Innholdsfortegnelse for December 8, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

The Long, Long Life of Trees by Fiona Stafford. Yale University Press, 287 pp., $30.00 The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate— Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben, translated from the German by Jane Billinghurst. Greystone/David Suzuki Institute, 272 pp., $24.95 In 1664 John Evelyn, diarist, country gentleman, and commissioner at the court of Charles II, produced his monumental book on trees: Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees. It was a seventeenthcentury best seller. Evelyn was a true son of the Renaissance. His book is learned and witty and practical and passionate all by turns. No later book on trees has ever had such an impact on the British public. His message? A very modern one. We are in desperate need of trees…

Physics in a Mad World edited by M. Shifman and translated from the Russian by James Manteith. World Scientific, 540 pp., $34.00 (paper) In the 1930s German and Russian scientists of Jewish origin were treated quite differently. The German scientists were automatically “guilty” if they had more than one eighth Jewish “blood.” In Russia they had to be guilty of doing something. Until October 1941 Jews were encouraged to leave Germany and most of the prominent scientists did so, though not without great difficulty, since they were allowed to take very little money out of the country. The Russian scientists, on the other hand, were not allowed to leave. Many were arrested and forced to “confess” to crimes. After having done so they were either imprisoned or summarily executed. In…

Education and the Commercial Mindset by Samuel E. Abrams. Harvard University Press, 417 pp., $39.95 School Choice: The End of Public Education? by Mercedes K. Schneider. Teachers College Press, 204 pp., $35.95 (paper) The New York Times recently published a series of articles about the dangers of privatizing public services, the first of which was called “When You Dial 911 and Wall Street Answers.” Over the years, the Times has published other exposés of privatized services, like hospitals, health care, prisons, ambulances, and preschools for children with disabilities. In some cities and states, even libraries and water have been privatized. No public service is immune from takeover by corporations that say they can provide comparable or better quality at a lower cost. The New York Times said that since the…

Whatever else one might say about the just- concluded 2016 presidential election, one thing is certain: FBI Director James Comey played an outsized and exceptionally inappropriate part. His highly prejudicial announcement on October 28, just eleven days before the election, that he had reopened an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server ensured that the final critical days of the campaign were taken up with innuendos and suppositions set off by his action. When Comey then announced on November 5, just two days before the election, that upon further review he had again found no basis to believe that Clinton had committed any crime, it only underscored the impropriety of his October 28 announcement. Had he conducted the review in confidence, as Justice Department rules require, the entire matter would…

In her interview for No Direction Home (2005), Martin Scorsese’s brilliant threeand-a-half-hour documentary about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez suggested there is something in Dylan’s music that goes “to the core of people”; there are those, she acknowledges, who are simply “not interested—but if you’re interested, he goes way, way deep.” Books on Dylan have been pouring from popular and academic presses for decades now, not to mention the numerous long-running fanzines that often combine recondite nuggets of information about Dylan performances or recording sessions (who was on bass on which take, what kind of hat he wore on stage) with scholarly accounts of sources for particular images or general appraisals of his musical and literary influences. Occasionally one learns about the more egregious of his many eccentricities. The sheer volume…

Hell Is a Very Small Place: Voices from Solitary Confinement edited by Jean Casella, James Ridgeway, and Sarah Shourd, with an afterword by Juan E. Méndez. New Press, 226 pp., $25.95 If you look inside a solitary confinement cell such as the ones I have visited in New York’s Sing Sing prison, you’ll see a gray-walled, eight-by-eight- foot room with a concrete slab bed; it’s underground, more like a tomb than a cell. The light is always on. Usually there aren’t any windows, but there is a toilet (no toilet seat or paper) and a shower. The solitary cell is home to a single prisoner, twenty-three or twenty-four hours a day; the extreme isolation and sensory deprivation imposed by the cell can last for days, months, years, or decades on…

Earlier this year our organization, the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), announced that it would divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies. We mean to do this gradually, but in a public statement we singled out ExxonMobil for immediate divestment because of its “morally reprehensible conduct.”1 For over a quarter- century the company tried to deceive policymakers and the public about the realities of climate change, protecting its profits at the cost of immense damage to life on this planet. Our criticism carries a certain historical irony. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, and Exxon-Mobil is Standard Oil’s largest direct descendant. In a sense we were turning against the company where most of the Rockefeller family’s wealth was created. (Other members of the Rockefeller family have been trying to get ExxonMobil…

In some parts of the world, it is still possible to silence a journalist with a sharp blow to the side of the head. But as newspapers the world over struggle with the financial disruption of digital technologies, governments are finding new ways of controlling the press. Murder is messy. Money is tidy. John Kituyi, a brave, persistent local newspaper editor in Kenya, was a victim of the old-fashioned method in April 2015, when the sixty-two-yearold from Eldoret in western Kenya was killed while preparing to publish the results of an investigation that could have embarrassed leading figures in Kenya’s national government. An assailant with a blunt object brought Kituyi’s life, the story, and the newspaper itself to a sudden end. Though the threat of such physical violence remains a…

hamilton/rea/redux The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz. Norton, 416 pp., $28.95 The Euro and the Battle of Ideas by Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James, and Jean-Pierre Landau. Princeton University Press, 440 pp., $35.00 The Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff once told me, “Europe is like a couple that wasn’t sure they wanted to get married, so instead they decided to just open a joint checking account and see how things went.” Things went badly, as evidenced by the eurozone’s continuing struggle to move beyond its debt woes and toward any kind of sustained growth in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. If Rogoff, author of The Curse of Cash,1 had his way, the euro might not exist—at least in paper or…

1. The battle for Mosul has begun. For the past two years, Iraq’s second- largest city has languished under the harsh rule of the Islamic State (ISIS). Now a combined force of Iraqi army troops, Shiite militias, and Kurdish fighters, backed up by a US- led coalition of more than sixty nations, is pushing forward to retake the city. The stakes are high. Dislodging ISIS from the city where its leader, Abu Bakr al- Baghdadi, declared his “caliphate” in 2014 promises to be a formidable undertaking, given the ferocity of resistance so far. But if the coalition manages to restore Iraqi government control over Mosul, it will certainly count as a major blow to the ambitions of the jihadists—even if final victory over them is still a long way off.…

Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 3 : The War Years and After, 1939–1962 by Blanche Wiesen Cook. Viking, 670 pp., $40.00 Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn. Penguin, 404 pp., $30.00 In the fall of 1940, when Luftwaffe planes were dropping tens of thousands of bombs over British cities and ports every night, and when American intervention in the war seemed more and more necessary, Eleanor Roosevelt published a short book entitled The Moral Basis of Democracy. Framed around Christ’s message of treating others with kindness, the golden rule she believed was essential to the flourishing of a healthy democracy, she asked all Americans to rise to their better selves and “practice a Christ-like way of living.” This was not a question of belief…