Innholdsfortegnelse for Oct-23-14 i The New York Review of Books

When Deng Xiaoping arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington in January 1979, his country was just emerging from a long revolutionary deep freeze. No one knew much about this five-foot-tall Chinese leader. He had suddenly reappeared on the scene after twice being cashiered by Mao, who famously described him as “a needle inside a ball of cotton.” But in 1979 he knew exactly what he wanted: better relations with the US. He and President Jimmy Carter appeared to be serious about resolving differences. While reporting on these meetings, I had the impression that they were aware they were appearing in a kind of buddy film, and were using the opportunity to suggest clearly that they were ready to cooperate. “Today we take another step in the historic normalization…

Lila by Marilynne Robinson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 261 pp., $26.00 In her new novel, Lila, Marilynne Robinson has written a deeply romantic love story embodied in the language and ideas of Calvinist doctrine. She really is not like any other writer. She really isn’t. Her literary career certainly does not resemble anyone else’s. Over the last thirty-four years, she has published four novels as graceful as deer, and four brilliant, scholarly works of stompingly polemical nonfiction. Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1980), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She did eventually win the Pulitzer for her second novel, Gilead, which appeared an astonishing twenty-four years later. With Home and now Lila, Robinson has created a small, rich, and fearless body of work in which religion exists unashamedly, as does doubt,…

Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr Norton, 765 pp., $39.95 Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh: John Lahr’s subtitle for his biography of Tennessee Williams nimbly fuses madness, spiritual quest, and sexuality in one inextricable formulation. The tone of the phrase alone—it comes from a 1937 diary entry—with its hint of what may now seem self-consciously overripe eloquence, its elusive mix of ironic gaudiness and open-hearted romanticism, already suggests a voice from a past more remote than could ever, to those of us who lived through Tennessee Williams’s era, have seemed possible. That voice dominates Lahr’s exuberantly detailed and constantly engaging account: a voice of unabashed truth-telling, frequently hilarious interjections, and a sense of musicality that did not fail him. Its traces are scattered profusely in diaries,…

The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis Knopf, 306 pp., $26.95 Martin Amis has set a love story in Auschwitz. More precisely, among the SS staff of the camp and their wives. He makes no apology for doing this—who would expect it of him, and why should he?—but neither does he explain his choice. This leaves the reader to do his or her own mental exercise and, after following this carefully planned novel from beginning to end, to sort through interesting possibilities. Did Amis site his story in the “anus mundi” simply to shock or to provoke—“love among the gas chambers”? Certainly not; there’s always a melancholy seriousness beneath his most Rabelaisian and gaudy caricatures, as there is with most satirists, and here, as in his other “political” novels about…

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis by Martin Wolf Penguin, 466 pp., $35.00 1. Almost nobody predicted the immense economic crisis that overtook the United States and Europe in 2008. If someone claims that he did, ask how many other crises he predicted that didn’t end up happening. Stopped clocks are right twice a day, and chronic doomsayers sometimes find themselves living through doomsday. But while prediction is hard, especially about the future, this doesn’t let our economic policy elite off the hook. On the eve of crisis in 2007 the officials, analysts, and pundits who shape economic policy were deeply, wrongly complacent. They didn’t see 2008 coming; but what is more important is the fact that they even didn’t believe…

The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work Across the India-Pakistan Divide by Ayesha Jalal Princeton University Press, 265 pp., $27.95 Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto, translated from the Urdu by Matt Reeck and Aftab Ahmad Vintage International, 288 pp., $16.00 (paper) 1. Out of the twentieth century’s great calamities have come some of our most memorable satires: Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk from World War I and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 from World War II. Their equivalent in the Indian subcontinent is a short story titled “Toba Tek Singh” by the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto. At first sight the comparison looks absurd; Hašek and Heller created entire worlds in long and densely peopled novels (Hašek conceived Švejk in six volumes, though he completed only three). Manto’s…

The Next America: Boomers, Millennials, and the Looming Generational Showdown by Paul Taylor PublicAffairs, 278 pp., $26.99 Social Trends in American Life: Findings from the General Social Survey since 1972 edited by Peter V. Marsden Princeton University Press, 386 pp., $75.00; $35.00 (paper) The Problem with Survey Research by George Beam Transaction, 421 pp., $59.95 Sexual Behavior, Sexual Attraction, and Sexual Identity in the United States: Data from the 2006–2008 National Survey of Family Growth National Health Statistics Reports Number 36, March 3, 2011, 36 pp.; available at www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr036.pdf The Pollsters: Public Opinion, Politics, and Democratic Leadership by Lindsay Rogers Knopf, 239 pp., 1949 (out of print) 1. Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center argues that surveys of public opinion are both necessary for democracy and based on equality.…

Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything by Philip Ball University of Chicago Press, 465 pp., $35.00 Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein Oxford University Press, 195 pp., $21.95 The current misuse of scientific findings can be tragic. At 3:32 AM on April 6, 2009, a devastating earthquake that measured 6.3 on the Richter scale rocked the medieval Italian town of L’Aquila, killing about three hundred people and leveling many buildings. Residents had experienced about thirty small tremors in the preceding three months and had become very apprehensive. A week before the quake, a meeting that included leading seismologists and public officials was held to evaluate the situation. According to seismologists, it is impossible to know with certainty whether small quakes are foreshocks of a larger tremor. One…

Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent W/Thomas Nelson, 163 pp., $16.99 (paper) Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon—Survival of Bodily Death by Raymond A. Moody Jr., with a preface by Melvin Morse and a foreword by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross HarperOne, 175 pp., $14.99 (paper) Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife by Raymond Moody and Paul Perry HarperOne, 256 pp., $15.99 (paper) On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Scribner, 304 pp., $16.00 (paper) On Life After Death by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, with a foreword by Caroline Myss Celestial Arts, 85 pp., $11.99 (paper) Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science…

To the Editors: The depth and the scope of the humanitarian consequences of Syria’s brutal war are difficult to fathom: more than three million Syrians have fled the country, another six million are displaced within it, and some eleven million are in need of humanitarian assistance. In August, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees called Syria “the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era.” What is the best way to reach those in need, particularly in the opposition-held parts of northern Syria that have been the target of the Syrian military’s indiscriminate barrel bombs and are now increasingly subject to control by the unspeakably brutal ISIS? I explore this question through the particular issue of international efforts to contain northern Syria’s polio epidemic in “Syria: The Other Threat,” a recent article…

To the Editors: In response to my article on the Sultanate of Oman [NYR, August 14], several scholars have pointed out that the descendants of slaves in Omani society have a distinct history that should be carefully distinguished from Omanis who have returned to the Arabian Peninsula from East Africa in recent decades. Oman is believed to have ties to Africa going back to the early years of the Islamic era, and following the conquest of Portuguese trading posts in the late seventeenth century, large numbers of Omanis settled on the East African coast—especially after 1832, when the Omani sultan moved his court to Zanzibar. During this era, African slaves were dispersed among tribes across Oman, and their descendants constituted a separate social class. However, while many slaves would have…

Across the way from our apartment—on Houston, I guess—there’s a new wall ad. The site is forty feet high, twenty feet wide. It changes once or twice a year. Whatever’s on that wall is my view: I look at it more than the sky or the new World Trade Center, more than the water towers, the passing cabs. It has a subliminal effect. Last semester it was a spot for high-end vodka, and while I wrangled children into their snowsuits, chock-full of domestic resentment, I’d find myself dreaming of cold martinis. Before that came an ad so high-end I couldn’t tell what it was for. There was no text—or none that I could see—and the visual was of a yellow firebird set upon a background of hellish red. It seemed…

Judging Statutes by Robert A. Katzmann Oxford University Press, 171 pp., $24.95 Robert Katzmann, who is now the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, has been a federal judge for over fifteen years. In his prior academic career at Georgetown Law School he studied the legislative process and engaged in projects intended to improve the relationship between Congress and the federal judiciary. He regards those two branches of government as partners, rather than rivals, in performing their constitutional roles. His new book, Judging Statutes, explains why it is appropriate to seek to understand the intent of Congress when confronted with vague or ambiguous statutory provisions. He disagrees with Justice Antonin Scalia and the so-called textualists who would not allow judges to look at…

ÊTRE is the verb to be, punishable by death or life-long confinement. AIMER is the verb of misunderstanding: also of longing for penetration of one by another, an impulse of varying duration, prone to declivity and often landing in law court. DONNER means to give, as in the phrase Je te donne, meaning that I take everything from you that I can disengage from your grasp, even if I must smash your knuckles with a hatchet. SAVOIR is to be frightened, similar in spelling to Savior but with an opposite meaning. Savior wears white clothes, and is executed: it took only five nails and two cross-beams and mettlesome vegetation. DORMIR is the verb to sleep which escapes me tonight, doubtless because of your absence, Dear upright…

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” With these words Dickens began his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities. But this cannot, alas, be said about our own terrible century. Men have for millennia destroyed each other, but the deeds of Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon (who introduced mass killings in war), even the Armenian massacres, pale into insignificance before the Russian Revolution and its aftermath: the oppression, torture, murder which can be laid at the doors of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and the systematic falsification of information which prevented knowledge of these horrors for years—these are unparalleled. They were not natural disasters, but preventable human crimes, and whatever those who believe in historical determinism may think, they could have been…

In the winter of 1844, Major Robert Gill, a young British military draftsman, set off from Madras into the independent princely state of Hyderabad to record a major new archaeological discovery. Some years earlier, in 1819, a British hunting party in the jungles of the Western Ghats had followed a tiger into a remote river valley and stumbled onto what was soon recognized as one of the great wonders of India: the painted caves of Ajanta. On the walls of a line of thirty-one caves dug into an amphitheater of solid rock lay the most beautiful and ancient paintings in Buddhist art, the oldest of which dated from the second century BC—an otherwise lost golden age of Indian painting. In time it became clear that Ajanta contained probably the greatest…

The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad For So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It by David Weil Harvard University Press, 410 pp., $29.95 Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street by Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt Russell Sage Foundation, 381 pp., $35.00 (paper) In mid-May, The New York Times reported on appalling labor conditions in the construction of NYU’s new satellite campus in Abu Dhabi. NYU said it had a commitment from both the government of Abu Dhabi and the contractor, the BK Gulf corporation, that workers would be treated decently. But the Times found that migrant workers from South Asia were crammed fifteen to a room, paid as little as $272 a month for an eleven- or twelve-hour workday six or…

In the Light of What We Know by Zia Haider Rahman Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 497 pp., $27.00 “And this, also, has been one of the dark places of the earth.” This mordant pronouncement of the seagoing storyteller Marlow, uttered at the outset of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, seems to reverberate through Zia Haider Rahman’s remarkable postcolonial novel In the Light of What We Know. It is a more complicated narrative than Conrad’s great parable of European colonization of the “dark continent” and it is longer, suffused with the anguish, anger, and incomprehension of not one but two South Asian, Oxford-educated leading characters. But like Heart of Darkness, it is set in the world capital London, as a tale, or rather a sequence of tales, told by a person…

The Tupac Amaru Rebellion by Charles F. Walker Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press, 347 pp., $29.95 Between 1780 and 1782, when the rebellion of the British colonists in North America was reaching its climax, a still more savage drama was being played out in South America. The Andes were in revolt, and Spain, like Britain, was faced with the prospect of losing one of its most prized overseas possessions. Since the overthrow of the Inca empire in the 1530s and the discovery of the silver mountain of Potosí in the high Andes in 1545, the viceroyalty of Peru had generated a substantial part of the wealth that enabled Spain to create and maintain its “empire of the Indies” and its position as a leading European power. Now suddenly in 1780…

When I returned to Ukraine at the end of August I went to see a senior diplomat in Kiev. He told me that things had changed so fast since I had been there in the spring that Ukraine was already “a different country” from the one it had been then. The main thing was that Ukrainian forces were on the offensive and winning back territory. They had had “considerable success” in retaking the rebel stronghold of Sloviansk on July 5; but now, stuck at the gates of rebel-held Donetsk and not wanting to turn it into “a Stalingrad,” the government, he said, “was realizing the limits of its current strategy.” Neither of us knew just how right he was. When I left his office I called a Ukrainian army contact…

To the Editors: I am most grateful to Jeremy Waldron for his generous and clear-headed review of my books Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism and Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas [NYR, October 9]. Waldron worries that nudging poses a risk to autonomy and dignity, but it is important to see that nudges are meant to promote both of those values. Disclosure of relevant information (about the terms of a school loan or a mortgage, for example) is hardly a threat to human dignity. When people are asked what they would like to choose, their autonomy is enhanced, not undermined. (Active choosing is a prime nudge.) A GPS certainly nudges, but it does not compromise what Waldron favors, which is “a steadfast commitment to self-respect.” Waldron is right…

To the Editors: Concerning the “Philosophy Issue” [NYR, October 9], I would just like to commend the reviews by Thomas Nagel and John Searle. Both show the power of conceptual clarification in making intellectual progress, thus vindicating a traditional aim of philosophy. In the case of Nagel’s review, this careful analysis yields the important result that science is not the only form of truth and rationality, with morality emerging as a reputable domain of truth-seeking discourse. In the case of Searle’s review, we come to see that an enormous amount of contemporary talk about information and computation is based on identifiable confusions—in particular, confusions between information in the observer-independent sense and information in the observer-relative sense (intrinsic and projected information, in other words). I hope that the scientists take these…

Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life by William Deresiewicz Free Press, 245 pp., $26.00 During the dark economic days of 2008, the literary critic and English professor William Deresiewicz, who had recently been refused tenure at Yale, published a dystopian essay in The American Scholar called “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education.” “After twenty-four years in the Ivy League—college at Columbia; a Ph.D. at the same institution, including five years as a graduate instructor; and ten years, altogether, on the faculty at Yale,” Deresiewicz had come to believe that “the system,” as he calls it, was cheating students out of “a meaningful education, instilling them with values they rejected but couldn’t somehow get beyond, and failing to equip them to construct…

My first wife, and last! Nine lives ago, at least. Forty-five years ago divorced. Sleek sloop without a mast. The sleek sloop Happiness dismasted, Broken into sticks on the rocks. The best wife I have ever had, the only! One more than I deserved. Irresistibly, we regret the past, Like scratching a delicious itch. I regret my youth a little bit. A little bit is not a lot For a guy as big as the sky! Stop trying to be witty— And pause unrepentantly to remember The girls in their summer dresses, Whose dresses existed to be lifted, Whose high heels were for walking naked! And the soft Caribbean in midwinter was true-blue, On a small white sloop with you,…

Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph by Jan Swafford Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1,077 pp., $40.00 Nine hundred and thirty pages into Jan Swafford’s new biography of Beethoven, there is an interesting juxtaposition. After the composer died, in March 1827, his funeral was “one of the grandest Vienna ever put on for a commoner.” Schools were closed. Some 10,000 people crowded into the courtyard of the building where he had lived, then followed the coffin to the local parish church—not, as Swafford has it, to St. Stephen’s Cathedral. (Among the torchbearers was Franz Schubert.) Franz Grillparzer, the leading Viennese writer of the day, wrote a funeral oration. But later that year, when Beethoven’s effects were auctioned off, a lifetime’s worth of manuscripts and sketchbooks fetched prices that Swafford calls “pathetic.” Beethoven’s late masterpiece…

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Knopf, 386 pp., $25.95 In considering the life and work of Haruki Murakami it’s good to keep a sharp eye on the relationship between individual and community, on questions of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and abandonment. Grandson of a Buddhist monk, his father a teacher of Japanese literature, Murakami has made a point of writing outside the Japanese tradition, against it almost, drawing to a large extent on tropes, images, and cultural references from Western literature, classical music, and pop culture. In this respect he has been praised for, but also accused of, pioneering a new global literature whose stories, whether real, surreal, or “magical,” are not radically located in any place…

Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature by Robert Darnton Norton, 316 pp., $27.95 I have only once met a censor on active duty. In the spring of 1989, my friends at the newly founded Polish opposition newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza let me take a cartoon up to the in-house censor at the printing house of the main Communist Party daily, on whose weary old presses Solidarity’s organ for the dismantlement of communism was now being produced. I knocked on the door, only to find a bored-looking woman in a floral dress, with a cigarette on her lip and a glass of tea at hand. She slowly scanned the cartoon and the article to which it related, as if to demonstrate that she could read, and then stamped her approval on…

Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert by John Drury University of Chicago Press, 396 pp., $35.00 The English Poems of Richard Crashaw edited and with an introduction by Richard Rambuss University of Minnesota Press, 449 pp., $39.95 George Herbert is among the best-loved English poets, and he is singular in that he is valued as much for his personality—his humility, gentleness, and holiness—as for his poetry. In this respect he is the polar opposite of, for example, Shakespeare, who is valued solely for his poetry, since we know nothing about his personality. Herbert himself did not, it seems, think of himself primarily as a poet. There is no evidence that he circulated his poems in manuscript among his acquaintances, as his friend John Donne did, nor…

The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI by Betty Medsger Vintage, 596 pp., $16.95 (paper) On the night of March 8, 1971, eight activists in the movement to end American involvement in the war in Vietnam broke into the small office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Media, Pennsylvania, a town near Philadelphia, and stole all its files. One of the burglars, William Davidon, who died recently, was a professor of physics at Haverford College and a veteran of many protests against the war. He enlisted the others by persuading them that it was an opportunity to obtain files that he thought would show that the FBI was trying to suppress the anti-war struggle by surveillance and harassment of its participants. This was not a wild…

The Endtimes of Human Rights by Stephen Hopgood Cornell University Press, 255 pp., $27.95 Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s by Barbara J. Keys Harvard University Press, 362 pp., $29.95 Human rights organizations today have a major part in international affairs. My organization, Human Rights Watch, works in ninety countries, including virtually all those suffering war or severe governmental repression. Amnesty International, the largest rights group, has similar coverage and three million members around the world. These two big international human rights groups are joined by diverse and vigorous groups and activists working in virtually every country of the world other than the most closed and repressive. Together, they investigate a wide variety of human rights abuses by governments and armed groups, publicize their misconduct, and…

To the Editors: In his fervent hymn to the singularity of Bacchae [NYR, September 25], Daniel Mendelsohn describes its text as “the only surviving Greek play about Dionysus himself, the god of drama.” But The Frogs of Aristophanes is another surviving Greek play about Dionysus (and Euripides and Aeschylus). Both plays were staged in 405 BC. Mendelsohn suggests that audiences watching Bacchae “are seeing double”—seeing actor and character in the play’s “reflections on how the theater works.” He could have added (with apologies to Marx) that Athenians in 405 saw Dionysus twice, one time in tragedy, a second time in farce. Joel Schechter San Francisco, California Daniel Mendelsohn replies: Of course Joel Schechter is correct to point out that Frogs, too, is a “surviving Greek play about Dionysus”; gripped, no…

To the Editors: In his review of my book The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 [NYR, June 5], I could only smile when Ahmed Rashid mentions his own three works on the region before turning to the book he is supposed to be reviewing. But Mr. Rashid is a brave man to review my book. At least one writer declined the commission, so poisonous is the atmosphere now in Pakistan for anyone who dares criticize the military and the intelligence agencies. Pakistani journalists who cross the line work under a double threat from Taliban sympathizers and members of the intelligence agencies. Two senior television reporters, Raza Rumi and Hamid Mir, have narrowly escaped assassination attempts recently for tackling such taboos on air. Less prominent journalists have been beaten, threatened,…