Innholdsfortegnelse for Apr-24-14 i The New York Review of Books

The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms: with Observations on Their Habits by Charles Darwin London: John Murray (1881) Jelly-Fish, Star-Fish, and Sea-Urchins: Being a Research on Primitive Nervous Systems by George John Romanes London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. (1885) Mental Evolution in Animals by George John Romanes London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. (1883) In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind by Eric R. Kandel Norton, 528 pp., $19.95 (paper) What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses by Daniel Chamovitz Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 192 pp., $14.00 (paper) The Foundations of Ethology by Konrad Lorenz Springer (1981) Behavior of the Lower Organisms by Herbert Spencer Jennings Columbia University Press (1906) Cephalopod Behaviour by Roger T. Hanlon…

Omar a film directed by Hany Abu-Assad Bethlehem a film directed by Yuval Adler Toward the end of Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad’s powerful new film, Omar, nominated for the Oscar in the best foreign-language film category, the eponymous Palestinian hero (played by Adam Bakri) says to Nadia (Leem Lubany), the woman he has loved and lost: “We have all believed the unbelievable.” The impossible backdrop to their love is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank; and indeed there is much that is unbelievable about this occupation and the reality it has created and maintained for nearly half a century. It is hard to fathom how the Israelis themselves can stand to live with the ongoing misery and cruelty they have inflicted, and it’s not so easy to…

Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics by Michael Ignatieff Harvard University Press, 205 pp., $24.95 Michael Ignatieff’s eighteenth book sets out to tell a tale that, in its outlines, is almost mythic. A writer and intellectual at the pinnacle of his powers is approached by a trio of shadowy envoys from a former life. These “men in black,” as he somewhat ominously calls them, invite him to return home to a country he has not lived in for most of his adult life. The reward they hold out, for which he must give up his present career, is the prospect of becoming the most powerful man in the land. He is flattered, but he also knows these men can’t simply hand him the prize; he will have to…

The Exiles Return by Elisabeth de Waal Picador, 319 pp., $26.00 About halfway through The Hare with Amber Eyes—Edmund de Waal’s best-selling history of his Jewish banking family, and of the art they collected and lost to the Nazis—we encounter his grandmother Elisabeth, a studious Viennese girl who has just turned seventeen and who, for the first time, is to have a dress made after a pattern of her own choosing. It is December 1916, soon after the death of the Emperor Franz Joseph. Watching expectantly are Elisabeth’s glamorous, dressy mother, her pretty younger sister, and her brother Iggie, who, at the age of ten, is obsessed with clothes and loves to watch his mother dress. Iggie later turns out to be gay and, in the 1930s, absconds to New…

Why waver? He won’t stab me for when we sat down widely pixillated between the horizon and the lice. We’re off to the sea, someone said. Let’s direct it to us and our various enjoyment. I hate it when we’re made of snot one minute, stone so simple the next. I would think first, and then we were there sooner other than that. Here’s the flooding group as if there is when I reached thirty. What did Russia (boxes on the road)... All this could have been avoided if we aren’t doing anything. Serviceberry shot down by squirrels, you don’t have to thank everybody. The charm of abuse sings in ways we are not. Or we can sit and travel, aimless ceremony. I paint feet. Summer pants. A…

Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem Doubleday, 366 pp., $27.95 Jonathan Lethem is a writer of enormous energy. His mind appears to be constantly ticking—digressing, racing—in a kind of writer’s fibrillation. His restless, slightly pedantic style seems to have been forged by a drive to lasso the stampede of associations provoked by nearly every thought or occurrence in his fiction. He may be describing himself when he writes, in his most recent novel, Dissident Gardens, of the “trivial facts...blizzarding” in the brain of one of his characters. Lethem is rarely trivial, but the abundance of references and asides that run through his work may make you feel that they, not his characters, are the real subject. And they may well be. Dissident Gardens opens with the line: “Quit fucking black cops…

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity by Simon Goldhill Princeton University Press, 352 pp., $45.00 From the onset of the Dark Ages down to our own time, the fraught and variegated relationship between Greek or Roman civilization and those civilizations’ heirs has never been less than significant and fascinating. Initially there was an emphasis on the survival and influence of classical literature. More recently, the range of interest has broadened to encourage closer scrutiny of the subtle way in which the classical legacy has been used—not always consciously—to manipulate latter-day politics, social problems, and religion. In these works, now known as “reception studies,” the Victorian Age of nineteenth-century Britain has been perceived, rightly, as a particularly rewarding lode to mine: during this period…

Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain by Patricia S. Churchland Norton, 304 pp., $26.95 Patricia Churchland’s Touching a Nerve belongs to the same genre as a book by Jean-Pierre Changeux that I recently reviewed in these pages1: neuroscience cheerleading, to put it crudely. Churchland is avowedly a big fan of the brain—she loves the brain (as she never tires of reminding us). And her book well conveys her enthusiasm, being generally well written, informative, and readable. She ably covers such topics as near-death experiences, aggression, sex, war, self-control, consciousness, and sleep, among others. If there is anyone left in the world who does not believe that the mind can be minutely controlled by the brain, right down to particular molecules, then this book might disabuse them of such ideas.…

To the Editors: In his fascinating essay Edward Mendelson gives examples of W.H. Auden’s “gifts of time, money, and sympathy” [“The Secret Auden,” NYR, March 20]. Although by its nature not entirely secret, then and since, in 1935 Auden gave himself in matrimony, to Erika, Thomas Mann’s daughter, to provide her with British nationality when the Nazis were about to revoke her German citizenship. In the following year he persuaded John Hampson to marry a friend of Erika, the actress Therese Giehse, who was also under threat for her anti-Nazi activities. Auden paid all the expenses involved. Hampson told a mutual friend who had tried to dissuade him: “Wystan says, ‘What are buggers for?’” David Martin Sheffield, England Edward Mendelson replies: David Martin’s letter is a welcome reminder of Auden’s…

To the Editors: In your April 3 issue you published a letter by Mr. Michael Konrad, reacting to the review by Freeman Dyson of my book Brilliant Blunders [NYR, March 6]. Professor Dyson’s response was excellent, and I wholeheartedly agree with it. I am nevertheless still puzzled by the fact that it appears almost certain that Mr. Konrad never read the book. For instance, I explain very clearly in the book that Darwin’s blunder was not in adopting the theory of blending inheritance. It was in not realizing that with the theory that he had adopted, natural selection would never have worked. Similarly, I discuss in great detail the circumstances relating (or not) Darwin with Mendel, but Mr. Konrad appears to be unaware of that discussion. He has obviously not…

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill Knopf, 180 pp., $22.95 You can read Jenny Offill’s new novel in about two hours. It’s short and funny and absorbing, an effortless-seeming downhill ride that picks up astonishing narrative speed as it goes. What’s remarkable is that Offill achieves this effect using what you might call an experimental or avant-garde style of narration, one that we associate with difficulty and disorientation rather than speed and easy pleasure. The novel tells the story of a marital crisis in the lives of a previously more-or-less happy couple. Short microepisodes from the lives of the couple alternate with facts and quotations from all kinds of sources—scientific studies, foreign proverbs, the poems of John Berryman, the writing of Simone Weil, to take a few examples. Here, in…

The Visionist by Rachel Urquhart Little, Brown, 345 pp., $26.00 The Visionist, Rachel Urquhart’s fine first novel, follows the intersecting paths of two fifteen-year-old girls in the early-nineteenth-century New England of spiritual enthusiasm, in this case a Shaker community in Massachusetts. “When I began researching this novel,” Urqhuhart notes in a bibliography, “I knew three things about the Shakers: They forbade sex, they made beautiful furniture, and they shook.” Most of us would probably say the same, with the possible addition of Aaron Copland’s use of a Shaker hymn in Appalachian Spring. Urquhart, however, has written a book that is rich with information far beyond the pretty boxes and the ladder-back chairs: The Visionist is a remarkably sensitive journey into an utterly foreign land. Even in the setting of the…

Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, January 14–March 30, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition by Keith Christiansen, with contributions by Roberto Bellucci, Cecilia Frosinini, Anna Pizzati, and Chiara Rossi Scarzanella Metropolitan Museum of Art, 96 pp., $19.95 (paper) (distributed by Yale University Press) American, or at least New York, lovers of the work of Piero della Francesca—love seems to be a better word than admiration to describe how people feel about this artist—have been given a rare two-part opportunity over the past year. Last winter and spring the Frick Collection brought together a small number of works by the fifteenth-century Italian painter, most coming from American museums. They were principally portraits of saints from an altarpiece, along with Virgin and…

In the early 1990s, President Bill Clinton, concerned about the specter of militant Islam in Africa, secured military alliances with a number of African strongmen, among them Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni.1 Since then, human rights groups have accused Museveni, now in his twenty-eighth year in power, of widespread corruption and political repression. I’ve been working as a public health consultant on and off in Uganda for twenty years, a period when development agencies such as the World Bank and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $20 billion on aid projects in the country. I’d looked on with dismay as the budgets of many of these projects were looted, elections were rigged, and innocent people who tried to draw attention to this were intimidated or worse. Museveni, now sixty-nine,…

The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words, 1000 BC–1492 AD by Simon Schama Ecco, 496 pp., $39.99 Simon Schama’s new book is a “story” and bears the subtitle “finding the words.” From his huge oeuvre we know him to be a natural storyteller who is never short of words. The size and complexity of great stories from the past, such as the empire of the Dutch republic, the French Revolution, or the rise of the Rothschilds, have held no terrors for him. Despite his preference for a big canvas, he once showed himself an excellent miniaturist in the partly fictional tales he told in his shortest and most adventurous book, Dead Certainties—a novelistic reconsideration of two deaths, in eighteenth-century Quebec and nineteenth-century Boston—and this talent comes through in the…

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato Anthem, 237 pp., $19.95 (paper) Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Markets, Speculation and the State by William H. Janeway Cambridge University Press, 329 pp., $35.99 “The great advances of civilization,” wrote Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom, his influential best seller published in 1962, “whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.” He did not say what he made of the state-sponsored art of Athens’s Periclean Age or the Medici family, who, as Europe’s dominant bankers but then as Florentine rulers, commissioned and financed so much Renaissance art. Or the Spanish court that gave us Velázquez. Or the many public universities that produced great scientists in…

What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster by Jonathan V. Last Encounter, 230 pp., $23.99 Jonathan Last wants Americans to have more babies. If we don’t, he warns, the proportion of young people will fall while the proportion of old people will rise to unprecedented levels. This aging of the population will bankrupt our retirement system or divert spending from other priorities or—heaven forbid—lead to an increase in taxes. It will weaken America’s capacity to project military power in the world because families with few offspring will be reluctant to sacrifice them in battle. It will diminish the proportion of innovators in the economy and lower America’s rate of economic improvement. It will undermine America’s competitive position in the world. “In the long run,” Last writes,…

Shklovsky: Witness to an Era by Serena Vitale, translated from the Italian by Jamie Richards Dalkey Archive, 224 pp., $14.00 (paper) Theory of Prose by Viktor Shklovsky, translated from the Russian by Benjamin Sher, with an introduction by Gerald L. Bruns Dalkey Archive, 216 pp., $14.95 (paper) A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917–1922 by Viktor Shklovsky, translated from the Russian by Richard Sheldon, with introductions by Richard Sheldon and Sidney Monas Dalkey Archive, 304 pp., $13.95 (paper) Zoo, or Letters Not About Love by Viktor Shklovsky, translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Richard Sheldon Dalkey Archive, 162 pp., $12.50 (paper) In Venyamin Kaverin’s early novel The Scandalist (1931), a literary critic named Viktor Nekrylov wakes up in Leningrad with a hangover. He has a train ticket back to…

To the Editors: In his essay on John F. Kennedy [NYR, February 20], Frank Rich takes me to task for an article on the JFK assassination that I recently published in The Wall Street Journal. In the course of doing so he makes two illogical claims. First: a Communist shot President Kennedy; nevertheless, the radical right and a culture of hate in Dallas were responsible for the crime. Second: in holding “right-wingers” blameless in the assassination, I thereby exonerate them for everything else they may have said or done. Neither claim is valid either as a matter of logic or fact. As I maintained in that article, the Kennedy assassination was an event in the cold war. All of the evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald as the probable assassin. His…

Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us About Right and Wrong by David Edmonds Princeton University Press, 220 pp., $19.95 Are certain actions intrinsically wrong, or are they wrong only because of their consequences? Suppose that by torturing someone, you could save a human life, or ten human lives, or a hundred. If so, would torture be morally permissible or perhaps even obligatory? Or imagine that capital punishment actually deters murder, so that with every execution, we can save two innocent lives, or three, or a dozen. If so, would capital punishment be morally permissible or perhaps even mandatory? And how, exactly, should we go about answering such questions? On one view, the best method, and perhaps the only possible one, begins…

Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible by Alan Rusbridger Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 403 pp., $28.00 A cursory glance at the title of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger’s first-person saga suggests a kinship with the BBC One television series Play It Again that launched in 2007 and documents the attempts of celebrities to learn a musical instrument. Just over halfway through his eventful and sometimes harrowing sixteen-month account of tackling Chopin’s Ballade in G Minor, Op. 23, a monument of the piano repertoire, Rusbridger serves up a more intriguing rationale: In a modestly viewed YouTube post by The Guardian in January 2013, Rusbridger amplifies: Indeed, in the 1942 film Rick simply tells his pianist: “Play it, Sam.” Woody Allen’s 1972 movie, Play It Again, Sam, obliterated any collective memory…

On a recent trip to Tehran I visited a friend I hadn’t seen since June 11, 2009. We had met on the eve of that year’s presidential election, and my friend, a prominent campaigner against the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had alluded somewhat unnervingly to the possibility of vote-rigging and violence. Ahmadinejad’s landslide “victory” was indeed denounced as fraudulent by his moderate and relatively pro-Western challengers, Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi—along with millions of their supporters who took to the streets in demonstrations over the following week. On June 20, after a sermon the previous day in which the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, warned of “blood, violence, and chaos” if the demonstrations didn’t stop, the security forces intervened with live ammunition, beatings, and waves of arrests. My friend was…

That building has won over everything. Here in high school opportunities are numerous, but what are they for? You could live like a girl of thirteen in a single dream, quash outside solicitations, go back to sleep every time, wherever your suns take you. This is outside, and remiss: It takes tools to deploy the core of your dream, face a common ford others have crossed too, on Saratoga waters, now and again imbibing notes of lemongrass and coconut. I told him we don’t get anything from North Dakota. Bilingual bullying was on the next floor. We had the most beautiful morning and afternoon.     We just had lunch with Dean Pavlov’s proxy; the entire breeze, right on the tabletop here. They’re not going to sue their money, accident…

Churchill’s Bomb: How the United States Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race by Graham Farmelo Basic Books, 554 pp., $29.99 This book is the story of a love triangle. The three characters are Winston Churchill the statesman, H.G. Wells the writer, and Frederick Lindemann the scientist. Churchill was in love with war and weapons, ever since he was a small boy playing with a historic collection of toy soldiers. Wells wrote books about war and weapons, real and imaginary. Lindemann invented weapons and enjoyed trying them out. War and weapons brought the three of them together. But Churchill could only listen to one guru at a time. The chief source of Churchill’s ideas about the application of science to war was Wells in World War I and Lindemann…

On it, the figure of something dead Inside a man who’s penetrated Another man articulated Against a square that could be read As a proper balance or a purple bruise. They go about it silently, Neither rapt, neither free To do as he might elsewhere choose. The one, his head wrenched to the side, His scrotum like a cortex but hairy, His penis eerily catenary, Seems to know the other has lied. The other has lied, pretending To like a no-questions-asked Approach to love’s brutal task And the overmastered scream it ends in. • Around it, tiny continents Of rust on the lids of oil paint, Brushes in coffee tins, the faint Smell of urine and arguments. Propped up are the photographs Of martyrs…

My Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead Crown, 293 pp., $25.00 What did Virginia Woolf mean by calling George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”? Like many of Woolf’s most telling critical remarks, it is tossed off without elaboration, as if both the character of Eliot’s “magnificent book” and the judgment on the rest of English fiction went without saying. One clue to the latter may come from the piece on “The Russian Point of View” with which Woolf followed her essay on George Eliot in The Common Reader (1925). By comparison to the Russians, Woolf suggests, readers of Victorian fiction had grown accustomed to novels in which good and bad characters were sharply distinguished from one another and everything was neatly sorted…

Parts of the following interview with George Soros by the Spiegel correspondent Gregor Peter Schmitz appear in their book, The Tragedy of the European Union: Disintegration or Revival?, just published by PublicAffairs. Gregor Peter Schmitz: The conflict in Crimea and Ukraine has changed the shape of European and world politics, and we will come to it. But let us first talk about a subject on which you’ve taken a critical position over the years: the crisis of the European Union: With regard to the euro, isn’t the worst over? George Soros: If you mean that the euro is here to stay, you are right. That was confirmed by the German elections, where the subject was hardly discussed, and by the coalition negotiations, where it was relegated to Subcommittee 2A. Chancellor…

To the Editors: Yes, Vichy made it worse and anti-Semitism was strong in France in the 1930s and during the war. But if we stop here, how can we explain that 75 percent of the Jews survived the Holocaust in this country? In his review [“Jews: How Vichy Made It Worse,” NYR, March 6], Robert Paxton unfortunately forgets to mention that I first give credit to the Jews themselves: my book explores their capacity to circumvent Vichy and Nazi persecutions and their ability to escape arrests. I tell the stories of seventeen individuals and families, French and foreign Jews: How did they react when the first anti-Jewish German and French laws were issued? When the mass arrests started, what did they do to protect their children? Some were successful, others…