Innholdsfortegnelse for May-22-14 i The New York Review of Books

A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren Metropolitan, 365 pp., $28.00 Elizabeth Warren has quite a story to tell. For many years, she was a professor at Harvard Law School. Inside the worlds of academia and Washington policymaking, she was known for her research into the causes and effects of bankruptcy, and for her ultimately futile campaign to block a Republican-driven effort to rewrite the bankruptcy law in favor of big banks and other lenders. Until the 2008 financial crisis, however, Warren was largely unknown to the American public. Then, following the subprime mortgage meltdown, she emerged as a vocal and stinging critic of Wall Street and its political enablers. Today, at the age of sixty-four, Warren holds Ted Kennedy’s seat in the Senate. She’s perhaps the most recognizable leader of…

Pushkin Hills by Sergei Dovlatov, translated from the Russian by Katherine Dovlatov, with an afterword by James Wood Counterpoint, 163 pp., $24.00 In a less punishing country than Russia, Sergei Dovlatov would have been a popular writer whose revolutionary approach to writing would have been obscured by the lightness of tone, brevity, and apparent simplicity of most of his work. The public would have loved him, but most critics would have been disdainful of the vulgarity of his characters’ language and the apparently autobiographical nature of most of his writing. But Dovlatov lived in the Soviet Union, where his fiction could not be published, so he was denied the popularity he deserved. As for the critics, he often drank with them, and they still found occasion to dismiss him. If…

I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia by Su Meck, with Daniel de Visé Simon and Schuster, 280 pp., $25.00 Memory: From Mind to Molecules by Larry R. Squire and Eric R. Kandel Roberts and Company, second edition, 256 pp., $80.00 Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions—A New Biological Principle of Disease by Stanley B. Prusiner, MD Yale University Press, 320 pp., $30.00 The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging by Margaret Lock Princeton University Press, 310 pp., $29.95 The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia by David Stuart MacLean Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 292 pp., $25.00 I began writing these words on what appeared to be an unremarkable Sunday morning. Shortly before sunrise, the bedroom still dim, I awoke and quietly made my…

The Society of Equals by Pierre Rosanvallon, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer Harvard University Press, 376 pp., $35.00 The sharp rise in inequality since the 1970s has created two puzzles. The first is an intellectual puzzle concerning the root causes of the widening gap in income and wealth, its social consequences, and its moral significance. The second is a practical and political puzzle, at least for those who are disturbed by increased inequality. What can and should be done about it? Depending on the answer to the first, the second may be more or less difficult. If rising inequality is primarily the result of economic changes brought about with new information technology, returning to a more equal distribution of income poses a daunting, perhaps impossible challenge. The global…

The following article will appear in the May 22, 2014 issue of The New York Review. In late April, traveling in eastern Ukraine, I was in the midst of its phony war. Threats were flying, ultimatums were delivered, and jets screamed low over the countryside. Trees were felled to block back roads, tires were piled up to build barricades, and men from backwater towns strutted with their guns, their lives suddenly seeming to have purpose. In eastern Ukraine, where neatly kept memorials commemorate the fallen of the great battles fought there by the Red Army during World War II, all the omens seemed to tell of war coming once again. But even at the eleventh hour it is not inevitable. This has been a time when normal life continues while…

To the Editors: It’s a sad fact that if one lets a falsehood get repeated too often, it can become a familiar truth. In his review of David Edmonds’s Would You Kill the Fat Man? [NYR, April 24], Cass Sunstein says that the hypothetical case he calls “The Trolley Problem”—in which a bystander can throw a switch, thereby turning a trolley that is headed toward five people onto a track on which there is only one person—was introduced into the literature of moral theory by Philippa Foot, in an article by her entitled “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” published in 1967. I presume that Mr. Sunstein got that piece of misinformation from Mr. Edmonds’s book. Goodness knows where Mr. Edmonds got it. (I haven’t…

In the scramble to gain market share in cyberspace, something is getting lost: the public interest. Libraries and laboratories—crucial nodes of the World Wide Web—are buckling under economic pressure, and the information they diffuse is being diverted away from the public sphere, where it can do most good. Not that information comes free or “wants to be free,” as Internet enthusiasts proclaimed twenty years ago.1 It comes filtered through expensive technologies and financed by powerful corporations. No one can ignore the economic realities that underlie the new information age, but who would argue that we have reached the right balance between commercialization and democratization? Consider the cost of scientific periodicals, most of which are published exclusively online. It has increased at four times the rate of inflation since 1986. The…

The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours by Gregory Nagy Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 727 pp., $35.00 On the morning of Sunday, June 10, 2012, the faculty, staff, and students of the University of Virginia were notified of a palace coup. The university’s president, Teresa Sullivan, had been forced to resign by a small faction on the board of trustees. The conspirators were led by the board’s chair (the “rector” in local parlance), a Virginia Beach real estate developer named Helen Dragas. The motives for the coup have never been entirely explained, perhaps because those responsible were themselves not quite sure what they were trying to accomplish. But the mythology of the affair has emphasized two issues. Sullivan was viewed as insufficiently aggressive in pursuing what the conspirators on…

Starting Over: Stories by Elizabeth Spencer Liveright, 208 pp., $24.95 Even before its adaptation into a Tony-winning musical, The Light in the Piazza bore the same relation to the rest of Elizabeth Spencer’s work as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” does to that of Robert Frost: a title known by those who know nothing else about her. Spencer’s 1960 novella about an American woman’s attempt to marry her daughter to a handsome young Italian is a deft comedy about the relations of America and Europe in which each has something to sell and the New World is in no way the dupe of the Old. Its heroine, Margaret Johnson, is a woman with a burden: at the age of ten her beautiful daughter Clara was kicked in the…

In 2012 Mali descended into chaos. Much of the north of this large and very poor country of 16 million people—its area about the size of France and Spain put together—was taken over by a shaky alliance between hard-line Islamists and Berber Tuaregs, some of whom had come from post-Qaddafi Libya, some from their traditional home in northern Mali. At the same time, the government in the capital city of Bamako was deposed in a military coup led by Amadou Sanogo, a midlevel military official. In January 2013 some four thousand French troops joined the Malian army in an offensive that drove out the Islamists and Tuareg fighters and restored control of much of the north to the government. Fighting still continues, and a residual French force remains in Mali…

To the Editors: As Mary Beard reminds us, in an eminently clear and well-balanced review [“The Latest Scheme for the Parthenon,” NYR, March 6], Joan Breton Connelly’s interpretation of the Parthenon Frieze has been around for some time. It has always seemed to me a classic example of a thesis that is worked out with close attention to the immediate evidence, yet nevertheless contrives (mainly, as Beard’s review makes clear, through chancy speculation) to arrive at a conclusion totally irreconcilable with the mores of the society in which it is set. The frieze was, in an almost literal sense, the diadem of the Parthenon; and the Parthenon was planned and executed as the emblem of Periclean Athens’s civic and intellectual ideals. Yet we are asked to believe that the chief…

To the Editors: Robert Paxton’s review of Jacques Semelin’s book Persecutions and Mutual Help in Occupied France [NYR, March 6] revealed some ignorance. “No detailed comparison of rates of rescue efforts seems to exist....” My book Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust (1979) did compare efforts at rescue and the effect on Jewish survival, comparing within occupation zone, time of deportation, anti-Semitism prior to the war, and many other factors. Helen Fein Cambridge, Massachusetts…

Lina Bo Bardi by Zeuler R.M. de A. Lima Yale University Press, 240 pp., $65.00 Lina Bo Bardi: The Theory of Architectural Practice by Cathrine Veikos Routledge, 269 pp., $49.95 (paper) Stones Against Diamonds by Lina Bo Bardi, translated from the Portuguese by Anthony Doyle and Pamela Johnston London: AA Publications, 132 pp., £15.00 (paper) 1. The hundredth anniversary of an overlooked creative innovator sometimes coincides with the revival of a reputation that is already underway. That has been happening lately with the posthumous lionization of the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, who was born in Rome in 1914 and died in 1992 in her adopted South American homeland at the age of seventy-seven. Bo Bardi’s two most important realized schemes are in São Paulo—the Museum of Art (1957–1969) and…

Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta Knopf, 320 pp., $27.95 1. In mid-February, as part of the plans for his official visit to Germany, Chinese President Xi Jinping asked to visit one of Berlin’s best-known sites: Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The request was declined when it became clear that Xi wanted to use the visit to draw a contrast between Germany’s repentance for Nazism and the alleged refusal of Japan to apologize for its war crimes in China. “The Germans are really uncomfortable with this kind of thing,” a diplomatic source said. “They don’t like China constantly comparing them with Japan and going on about the war.” World War II parallels are back in fashion. Hillary Clinton, for example, recently compared Russia’s actions…

The Law in These Parts a film directed by Ra’anan Alexandrowicz (2011) My Neighbourhood a film directed by Julia Bacha and Rebekah Wingert-Jabi (2012) Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel by Max Blumenthal Nation Books, 496 pp., $27.99 I know a Palestinian shepherd from the South Hebron hills who was out in the hills with his sheep and goats, some years ago, when Israeli settlers brutally attacked him. There is nothing unusual about that. After a while some soldiers turned up and arrested the shepherd when he dared to complain. This outcome is also entirely normal. Then the real nightmare began. He was held for some three weeks before being charged and brought to court—a court that conducted itself entirely in Hebrew, a language he didn’t understand. I first…

Frog Music by Emma Donoghue Little, Brown, 405 pp., $27.00 The historical novel that offers a surfeit of period detail—books such as Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha—can make us feel very distant from the men and women (however much we may sympathize with them) who dress and sound and live so differently than we do. By the final pages, we may notice that we know more about what they wore and how their houses looked than about who they were. Whereas the psychological novel set in the past that focuses on language and characters—as with Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Péter Nádas’s Parallel Stories, and Russell Banks’s Cloudsplitter—can give us the sense that we are reading about ourselves or…

To the Editors: I was surprised that Joel Cohen’s review [“The Case for More Babies,” NYR, April 24] didn’t take the opportunity to talk about the dangers posed by overpopulation. Is that because Cohen does not share my belief that overpopulation is the greatest danger confronting our species? It seems to me that all our efforts to curb the harm that we do to the planet are meaningless if we halve the consumption rate of individuals and have twice as many individuals. I agree with Jonathan Last in his book What To Expect When No One’s Expecting that the dangers he discusses are real, but I believe the dangers posed by his solutions are greater. I cannot understand the thinking of religious institutions that seem intent on maximizing the number…