Innholdsfortegnelse for Jul-10-14 i The New York Review of Books

For Evgenia This happened in 1967. That year, the American author Truman Capote, then forty-three years old, published a beautiful essay he titled “Ghosts in Sunlight.” The piece—it’s not very long—describes the author’s experience on the set of the film adaptation of his 1966 best-selling book, In Cold Blood. At one point Capote relates how the actors impersonating the real-life protagonists in his famous “non-fiction novel” unsettled him, rattled him, for there they were, alive and interpreting the thoughts and feelings of men he had known long before, dead men he could not shake. Capote describes this experience as being akin to watching “ghosts in sunlight”—a lovely metaphor about memory and the real converging to make the world something else, and the artist someone else, too. Standing on that film…

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald Metropolitan, 259 pp., $27.00 The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man by Luke Harding Vintage, 346 pp., $14.95 (paper) United States of Secrets a Frontline documentary directed by Michael Kirk The NSA Report: Liberty and Security in a Changing World by the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies: Richard A. Clarke, Michael J. Morell, Geoffrey R. Stone, Cass R. Sunstein, and Peter Swire Princeton University Press, 239 pp., $16.95 (paper) Within days of the publication of No Place to Hide by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, a photograph began circulating on the Internet that showed National Security Agency operatives surreptitiously implanting a surveillance device on an intercepted…

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone Little, Brown, 372 pp., $28.00 In the mid-1990s, when Amazon emerged as an online bookseller, publishers welcomed the company as a “savior” that could provide an alternative to the stifling market power of that era’s dominant chain stores, Barnes & Noble and Borders. Book publishers with exceptional foresight may have understood that they “had to view Amazon as both an empowering retail partner and a dangerous competitor,” as Brad Stone puts it in The Everything Store, his deeply reported, fiercely independent-minded account of Amazon’s rise. Yet at first, Amazon seemed innovative and supportive. The company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, a Princeton- educated computer scientist and former Wall Street hedge fund strategist, had married a novelist; he often expressed…

The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book by Peter Finn and Petra Couvée Pantheon, 352 pp., $26.95 Inside the Zhivago Storm: The Editorial Adventures of Pasternak’s Masterpiece by Paolo Mancosu Milan: Feltrinelli, 402 pp., €40.00 In its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the CIA has a museum that’s not generally open to the public. The museum’s function, according to its website, is to “inform, instruct and inspire” members of the CIA as they practice the craft of intelligence.1 Among its prize exhibits, alongside the Enigma encryption machine, a semi-submersible submarine, and Osama bin Laden’s AK-47, is an unassuming paperback book measuring five-and-a-half inches high, three-and-a-half inches wide, and three quarters of an inch thick. It’s a pocket edition of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, six…

Consider the ermine— territorial, noxious, thieving— its dense fur whitening when light is reduced. Mesmerizing its victims with a snake dance, killing with a bite to the back of the neck. Born blind, deaf, and toothless, the male is called a “dog,” a roamer, a strayer, a transient. But huddled in my arms for warmth, with my fingernails stroking his underbelly, he forgets his untamable nature. His rounded hips shiver like mine. In folklore, he holds the soul of a dead infant; and in life, he prefers to give himself up when hunted, rather than soil himself. This is civilization, I think, roughly stroking his small ears. But then suddenly I’m chasing him around the dining room screaming, No, I told you, no! like…

Voices from Tibet: Selected Essays and Reportage by Tsering Woeser and Wang Lixiong, edited and translated from the Chinese by Violet S. Law, and with an introduction by Robert Barnett Hong Kong University Press/University of Hawaii Press, 81 pp., $20.00 (paper) Tibet: An Unfinished Story by Lezlee Brown Halper and Stefan Halper Oxford University Press, 367 pp., $29.95 A History of Modern Tibet, Volume 3: The Storm Clouds Descend, 1955–1957 by Melvyn C. Goldstein University of California Press, 547 pp., $75.00 Tsering Woeser was born in Lhasa in 1966, the daughter of a senior officer in the Chinese army. She became a passionate supporter of the Dalai Lama. When she was very young the family moved to Tibetan towns inside China proper. In school, only Chinese was used, but Tibetan…

Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up by Mary Beard University of California Press, 319 pp., $29.95 In 1984 the American satirist Veronica Geng was asked to introduce a reprint of Dwight Macdonald’s Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm—and After. Rather than writing a conventional preface, she decided to depict the authors in the anthology as characters from the Travis McGee mysteries of John D. MacDonald—or rather, from their jacket blurbs: “Cyril Connolly—whose bait box harbored a poisonous cargo”; “Robert Benchley—the Vietnam vet who drifted freely between the glittering cabanas of the Fun Coast and the oil-stained walkways of a derelict marina”; “Jane Austen—bright, petite, blonde, suntanned—she couldn’t get a license to open her health spa, but she didn’t need a license to kill.” Why is…

The Second Arab Awakening: And the Battle for Pluralism by Marwan Muasher Yale University Press, 210 pp., $30.00 The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising by Gilbert Achcar, translated from the French by G.M. Goshgarian University of California Press, 310 pp., $65.00; $27.95 (paper) In 1938 George Antonius, an Egyptian Christian of Lebanese origin living in Jerusalem, published The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement. In his path-breaking book Antonius, who had been educated at Cambridge, charted the Arab national idea from its ethnic and linguistic beginnings in the early Islamic conquests, through the intellectual renaissance in nineteenth-century Syria, and to the grassroots—and eventually armed—political movement that overthrew Ottoman rule in Arabia, Iraq, and Syria—in alliance with Britain—during World War I. In his indictment…

To the Editors: In her essay “India: Censorship by the Batra Brigade” [NYR, May 8], Wendy Doniger touches on a number of issues when it comes to the academic study of religion and larger questions of representation. She frames the debate over her book, as well as other topics when it comes to Hinduism, as one between Hindu right-wing activists and scholars, which essentializes a complex history that involves academic freedom, religious sensitivity, and a history of, in Doniger’s words, talking past each other. In referring to the revisions of the California textbooks several years ago, Doniger is wrong to claim that the textbook lawsuit was a “win” for scholars by mischaracterizing the debate as one of scholars versus Hindu activists. She cites extreme examples and proceeds to argue that…

To the Editors: For me, Rana Mitter’s excellent review of Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta was an eye-opener. It revealed much that I, and probably many others, didn’t know about Japan’s past, such as the refusal by the Treaty of Versailles diplomats to include a racial equality clause and the diversity of views within Japan’s noncentralized leadership. May I draw your attention to one little error in the review? Comfort women were not prostitutes. Prostitutes sell sexual favors in return for money or some other benefit. Although “comfort woman” and “prostitute” are the same word in Japanese, in practice they had vastly different meanings during the Japanese occupation of eastern Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. Comfort women were the umpteen thousands of local women and girls…

Stress Test: Reflections on Financial Crises by Timothy F. Geithner Crown, 580 pp., $35.00 1. Midway through Timothy Geithner’s Stress Test, the former treasury secretary describes a late-2008 conversation with the then president-elect. Obama “wanted to discuss what he should try to accomplish.” Geithner’s reply was that his accomplishment would be “preventing a second Great Depression.” And Obama shot back that he didn’t want to be defined by what he had prevented. It’s an ironic tale for Geithner to be telling, although it’s not clear whether he himself realizes just how ironic. For Stress Test is meant to be a story of successful policy—but that success is defined not by what happened but by what didn’t. America did indeed manage to avoid a full replay of the Great Depression—an achievement…

Bourbon Street: A History by Richard Campanella Louisiana State University Press, 368 pp., $35.00 Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink Crown, 558 pp., $27.00 Whenever I meet a stranger in New Orleans, one of the first questions I’m asked is where I’m from. It’s a loaded question, and I tend to answer it warily because I have a loaded answer: New York City. It tends to elicit raised eyebrows because there is a general perception in New Orleans today that the city is being swarmed, occupied, and rendered unrecognizable by New Yorkers (and, to a slightly lesser extent, Angelenos). Anecdotal evidence would include a surge in fawning depictions of the city in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and New…

Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 755 pp., $39.95 Walter Benjamin entered the English language the wrong way around: he was a myth before he ever had the chance to be a fact. When the first American collection of his essays was published—Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, in 1968—he had been dead for almost three decades. Only a few survivors of Weimar Germany still recalled his brief, illustrious career as a literary critic. Fewer still—only his closest friends—were acquainted with the unpublished writing that included some of his most profound thought. Indeed, if it weren’t for those devoted friends—Georges Bataille in Paris, Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem, Theodor Adorno in New York—Benjamin’s papers would not have survived World War II, just…

Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and in Health by Jeanne E. Abrams New York University Press, 306 pp., $30.00 The history of medicine, like the history of science, is a highly bifurcated and contentious field. Some historians of medicine, Lewis Thomas and David Wootton, for example, believe that the past is decidedly inferior to the present and that nothing much good happened in medicine until the mid-nineteenth century and the discovery of germ theory. The reason that physicians do not want to read about the history of medicine, said Thomas, “is that it is so unbelievably deplorable,” with all that bleeding, purging, and misunderstandings based on theories of the human body inherited from antiquity. David Wootton, in his book Bad Medicine (2006), goes further. He thinks…

Essays and Reviews, 1959–2002 by Bernard Williams, with a foreword by Michael Wood Princeton University Press, 435 pp., $35.00 Since Plato, philosophers have offered accounts of the ethical values and moral principles we should pursue individually and as a society. Although nearly moribund for most of the last century, ethical theory was revived in the 1970s, because of the influence of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), a systematic treatment of political and economic justice in the liberal social contract tradition. Robert Nozick’s libertarian reply to Rawls in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) was followed by a stream of new works in political philosophy, continuing to the present day. In moral philosophy, theories of our personal moral duties were developed by Thomas Nagel, T.M. Scanlon, the utilitarians R.M. Hare…

Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre by Jonathan Israel Princeton University Press, 870 pp., $39.95 Did a secret society bring about the French Revolution? In the classic fictional version of this widely believed conspiracy theory, Alexandre Dumas’s novel Joseph Balsamo, a Masonic society known as the Illuminati gather in a ruined castle in 1770 and plot the overthrow of the French monarchy. Their leader, called the “Great Copt,” speaks of the day when “the monarchy is dead...religious domination is despised...social inferiority is extinguished.” Dumas would have found a great deal to appreciate in Jonathan Israel’s Revolutionary Ideas. Israel, a much-respected professor of history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, does not present the French Revolution of 1789 as…

The Infatuations by Javier Marías, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa Knopf, 338 pp., $26.95 In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina, translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 641 pp., $30.00 How strange it must seem to historians, sociologists, and philosophers that, after all that has happened in the world, the small matter of love, in all its minuscule twists and turns, continues to preoccupy novelists more than, say, the breaking of nations or the fate of the earth. Some novelists have tried to rectify this; they have attempted to make the art of the novel seem more important somehow by treating, say, terrorism or large political questions with great seriousness. But then other novelists return, like scavengers or renegades or deserters…

On May 29 the bodies of more than thirty men killed fighting Ukrainians on the outskirts of Donetsk were loaded into a truck and sent home to Russia. The truck, on which a red cross had been hastily painted and which normally delivers chilled food, said on the side: “Fresh produce, to serve you better.” Four days earlier Petro Poroshenko had been elected president of Ukraine by a crushing margin. Both events marked the beginning of a new chapter in the story of the battle for Ukraine. On the one hand it was now clear to everyone that after failing to secure the territory themselves, the eastern Ukrainian separatist rebels were now receiving serious help in the form of militiamen from Russia. They were happy to boast about this. Some…

To the Editors: In his response to Patricia Churchland’s letter [NYR, June 19], Colin McGinn speaks of her “heated rhetoric.” In my view her address to him is moreover rude, a word that belongs to a mentalistic, not a physicalist vocabulary, a comment I elaborate in a moment. More, oddly neither philosopher mentions Donald Davidson’s famous argument on the mind/body problem that he calls “anomalous monism” (see “Thinking Causes” and “Laws and Cause” in a collection of Davidson’s essays called Truth, Language, and History [Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 2005], which I edited, and “Mental Events” in Essays on Actions and Events [Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 2001]). Briefly, Davidson argues that all events are physical, while rejecting the thesis, essential to a materialistic view like Churchland’s, that mental events, such as…

I met J.G. Ballard once—it was a car crash. We were sailing down the Thames in the middle of the night, I don’t remember why. A British Council thing, maybe? The boat was full of young British writers, many of them drunk, and a few had begun hurling a stack of cheap conference chairs over the hull into the water. I was twenty-three, had only been a young British writer for a couple of months, and can recall being very anxious about those chairs: I was not the type to rock the boat. I was too amazed to be on the boat. (Though it was no pleasure barge, more like a Travelodge afloat, with an interior that put you in mind of a Shepperton semidetached. A Ballardian boat. Everything brown…

Nothingness unseamed itself for me too. It turned itself wrong side out. How on earth did I end up here— head to toe among the planets, without a clue how I used not to be. O you, encountered here and loved here, I can only guess, my arm on yours, how much vacancy on that side went to make us, how much silence there for one lone cricket here, how much nonmeadow for a single sprig of sorrel, and sun after darknesses in a drop of dew as repayment—for what boundless droughts? Starry willy-nilly! Local in reverse! Stretched out in curvatures, weights, roughnesses, and motions! Time out from infinity for endless sky! Relief from nonspace in a shivering birch tree’s shape! Now or never wind will stir…

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis Norton, 274 pp., $27.95 With his new book, Flash Boys, Michael Lewis has made a story that very few people in America had known, or cared, anything about—the rise of high-frequency trading on Wall Street—into the object of national outrage. More than one reviewer wrote that Lewis’s book would make readers’ “blood boil.” Democrats in Congress cited it in renewing their call for a tax on financial transactions. The FBI publicly disclosed, the day Flash Boys was published, that it was investigating high-speed traders. Virtu Financial, a high-frequency trading firm that had been scheduled to go public in late April, delayed its IPO because of the negative publicity generated by the book. And so influential was Lewis’s claim that the US…

Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent by Gabrielle Walker Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 388 pp., $27.00 What We Know: The Reality, Risks and Response to Climate Change a report by the Climate Science Panel of the American Association for the Advancement of Science 28 pp., March 2014 Climate Change Impacts in the United States: The Third National Climate Assessment a report by the US Global Change Research Program 829 pp., May 2014 We may be entering the high-stakes endgame on climate change. The pieces—technological and perhaps political—are finally in place for rapid, powerful action to shift us off of fossil fuel. Unfortunately, the players may well decide instead to simply move pawns back and forth for another couple of decades, which would be fatal. Even more unfortunately, the natural…

Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case for Putting America’s House in Order by Richard N. Haass Basic Books, 195 pp., $15.99 (paper) Restraint: A New Foundation for US Grand Strategy by Barry R. Posen Cornell University Press, 234 pp., $29.95 The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge Penguin, 305 pp., $27.95 Reforming Taxation to Promote Growth and Equity a white paper by Joseph Stiglitz Roosevelt Institute, Columbia University, 28 pp., May 28, 2014; available at www.rooseveltinstitute.org In the 1930s travelers returned from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany praising the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous. Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period…

Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole Random House, 162 pp., $23.00 In a recent interview with The New York Times Book Review, the young Nigerian writer Teju Cole said that “‘the novel’ is overrated, and the writers I find most interesting find ways to escape it.” Cole himself may be, like the writers he most admires, not “really a novelist,” though his first book, Open City (2011), was widely and rightly celebrated as an excellent first novel. His new book, Every Day Is for the Thief, though labeled a novella, is a collection of revised blog posts; this mode manages to find more interesting ways to escape “the novel”—at least the sort of novel Cole finds so uninteresting—than Open City did. Cole was born to Nigerian parents…

Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War by Michael C.C. Adams Johns Hopkins University Press, 292 pp., $29.95 Living Hell is an extended antiwar sermon. Like all good preachers, Michael C.C. Adams begins with a quoted text, this one from a speech in 1880 by General William T. Sherman to an audience in which many of the listeners were too young to remember the trauma and devastation of the Civil War. “There is many a boy here to-day who looks on war as all glory,” said Sherman, “but, boys, it is all hell.” Growing up in Britain in the 1960s, during the centennial commemorations of the American Civil War, Adams “harbored romantic notions of dramatic exploits on the battlefield, of boys being forged into men through the ultimate…

To the Editors: I have long been an admirer of the contributions Jerome Groopman makes to The New York Review, but when commenting on my book The Alzheimer Conundrum: Entanglements of Dementia and Aging [NYR, May 22] he came up short. Nothing in my book indicates that there is an “easy way” to prevent Alzheimer’s disease (AD), as Groopman suggests I am arguing. He recommends that we learn from the recent “stunning success” obtained in combating with drugs the viruses known respectively to cause HIV/AIDS and liver failure resulting from infection with hepatitis C. But Groopman’s argument is flawed. The causal agents of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C are known. The prime candidates for proximate AD causation are proteins—amyloid precursor protein and tau—inherent to normal body functioning. Despite years of research…

To the Editors: Rana Mitter’s review of Eri Hotta’s Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy [NYR, May 22] calls for the US to “constrain” as well as protect Japan. He argues that the revival of Japan as it existed during the war “should at all costs be avoided.” Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and many of his associates have a nostalgic attachment to this dreadful chapter of Japanese history. The premier worships his grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who played a major part in the “Great East Asia War.” But fears that Japan could return to the “bad old days” are groundless. First, Japanese attitudes toward war have been radically altered since 1945. Today, with a hawkish cabinet, a hostile China, and a dangerous North Korea, Japan devotes a minute fraction of its resources…