Innholdsfortegnelse for Nov-20-14 i The New York Review of Books

Europe is facing a challenge from Russia to its very existence. Neither the European leaders nor their citizens are fully aware of this challenge or know how best to deal with it. I attribute this mainly to the fact that the European Union in general and the eurozone in particular lost their way after the financial crisis of 2008. The fiscal rules that currently prevail in Europe have aroused a lot of popular resentment. Anti-Europe parties captured nearly 30 percent of the seats in the latest elections for the European Parliament but they had no realistic alternative to the EU to point to until recently. Now Russia is presenting an alternative that poses a fundamental challenge to the values and principles on which the European Union was originally founded. It…

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan Knopf, 334 pp., $26.95 Christopher Isherwood called it the Test. He was obsessed by the idea that men of his generation, born too late to have fought in the Great War, were never put to the test of manhood imposed on their fathers. Isherwood was ten in 1915 when his father, Frank Isherwood, a professional soldier, died in France. It affected him deeply. The test of manhood, for him, was more than trial by gunfire (he was in fact a pacifist); it was sexual as much as anything else. He liked to say that he had to prove himself by courting risk. Homosexuality was cast as a form of rebellion. Not that having sex with tough Berlin street boys was…

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World by Yong Zhao Jossey-Bass, 254 pp., $26.95 On December 3, 2013, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced yet again that American students were doing terribly when tested, in comparison to students in sixty-one other countries and a few cities like Shanghai and Hong Kong. Duncan presided over the release of the latest international assessment of student performance in reading, science, and mathematics (called the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA), and Shanghai led the nations of the world in all three categories. Duncan and other policymakers professed shock and anguish at the results, according to which American students were average at best, nowhere near the top. Duncan said that Americans…

Gaza: A History by Jean-Pierre Filiu, translated from the French by John King Oxford University Press, 422 pp., $29.95 Palestine Speaks: Narratives of Life Under Occupation compiled and edited by Cate Malek and Mateo Hoke Voice of Witness/McSweeney’s, 346 pp., $16.00 (paper) Gaza and Israel: New Obstacles, New Solutions a report by the International Crisis Group Middle East Briefing No. 39, 11 pp., July 14, 2014; available at www.crisisgroup.org In 332 BC Alexander the Great conquered Gaza. It was not easy going. The siege lasted for one hundred days, and the Gazans, led by Batis, the “king of Gaza,” defended themselves skillfully, notably by extensive use of tunnels. Alexander himself was wounded in the fighting. He revenged himself by killing almost all the city’s young men, including Batis, who was…

Welcome to Subirdia: Sharing Our Neighborhoods with Wrens, Robins, Woodpeckers, and Other Wildlife by John M. Marzluff, with illustrations by Jack DeLap Yale University Press, 303 pp., $30.00 In March 2013 John Marzluff, a veteran ecology professor, spent a few days in Yellowstone National Park. As he always does when out of doors, Marzluff counted the birds he found there: twenty-four species. Traveling to New York City afterward, he spent several hours over two days in Manhattan’s green space, Central Park. There he checked off thirty-one species. Central Park was “birdier” than Yellowstone! Marzluff was not entirely surprised. Over the last thirteen years he and his graduate students at the University of Washington have studied what happens to birds, mammals, and other wildlife when forests around Seattle and other cities…

La Grande by Juan José Saer, translated from the Spanish and with an afterword by Steve Dolph Open Letter, 501 pp., $16.95 (paper) The career of the Argentinian novelist Juan José Saer (1937–2005) makes one wonder how literary fame comes about. He has a small cult following, but he is not well known beyond it. Many readers for whom Mario Vargas Llosa—his almost exact contemporary—is a household name have simply not heard of Saer, let alone read him, and it is hard to find any of his books in Spanish-speaking cities. Yet he wrote fourteen novels, five collections of stories, four of literary essays, and one of verse. Why did he not leave more of a mark, at least among followers of Latin American fiction, since some of his novels…

To the Editors: In “China Strikes Back” [NYR, October 23], Orville Schell sounds a much-needed wake-up call about China’s recent attitude toward the world. He notes the “China dream”—a vision of modern life that sidesteps human rights and democracy—and that the government is pushing with increasing “truculence.” He might have added that the truculence has been even stronger inside China than outside. In late September Chinese bookstores were ordered to remove all works by Yu Ying-shih, who is arguably the world’s greatest living historian of China, a few days after Yu made a speech supporting the pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. I salute Schell for his excellent piece but find one point where I think we need to probe more deeply. Schell refers to “China’s new confidence in its own…

To the Editors: Save the Sunlight of New York is a group of citizens who are concerned about the threat to the natural light available to New York City residents and visitors due to “supertower” overdevelopment, particularly this year’s spate of thousand-foot towers that overshadow Central Park and proposed massive development projects in midtown Manhattan and residential parts of Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side. We are petitioning New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to reappraise zoning laws to limit the height of buildings around New York City’s parks and residential neighborhoods. Please sign our petition, which is online at http://chn.ge/1ttFGrr. Arcadi Nebolsine New York City…

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore Knopf, 410 pp., $29.95 Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine by Tim Hanley Chicago Review Press, 320 pp., $18.95 In 1978, David Levine drew the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger wearing a leotard with stars below the waist, bouncing confidently off what looked at first like a trampoline. On second glance it was a springy contraceptive diaphragm. Of course: Sanger as Wonder Woman. (See illustration below.) The choice of imagery was obvious. Many decades earlier, Sanger had argued that women should be taught about sex, its pleasures and consequences, and given the information and medical support they needed to determine their destinies as mothers (or as not-mothers, should they so choose). In cofounding America’s first…

In memory of Karl Miller (1931–2014) The trees are waving their arms around Like some ridiculous performance of modern dance. They look like ludicrous John Hollander raving about the excellence Of late Auden. Stop this nonsense! You’re not dancers! At Ninety-second and Broadway, I’m afraid that’s What it looks like they think they are. We had droll things to say about everything we liked or didn’t. And weren’t we clever and didn’t we have fun! We said everything we had to say Until the plane ran out of runway, Took off while it was landing—and you were gone. Such suffering and sickness and sweet good times! I see a rainbow above a lawn being watered, Dragonfly iridescence, hissing sprayer-mist, quiet— And hear the deafening roar of Niagara Falls—…

Robert Gober: The Heart Is Not a Metaphor an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, October 4, 2014–January 18, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Ann Temkin Museum of Modern Art, 271 pp., $45.00 The sixty-year-old artist Robert Gober is a connoisseur of the uncanny. He dreams up discombobulating variations on ordinary objects, sights, and situations. Then he turns his disquieting visions—a playpen crisscrossed by two pipes; a wedge of cheese with a head of hair—into impeccably carpentered, cast, painted, woven, and sewn works. The retrospective of his sculptures, drawings, prints, paintings, and installations at the Museum of Modern Art—the first large-scale survey of his work in the US—is a twenty-first-century cabinet of curiosities. Gober, who planned the show along with Ann Temkin, a curator…

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride Coffee House Press, 227 pp., $24.00 “The English,” wrote Kenneth Tynan when reviewing Brendan Behan’s The Hostage, “hoard words like misers; the Irish spend them like sailors.” This is, however, exactly what Irish writers are afraid of. Much of modern Irish literature can be seen as a struggle to, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase, govern the tongue. Volubility, garrulousness, lushness, and lyricism are the clear and present dangers against which the writers have to arm themselves. What can they do with the drunken sailor of Irish speech, heady with elaborations, exaggerations, and evasions? They must lock it in the hold. They have to throw obstacles in the way of the natural flow that would otherwise carry them onto the rocks of rhetoric,…

The Marriage of Figaro an opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, directed by Richard Eyre, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, September 22–December 20, 2014 The Met’s new production of The Marriage of Figaro, directed by Sir Richard Eyre, begins with a view of some impressive architectural machinery designed (along with the costumes) by Rob Howell: we see the model, on a revolving stage, of Count Almaviva’s mansion near Seville, designed to reveal successive interrelated interiors as the set turns. These are high-vaulted chambers dense with arabesque marquetry and latticework, often oppressively dark unless the parted slats permit some afternoon light to find its way in. Although it is not at once apparent, this is the Spain of the 1930s, but a corner of Spain evidently still closely bound…

Jump Soul: New and Selected Poems by Charlie Smith Norton, 230 pp., $26.95 Charlie Smith’s Jump Soul comprises excerpts from seven previous volumes ranging from 1987 to 2009 (Red Roads, Indistinguishable from the Darkness, The Palms, Before and After, Heroin and Other Poems, Women of America, Word Comix) and a remarkable new collection, forty-six poems entitled Godzilla Street, his strongest work yet. His poetry is in some ways typically modern and American: awash in idiomatic cross talk and leaps in register, given to all-encompassing lists. It can sometimes seem as if Smith is “on a long run/of quirky asides,” but the poetry grows distinctive for how it records the “give-and-take of the fracas,” the conflicting demands of inhabiting the shared life, particularly life in the city. He has a strong…

To the Editors: There is a factual error in Steve Coll’s article “Citizen Bezos” [NYR, July 10]. Coll writes: “Amazon has introduced a kind of self-publishing enterprise, the Kindle Single, which offers to writers publisher-displacing royalty rates of up to 70 percent.” In fact, Kindle Singles are only a small part of a much larger “self-publishing enterprise” introduced by Amazon: Kindle Direct Publishing. KDP allows authors to publish, at no cost, e-books of any length, and to set any price for them. These self-published titles can be bought by Amazon customers anywhere in the world, to read on any device that runs a Kindle app, which nearly all do. Authors are paid a 70 percent royalty on all books priced under ten dollars, and a 35 percent royalty on all…

The criminal justice system in the United States today bears little relationship to what the Founding Fathers contemplated, what the movies and television portray, or what the average American believes. To the Founding Fathers, the critical element in the system was the jury trial, which served not only as a truth-seeking mechanism and a means of achieving fairness, but also as a shield against tyranny. As Thomas Jefferson famously said, “I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” The Sixth Amendment guarantees that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.” The Constitution further guarantees that at the trial,…

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin Palgrave Macmillan, 356 pp., $28.00 Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things by David Rose Scribner, 304 pp., $28.00 Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, with a foreword by Marc Benioff Patrick Brewster, 225 pp., $14.45 (paper) More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook by Jim Dwyer Viking, 374 pp., $27.95 Every day a piece of computer code is sent to me by e-mail from a website to which I subscribe called IFTTT. Those letters stand for the phrase “if this then that,” and the code is…

The Children Act by Ian McEwan Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 221 pp., $25.00 This is Ian McEwan’s sixteenth book of fiction, by my count, and among the best and most accomplished novels he has ever written. His particular thread of success, it seems to me, has been to compose passages that burn a scar into memory, like star-shells on a flinching retina. In his earlier work, these were often scenes—moments, almost—of intense horror that the empathetic reader might spend years trying to forget. For example, the loss of a little daughter who vanishes in a supermarket, never to be found again (The Child in Time). Or the man clinging to the rope of a soaring balloon who knows that he will have to let go (Enduring Love). These were coups: almost…

Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928 by Stephen Kotkin Penguin, 949 pp., $40.00 Joseph Stalin, for a quarter-century undisputed master of the Soviet Union and its postwar satellites, was one of the leading mass murderers of the murderous twentieth century. So much so that Hitler, Stalin’s competitor in this field, came greatly to admire him. In some of his “table talks,” held in the circle of intimate associates while German troops were ravaging the Soviet Union, Hitler called him a “genius” and a “tiger.”* According to Alexander Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo and the closest adviser of Mikhail Gorbachev, who as chairman of a commission to study Stalinist repressions had access to all the relevant records, Stalin was responsible for the death of 15 million Soviet citizens. He…

I Can Hear You Whisper: An Intimate Journey Through the Science of Sound and Language by Lydia Denworth Dutton, 390 pp., $26.95 At medical school I was taught by Dr. Nimmo, an elderly Edinburgh physician who wore a pinstripe suit, carried a heavy gold watch, and whose combed white hair was held in place with pomade. If he realized that a patient was hard of hearing he’d take his stethoscope from his jacket pocket and ceremoniously place the earpieces into their ears. Taking the other end in his hands, he’d speak slowly and clearly into it as if into a microphone. The focus and amplification of the stethoscope meant that he didn’t have to shout loudly, and the privacy of the patient on the open ward was preserved. For the…

Thailand has long had the image of a benign, stable country, which is a chief reason it has long been seen, at least by Americans, as a great hope for the future in Southeast Asia. It is relatively prosperous, growing not quite as fast as nearby China but at impressive rates of up to 7 percent a year. It is the world’s second-largest exporter of rice and the leading exporter of computer hard drives. Its troubling Muslim insurgency in the south is mainly restricted to a small part of the country. Thailand is ethnically largely homogeneous, overwhelmingly Buddhist, and ruled by a revered, exceedingly long-serving king. It is a beautiful country, with verdant mountains, a gorgeous seacoast, and rich alluvial, if flood-prone, plains. Millions of visitors have been drawn to…

To the Editors: In his review of recent books on the campaign for marriage equality [“I Do, I Do,” NYR, August 14], Edmund Wilson makes misleading statements about my testimony in California’s Prop 8 case. First, he writes that my testimony “lost steam when he had to admit that his degree from Warwick University was granted not for his study of marriage or families, but of nineteenth-century cabinetmakers.” That’s an odd way to put it! I never stated or tried to pretend otherwise, and my academic career (such as it was) was part of the court and public record from the beginning. More importantly, to justify his assertion that on the witness stand I “ended up expressing ideas that helped the pro-marriage equality side,” Wilson offers a long quotation from…