between indentured servants and slaves, and in so doing invented whiteness in America. It may have been possible for a free African or mixed-race person to own slaves, but it was not possible for a European to be taken into slavery. The distinction helped to keep blacks and poor whites from seeking common cause. The slave patrols that originated in the seventeenth century would be largely made up of poor whites— paterollers, the members of the patrols were called. To stop, harass, whip, injure, or kill black people was both their duty and their reward,…