Innholdsfortegnelse for September 29, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

Zero Days a documentary film directed by Alex Gibney Ninety-four minutes into Zero Days, Alex Gibney’s documentary about the American government’s expanding and largely invisible embrace of offensive cyber weaponry, the image of retired general James Cartwright appears on the screen. From 2007 to 2011 Cartwright was vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a favorite of President Obama. But when he appears in Gibney’s film, it’s not as an advocate, it’s as a potential enemy of the state, accused of leaking classified information about Stuxnet, the sophisticated software worm that destroyed thousands of centrifuges at Iran’s Natanz nuclear enrichment facility between 2008 and 2010. Stuxnet went rogue in the process and infected computers throughout the world. “These are criminal acts when they release information like this,” President Obama…

Redeeming the Kamasutra by Wendy Doniger. Oxford University Press, 182 pp., $24.95 Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra is universally known as a repertory of erotic positions, some of them sufficiently acrobatic to intimidate more than a few Western lovers, no doubt fearful they might find themselves insufficiently inventive. It is also, and it may be primarily, an excellent catalog of novelistic plots in the guise of an obsessively classificatory treatise. But to explore it you need a suitable guide, and none could be better than Wendy Doniger, who alone among the great living Indol ogists—to the best of my knowledge—is also an authority on Hollywood B movies, as well as on the dizzying welter of stories that can intertwine in and around a bed, as she proved in her substantial book The Bedtrick:…

#CultureUnderThreat: Recommendations for the US Government a task force report by the Antiquities Coalition, the Asia Society, and the Middle East Institute?? 46 pp., April 2016; available at taskforce.theantiquariancoalition.org The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War by Robert Bevan. Reaktion, second revised edition, 303 pp., $19.95 (paper) Palmyre: L’irremplaçable trésor by Paul Veyne. Albin Michel, 144 pp., €14.50 1. Among the major turning points of the Syrian conflict, few have been laden with as much symbolism—or geopolitical posturing—as the recapture of the ancient city of Palmyra on March 27, 2016. After a weeks-l ong campaign by Russian bombers and Syrian regime soldiers, the withdrawal of ISIS forces from this extraordinary desert oasis was celebrated as bringing an end to an infamous reign of barbarism. Connecting Rome and the civilizations of…

His Final Battle: The Last Months of Franklin Roo sevelt by Joseph Lelyveld. Knopf, 399 pp., $30.00 Needing to remove Vice President Henry Wallace from the Democrats’ 1944 election ticket, President Roosevelt sent him on one of those foreign junkets contrived to refresh sagging egos in the warming balm of publicity. This one took Wallace to China, Mongolia, and Siberia. At his departure, the president said, “I think you ought to see a lot of Siberia.” Wallace apparently heard nothing disturbing in the president’s advice, so treated himself to a journey of 27,000 miles that lasted fifty- one days. It was a suicidally long absence from the political battlefields back home where Wallace’s future was being decided by Democratic Party bosses who wished him no good. Wallace was out of…

Watteau’s Soldiers: Scenes of Military Life in Eighteenth-Century France an exhibition at the Frick Collection, New York City, July 12–October 2, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition by Aaron Wile. Frick Collection/Giles, 112 pp., $39.95; $22.95 (paper) There are painters who aim for a direct, blunt- force power. They marshal colors, shapes, figures, signs, and symbols to convey the strongest possible experiences and emotions. Caravaggio was that kind of painter. So was Rogier van der Weyden, at least when he painted a Crucifixion. In the work of these artists, a smile, a frown, a tear, a sword makes an immediate, unequivocal appeal. The painters are getting right to the point. But for many of the greatest artists, getting right to the point is anything but the point. Antoine Watteau, who died…

The Killing of Osama bin Laden by Seymour M. Hersh. Verso, 132 pp., $19.95 1. On May 1, 2011, President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a “targeted operation” carried out by a “small team of Americans.” The raid was conducted, he explained, after “years of painstaking work by our intelligence community” had uncovered bin Laden’s hiding place in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Obama said the successful attack was “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al- Qaeda.” During the past few years, the CIA’s claim to having successfully tracked down Osama bin Laden through extensive intelligence work has come under scrutiny by a small group of skeptics. Seymour Hersh, the widely admired investigative journalist who uncovered the My Lai…

In Gratitude by Jenny Diski. Bloomsbury, 250 pp., $26.00 The epigram for Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica (1997), a typically uncategorizable mixture of travel journal, childhood memoir, and Melvillean meditation on whiteness and oblivion, was from Beckett’s Malone Dies: “I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject?” Beckett, alongside Montaigne, Nabokov, and Joyce, was one of Diski’s literary heroes. And Beckett’s bitter deathbed punning would have worked as an epigram for In Gratitude, too, as Diski herself observes. Now that the sound of Diski’s fierce, cool, prickly, noticing, and absolutely original voice has come to the end, it’s clear that she was always talking about herself, and, equally, that she was incapable of lying…

Creating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: The Inside Story by Robert W. Doubek. McFarland, 311 pp., $35.00 (paper) Memorials to Shattered Myths: Vietnam to 9/11 by Harriet F. Senie. Oxford University Press, 261 pp., $99.00; $29.95 (paper) Maya Lin: Topologies with a foreword by John McPhee and essays by Michael Brenson, William L. Fox, Paul Goldberger, Philip Jodidio, Maya Lin, Lisa Phillips, and Dava Sobel. Rizzoli, 400 pp., $75.00 1. Older artists who struggle futilely for recognition often envy those who achieve great success at an early age. But never being able to surpass or even equal a youthful triumph can be a cruel fate for those who believe you are only as good as your latest work. This is the potentially daunting reality that Maya Lin has lived with for…

A War Like No Other: The Constitution in a Time of Terror by Owen Fiss, edited and with a foreword by Trevor Sutton. New Press, 330 pp., $27.95 Say the word “war” and the rule of law often implodes, with courts frequently employing sophistry to avoid any interference with governmental conduct. To take an obvious example, during World War II the Roosevelt administration interned thousands of American citizens of Japanese descent solely on the basis of their ancestry, and the Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Hugo Black, upheld this patently unconstitutional confinement by simply repeating the mantra that, in time of war, total deference (unchecked and unbalanced) is due the military. During the same war, the US troops fighting Nazi racism were, without judicial interference, segregated by color.…

The Girls by Emma Cline. Random House, 355 pp., $27.00 1. Emma Cline’s best- selling historical novel The Girls is set in 1969, when a group of followers of the hippie Svengali Charles Manson, mostly young women, invaded the home of Sharon Tate, the actress wife of film director Roman Polanski. No one will have forgotten the massacre of the pregnant Tate and several friends, and the next night, of an elderly couple in their suburban Los Angeles ranch house. Cline has changed the names, and relocated the Manson farm and the scene of the murders from Southern California to the small, arty, rural California community of Petaluma in the farm belt of Northern California, and mostly spares us grisly details. Her object is not to revisit Manson but to…

Cat Wars: The Devastating Consequences of a Cuddly Killer by Peter P. Marra and Chris Santella. Princeton University Press, 212 pp., $24.95 Dogs may claim the oxidized trademark of “man’s best friend,” but in this country pet cats outnumber dogs by as much as 20 percent. Nearly half of American households are home to one or more cats, and we treat our 86 million felid companions remarkably, even extravagantly, well. Driven by their fussy palates, we spend $7 billion a year to feed them, to try comically elaborate medleys like “tuna in crab surimi consomme” or “Pumpkin Jack Splash.” We invest another few billion dollars annually in cat veterinary care, cat toys, cat litter, catnip, a little witch’s hat for Halloween. We reward funny cat videos on YouTube with hundreds…

The modern state of Turkey has known three coups in which its military forces took power, in 1960, 1971, and 1980. In addition there was the coup of 1997, when the generals sat down with an Islamist prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, and forced him to resign, making way for a secularist successor. These interventions were designed to protect the secular, European identity of the republic that was established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923 from the perils of Islamism, communism, and political violence. They were all animated by an ideology known as Kemalism and they were all followed by repression. Kemalism espoused the principles of “republicanism, statism (in economic policy), populism, laicism, nationalism, and reformism,” which did not exclude authoritarian measures to maintain the government’s power. The 1960 coup led…

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday, 306 pp., $26.95 When the abolitionist William Wells Brown said that “Slavery has never been represented; slavery never can be represented,” it wasn’t because he didn’t mean to try. The writer, ex- slave, and orator (1814–1884) would spend most of his career testifying to the realities of bondage, in speeches, memoirs, a novel, a play, and eventually, as though frustrated with words, in magic lantern slides—“William Wells Brown’s Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave.” Today, slavery remains the American unrepresentable. It is the perennial confession of the national conscience, perpetually on the verge of being made. Somehow, it is always new—every book, film, and television show on the subject is praised as a reckoning with history…

Facing a mass audience, Hillary Clinton had often come across as if she’d been rehearsing in front of a mirror, trying on expressions of delight that registered as forced, less than wholehearted, the opposite of spontaneous. The “public” part of public service, she’d acknowledge, was the part that came hardest to her. But on the last night of the Democratic convention, as she stood by herself on a big stage, bathed in bright lights, ready to embrace a presidential nomination never before bestowed on a woman by a major American party, she no longer seemed to be playing a role. In that heady moment of fulfillment for herself and most women (and some men), she seemed, at last, to be inhabiting one. All week long, talking heads and live updaters…

Empty Chairs: Selected Poems by Liu Xia, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern, with a foreword by Herta Muller and an introduction by Liao Yiwu. Graywolf, 118 pp., $16.00 (paper) Steel Gate to Freedom: The Life of Liu Xiaobo by Yu Jie, translated from the Chinese by H.C. Hsu. Rowman and Littlefield, 240 pp., $39.00 June Fourth Elegies by Liu Xiaobo, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. Graywolf, 229 pp., $26.00 Day and night, I copy the Diamond Sutra of Prajnaparamita. My writing looks more and more square. It proves that I have not goneentirely insane, but the tree I drew hasn’t grown a leaf. —from “I Copy the Scriptures,” in Empty Chairs Every month, the Chinese poet, photographer, and artist Liu Xia boards a…

Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space by Janna Levin. Knopf, 242 pp., $26.95 Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos by Priyamvada Natarajan. Yale University Press, 267 pp., $26.00 The magnificent success of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity—the modern theory of gravity, space, and time that supplanted Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation—promoted the popular misconception that major advances in fundamental physics and cosmology are the province of theoretical physicists working at blackboards or at their desks. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cosmology, like the rest of physics, is an empirical science. Progress is usually made when new experimental tools become available that produce discoveries that force scientists to adjust to new realities, or when ingenious experimentalists set out to…