Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-05-14 i The New York Review of Books

The Outsider by Albert Camus, translated from the French by Sandra Smith London: Penguin, 128 pp., £7.99 (paper) One of the most widely read French novels of the twentieth century, Albert Camus’s L’Étranger, carries, for American readers, enormous significance in our cultural understanding of midcentury French identity. It is considered—to what would have been Camus’s irritation—the exemplary existentialist novel. Yet most readers on this continent (and indeed, most of Camus’s readers worldwide) approach him not directly, but in translation. For many years, Stuart Gilbert’s 1946 version was the standard English text. In the 1980s, it was supplanted by two new translations—by Joseph Laredo in the UK and Commonwealth, and by Matthew Ward in the US. Ward’s highly respected version rendered the idiom of the novel more contemporary and more American,…

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History by Nicholas Wade Penguin, 278 pp., $27.95 1. Science and science journalism are different things. Though each is valuable, they require at least partly different skills. Science demands unrelenting skepticism about purported facts and theories, and science journalism demands an ability to make the complex clear. Despite my admiration for his work as a journalist, I’m afraid that Nicholas Wade’s latest book reminds us of the risks inherent in blurring the distinction between these endeavors. A Troublesome Inheritance goes beyond reporting scientific facts or accepted theories and finds Wade championing bold ideas that fall outside any scientific consensus. Wade, now a freelance writer and reporter, is best known for his work as a journalist at The New York Times. He has also…

The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry Liveright, 196 pp., $24.95 Already in the 1880s a cannily vulgar mythologizing of the Old West had begun. Here are Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday awkwardly impersonating themselves in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Denver, as reported in Larry McMurtry’s radically distilled new novel The Last Kind Words Saloon: If the fabled gunslingers had been skilled actors playing “Wyatt Earp” and “Doc Holliday”—quasi-historic Wild West figures—the audience, eager to be entertained, would have applauded; unfortunately, the men are the actual Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, thus at a disadvantage. By the time they finally get their routine right, the crowd has lost interest; by the sixth night of performing, the show is shut down by Harry Tammen, “the magnate who owned…

Who wouldn’t like to have the power to kill Friends and enemies at will and fill The jails with people you don’t know or know Only slightly from meeting them a year ago, Maybe at an AA meeting, where they don’t even use last names. Hi, I’m Fred. Instead of being someone who constantly blames And complains, why not annihilate? Why not hate? Why not exterminate? Why not violate Their rights and their bodies? Tell The truth. Who wouldn’t like to? There’s a wishing well in hell Where every wish is granted. Decapitation gets decanted. Suppose you have the chance To guillotine the executioner after having guillotined everyone else in France?…

Lost for Words by Edward St. Aubyn Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 261 pp., $26.00 There are book prizes, and then there is the Booker Prize, known, fondly, as the Booker, or, furiously, by a close homonym. In fact, “Booker Prize” is as much a nickname as “the Booker.” Properly, it was first the Booker-McConnell Prize, after its sponsor company, an international food conglomerate with a long and not entirely unshadowed colonial history. Since 2002, when the Man Group took over sponsorship, it has been the Man Booker Prize, a rather awkward renaming that the poor old—or, rather, rich old—Man Group has tried to establish firmly in the public consciousness, with not much success. The Booker remains the Booker. The prize was established in 1969, although the novels considered had been…

Solo: A James Bond Novel by William Boyd Harper, 322 pp., $26.99 If, at the end of 1953, you’d asked almost anybody in Britain what had been the year’s most significant national events, it wouldn’t have been hard to predict their replies: the Queen’s coronation and a British team conquering Everest. (Never mind that the two men who made it to the top were from New Zealand and Nepal.) Yet when it comes to Britain’s global reach ever since, a better answer—if unimaginable at the time—might have been the publication of a novel written by a forty-three-year-old bachelor to take his mind off “the agony” of getting married; a novel, moreover, that the publisher Jonathan Cape thought was “not up to scratch,” but accepted anyway as a favor to the…

From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe HarperPerennial, 304 pp., $13.99 (paper) The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma by Thant Myint-U Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 388 pp., $16.00 (paper) Golden Parasol: A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma by Wendy Law-Yone London: Chatto and Windus, 309 pp., £17.99 Nor Iron Bars a Cage by Ma Thanegi ThingsAsian, 175 pp., $12.95 (paper) Smile as They Bow by Nu Nu Yi, translated from the Burmese by Alfred Birnbaum and Thi Thi Aye Hyperion East, 146 pp., $21.95 When Pascal Khoo Thwe was a boy, growing up among Padaung tribesmen in remote southeast Burma, his grandmothers and aunts wore broad rings of gold around their necks, each weighing about a pound, and they added more,…

Franco’s Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936 by Jeremy Treglown Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp., $30.00 1. On August 19, 1936, militiamen loyal to General Francisco Franco murdered Spain’s famous poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. Afterward, one of the killers, the Falangist Juan Trecastro, burst into a local bar and said, “We’ve just killed Federico García Lorca. We left him in a ditch and I fired two bullets into his arse for being a queer.” In Salamanca there is an archive of the Nationalists’ files, including over 2.5 million “Social” and “Political” cards on their enemies. Here is what the British writer Jeremy Treglown found on Lorca’s: “Poet [;] his works treated of popular poems [a mistake for “themes”?]. Died in––Granada.” “How tantalizing the dashes are!” Treglown…

As the first heavy fighting began in eastern Ukraine in early May, with an attempt by Ukrainian forces to retake the town of Sloviansk, and as violent clashes spread elsewhere, including Odessa, in the country’s southwest, there has been a growing sense that a larger confrontation, one that could involve Russia and the West, may be unavoidable. Such a perception is a terrible mistake. There is nothing inevitable about the future course of the conflict. It is absolutely essential for Western governments to focus on what they can do to avoid war, preserve democracy, and keep Ukraine united. What they cannot do is help the government in Kiev to win with military force in the east. The rebel forces that have taken control of cities of the Donbas, the largely…

To the Editors: Regarding the possibility of rescuing Jewish refugees from the Nazis, the choice was not between what was morally desirable and what was “realistic,” as Noah Feldman claims [“Could FDR Have Done More to Save the Jews?,” NYR, May 8]. There were numerous realistic steps that President Franklin D. Roosevelt could have taken that would not have involved challenging the immigration quotas or diverting from the war effort. All of these rescue steps were proposed, at the time, by prominent progressives and New Dealers, such as Nation editor Freda Kirchwey, Democratic congressman Emanuel Celler, and investigative journalist I.F. Stone. Consider, for example, immigration. The quota system permitted a maximum of 25,957 German citizens to immigrate to the US each year. Yet during Roosevelt’s twelve years in office, the…

Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution by John Paul Stevens Little, Brown, 177 pp., $23.00 It’s hard to amend the United States Constitution. Under Article V, an amendment can be proposed only with the approval of either two thirds of both houses of Congress or the legislatures of two thirds of the states. It’s difficult enough to obtain that level of agreement, but there is another obstacle, which is that no proposed amendment can be ratified without agreement from either three fourths of the state legislatures or conventions in three fourths of the states. The authors of the Constitution knew exactly what they were doing. They wanted to limit amendments to what James Madison called “great and extraordinary occasions.” Their plan worked. In well over two…

On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee Riverhead, 352 pp., $27.95 Dystopian novels portray a society, usually of the future, that has arrived at the destination we’re all headed for if we don’t change now. The great dystopian novels and the scary developments they portray convince us of things that are all too possible in the society we live in, if we hadn’t spotted them for ourselves. The most shocking dystopian novel is the first one you read, when the whole idea of the arbitrariness of human arrangements comes over you, with the realization that the future is contingent on the present, and can be affected by something you do or don’t do now. For people of a certain age, that seminal reading experience is likely to have been…

The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited by Louisa Lim Oxford University Press, 248 pp., $24.95 Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China by Rowena Xiaoqing He Palgrave Macmillan, 212 pp., $95.00; $29.00 (paper) Every spring, an old friend of mine named Xu Jue makes a trip to the Babaoshan cemetery in the western suburbs of Beijing to lay flowers on the tombs of her dead son and husband. She always plans her visit for April 5, which is the holiday of Pure Brightness, or Qingming. The traditional Chinese calendar has three festivals to honor the dead and Qingming is the most important—so important that in 2008 the government, which for decades had tried to suppress traditional religious practices, declared it a national holiday and gave people…

Can’t and Won’t by Lydia Davis Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 289 pp., $26.00 1. How small can a story be? In the avant-garde underground of Stalinist Leningrad, Daniel Kharms once wrote a story in two sentences. In the first, he described how one day “a man on his way to work met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was making his way back home.” The second and final sentence was this: “That, in the end, is the whole story.” And of course, Kharms did mean it. In the absurdist terror of Leningrad, Kharms wanted to play with the minimal conditions for reality. His shortness was garish but desperate. He called that story “A Meeting”: a story in two sentences, or maybe even one, if you ignore…

It turns but does not try to remember it does not precede or follow obey nor disobey it is not answering a question it arrives knowing without knowledge it makes the pieces one by one in the dark there is always enough dark before time comes with the locusts the insects of comparison the improvers with their many legs in the dazzling air they never touch what is awake there and is not waiting not asking not fashioned at one with the uneven current of breathing with the age of silence in the rush of noise…

The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made by Philip Bobbitt Grove, 270 pp., $24.00 When the Florentine Republic collapsed in 1512 and the Medici princes returned to power, Niccolò Machiavelli was suddenly and violently ousted from the position he had occupied in the Chancery since 1498. Writing to his friend Francesco Vettori in December 1513, he reported that he was now living on his farm and beguiling the time by reading about ancient statecraft: As Philip Bobbitt observes in The Garments of Court and Palace, Machiavelli is evidently referring here (in what Bobbitt calls “the most famous letter written during the Renaissance”) to the completion of The Prince. Although Machiavelli subsequently revised his draft, most historians agreed to treat the year 2013 as the…

Falling Out of Time by David Grossman Knopf, 193 pp., $24.95 “I once thought of teaching my son a private language,” writes Yair to Miriam, a woman he barely knows but engages in a passionate correspondence, in David Grossman’s Be My Knife. The longing of parents to protect their children, and their inevitable failure to do so, lie at the very center of Grossman’s fiction. It is, of course, a universal theme: even where life does not show its most savage side, parents learn the pain of helplessness. But for Grossman, who was born in Israel in 1954, that pain takes on the starkest and most violent forms, thanks to the course of Jewish and Israeli history. In the Holocaust, millions of Jewish parents saw their children murdered; over the…

In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine by Jeffrey Veidlinger Indiana University Press, 385 pp., $35.00 A quarter-century after the end of the cold war, Europe finds itself facing a moment of truth with Russia. At stake most immediately is Ukraine. Once again, as during Nazism and as during Stalinism, the European periphery has become the center of European history. In February we saw a climax of a revolution in Kiev, on the main square known as the Maidan, live-streamed on YouTube. We saw people on the streets facing water cannons, tanks, and snipers. It was a revolution whose success was based not only upon the sophistication of an emergent civil society, but also upon people’s willingness to die in protest against a gangster’s tyranny.…

To the Editors: Oliver Sacks provides a captivating synthesis in his review of nine books spanning twelve decades that have examined mental features of diverse biological species [“The Mental Life of Plants and Worms, Among Others,” NYR, April 24]. He skillfully maintains a level of description that balances detail and generality, except on one issue. In a short paragraph he states: However, a close examination of “essentially the same” reveals highly significant differences. Some commonalities certainly exist in the nervous systems of these species, but their enormous cognitive variations reflect distinct critical details in their neuronal mechanisms. At the cellular level, even between mice and men, the vastly greater number of neurons in human brains is largely attained by significant miniaturization of neurons. In general, for rodents and primates with…

Why We Build: Power and Desire in Architecture by Rowan Moore Harper Design, 392 pp., $30.00 1. Rarely do architecture writers convey a sense of place with the observational acuity, physical immediacy, and (on occasion) moral outrage of the British journalist Rowan Moore. Since the turn of the millennium, Moore—a Cambridge University—trained architect and younger brother of Charles Moore, the newspaper and Spectator editor and Margaret Thatcher’s authorized biographer—has been the architecture correspondent for The Evening Standard, then the director of the London-based Architecture Foundation, and is now the architecture critic of The Observer. Michael Sorkin burned up the pages of New York’s Village Voice in the 1980s with his tirades against Philip Johnson, Paul Goldberger, and other voices of the architecture establishment. Since then no other newspaper architecture critic…

The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 by Carlotta Gall Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 329 pp., $28.00 During the Afghan elections in early April I was traveling in Central Asia, mainly in Kyrgyzstan. I wanted to inquire into the fears of the governments there as a result of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. What did they think of the growth of Taliban and Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Officials in each country cited two threats. First, the internal radicalizing of their young people by increasing numbers of preachers or proselytizing groups arriving from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. The second, more dangerous threat is external: they believe that extremist groups based in Pakistan and Afghanistan are trying to infiltrate Central Asia in order to launch terrorist attacks. Islamic extremism…

Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake by Daniel E. Sutherland Yale University Press, 440 pp., $40.00 An American in London: Whistler and the Thames an exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, October 16, 2013–January 12, 2014; the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, February 1–April 13, 2014; and the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 2–August 17, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition by Margaret F. MacDonald and Patricia de Montfort London: Philip Wilson, 191 pp., $60.00 (Distributed in the US by Palgrave Macmillan) Darren Waterston: Uncertain Beauty an exhibition at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts, March 8, 2014–February 1, 2015; and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, D.C., July 2015 Catalog of the exhibition, to be published by Rizzoli in association with MASSMoCA…

A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand by Philip Short John Macrae/Henry Holt, 620 pp., $40.00 I had the good fortune to be presented to François Mitterrand, the subject of Philip Short’s engrossing, authoritative, and fair biography, which is chock-full of previously unavailable information, sometime in the fall of 1973, at a small lunch given in New York City by the French consul general.1 At first I thought he looked like a priest out of a film Luis Buñuel had yet to make. Later I realized that in fact the resemblance was with Vautrin—the escaped convict who dominates three of Balzac’s greatest novels, Père Goriot, Lost Illusions, and Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans, and finishes his career as Louis Philippe’s prefect of police—when, disguised as priest, he…

John Quincy Adams: American Visionary by Fred Kaplan Harper, 652 pp., $29.99 Louisa Catherine: The Other Mrs. Adams by Margery M. Heffron, edited by David L. Michelmore Yale University Press, 416 pp., $40.00 A Traveled First Lady: Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams edited by Margaret A. Hogan and C. James Taylor, with a foreword by Laura Bush Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 388 pp., $35.00 1. In February 1778, John Quincy Adams, ten years old, crossed the Atlantic with his father, who had just been appointed to the American diplomatic delegation in Paris. “Johnny...reads and chatters french like a french Boy,” John Adams proudly wrote Abigail a few months after father and son, a family of two, arrived in France. The young John Quincy, groomed from infancy for lofty public…

Before Sunrise a film directed by Richard Linklater Turner, DVD, $14.98 Before Sunset a film directed by Richard Linklater Warner, DVD, $19.96 Before Midnight a film directed by Richard Linklater Sony Pictures, DVD, $30.99 Before Midnight extends Richard Linklater’s extraordinary sequence of films, begun eighteen years ago with Before Sunrise and continuing, nine years later, with Before Sunset. The films follow the ups and downs of a young couple, Céline and Jesse, played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. They first meet at the same moment we first meet them, on a train crossing Europe, and part (promising to meet back in Vienna six months hence) fourteen hours of their time and almost two hours of our time later, just in time to end Before Sunrise. Many people who saw…

The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do About It by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig Princeton University Press, 398 pp., $29.95 Why, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke asked rhetorically in an April 2012 speech, did the collapse of the trillion-dollar market for subprime mortgages set off the most severe financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression? Twelve years earlier, in 2000, the crash of high-flying technology companies such as Cisco Systems and dot-com companies such as Amazon and the now defunct Pets.com wiped out roughly $6 trillion in assets, but it set off only the relatively short and mild recession of 2001. Cisco and especially Amazon are today much larger. The answer, now widely accepted but clearly not appreciated sufficiently at the time, is…

Hill of Destiny by Jean Giono translated from the French by Jacques Le Clercq. Brentano’s, 266 pp. (out of print) Harvest by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Henri Fluchère and Geoffrey Myers Viking, 192 pp. (out of print) To the Slaughterhouse by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Norman Glass Peter Owen, 200 pp., $23.95 (paper) The Malediction by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Peter de Mendelssohn London: Museum Press, 156 pp. (out of print) The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono, translated from the French by Jonathan Griffin North Point, 426 pp., $35.00 (paper) Journal—Poèmes—Essais by Jean Giono Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1,664 pp., €68.50 Oeuvres romanesque complètes, Vol. 1: Naissance de l’Odyssée, Colline, Un de Baumugnes, Regain, Solitude de la pitié,…

To the Editors: In his review of my new memoir, Blood Will Out (which consists in a curiously large degree of a review of my character), Nathaniel Rich baldly accuses me of “conning” my readers [NYR, May 8]. He charges me with calculated disingenuousness for writing that I was fooled over the years by the infamous con man, impostor, and murderer who called himself, among other names, “Clark Rockefeller.” Well, indeed I was fooled, as those who knew me at the time can well attest. His wife of over a decade, a Harvard MBA, was also fooled, as was her entire family. And the three major investment firms where the accomplished deceiver found employment. And the exclusive Algonquin and Lotos clubs of Boston and New York, which he frequented under…