Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-04-14 i The New York Review of Books

Citizenfour a film directed by Laura Poitras At some point in the chase that led the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras from America to Berlin and finally to the hotel room in Hong Kong where she would meet the whistle-blower who identified himself as “Citizenfour,” her unnamed informant sent this warning: “I will likely immediately be implicated. This must not deter you.” What did he offer in return for the risk he hoped she would take? The answer was compelling. He knew things that the American public ought to know. The director of the National Security Agency, General Keith Alexander, had “lied to Congress, which I can prove.” Alexander denied under oath that the NSA had ever engaged in the mass surveillance of Americans that was then going forward under…

Gone Girl a film directed by David Fincher It is one of the uncontested wisdoms of our era that “marriage is hard work.” The belief that conjugal happiness can be earned only by rigorous and sustained emotional labor is so deeply entrenched in the common culture that when Amy Dunne, the female protagonist of David Fincher’s new movie, Gone Girl, boasts cheerfully of finding marriage “easy,” it is as if she had entered Dracula’s castle scoffing at the existence of vampires: the audience knows at once that her hubris must be punished.  Gone Girl is a sort of marital horror story, told from the alternating and competing perspectives of the spouses. It is based on a best-selling thriller by Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the screenplay), and it depends…

Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 20, 2014–February 16, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Emily Braun and Rebecca Rabinow Metropolitan Museum of Art, 382 pp., $65.00 The man who did the most to give Cubism a cohesive identity was Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. In early 1907, this progressive-minded twenty-two-year-old used funds from his German banking family to open a little gallery in the rue Vignon, just off the grands boulevards of Paris. He had an eye for the innovatory, and soon canvases by André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck were hanging on his walls. Two years earlier at the Salon d’Automne, the big event in the contemporary art calendar, these painters had been linked to Henri Matisse under…

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell, with a foreword by Rory Stewart Basic Books, 320 pp., $28.99 In August, President Obama announced a series of air strikes against the advancing forces of the Islamic State (IS), the self-declared “caliphate” in northern Iraq. The aim was not only to support embattled Kurdish forces in the region, but also to protect thousands of beleaguered members of the mysterious religious minority known as the Yazidis. Americans soon learned that the Islamists were targeting the Yazidis for their reputation as “devil worshipers.” News organizations scrambled to find experts who could provide clarification—among them Gerard Russell, a former British diplomat and a fluent speaker of Arabic and Dari, who had widely traveled in Iraq and…

The Book of My Lives by Aleksandar Hemon Picador, 242 pp., $15.00 (paper) The 1970s and 1980s were a golden period for many young people in Yugoslavia. The universities and some high schools were first-rate. Cultural life was flourishing in the cities. The same plays and movies one saw in Western capitals were being shown there. The young read contemporary European and American literature, listened to rock music and the blues, and occasionally traveled abroad. Literary weeklies and periodicals proliferated, thanks to government support, and published a large number of translations of fiction and poetry; so, for example, there’d be an issue devoted to contemporary Argentinian short stories and another to Scandinavian poetry, and so on. I heard a Croatian publisher recently lament the years when a newly translated foreign…

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton Back Bay, 834 pp., $18.00 (paper) “I do not come out of a literary tradition,” said the Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan in his acceptance speech after winning this year’s Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. “I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world.” And with those words, he seemed to banish—for now, at any rate—the latest in the Booker’s long history of “controversies,” a history that dates back to 1972, the fourth year of the prize, when John Berger, having won with his experimental work G, used his acceptance speech to lambast the Booker company’s exploitation of Caribbean laborers in its sugar business, before announcing that he’d be sharing…

The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters Riverhead, 566 pp., $28.95 As The Paying Guests opens, its heroine, Frances Wray, is trying to slow the alarming rate at which her standard of living is declining. Her disagreeable father has died of apoplexy; both of her brothers were killed in World War I; and without the financial support of male relatives and the help of servants, the home she shares with her mother in a London suburb has become increasingly difficult to maintain. Neither the onerous burden of housework that Frances has assumed, nor her skill at tenderizing the cheaper cuts of meat, nor the forbearance of local merchants who extend her credit can disguise the fact that Frances and her mother have fallen on hard times. Four years have passed since…

To the Editors: I take issue with two omissions in Michael Greenberg’s’s interesting and informative article about NYC policing [NYR, November 6]. One is his omission of the public schools from this statement: “The extent of the isolation of these neighborhoods is startling. The police and a handful of emissaries from health and social services are virtually the only outsiders who regularly set foot in them.” Having spent thirty years in the New York City public schools, I can say that most frequently the only public agency open five days a week, twelve months of the year, is the public school, or schools. There families find out what is available in community and parks programs, library programs, health, safety, fire prevention, etc. There children eat two meals a day, have…

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald Mariner, 123 pp., $10.00 (paper) Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Alan Hollinghurst Mariner, 181 pp., $14.95 (paper) Human Voices by Penelope Fitzgerald Mariner, 144 pp., $12.00 (paper) At Freddie’s by Penelope Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Simon Callow Mariner, 230 pp., $14.95 (paper) Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Julian Barnes Mariner, 340 pp., $14.95 (paper) The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald Mariner, 187 pp., $12.00 (paper) The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald Mariner, 176 pp., $12.00 (paper) The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Candia McWilliam Mariner, 282 pp., $14.95 (paper) Edward Burne-Jones by Penelope Fitzgerald, with an introduction by Frances Spalding London: Fourth Estate, 336 pp., £12.99 (paper) Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life by…

               vs. the Washington Generals Because they always win. Because Meadowlark Lemon. Because for them, double dribbling               is literal. Because on your finger               your knee, toes               & elbows, the world can spin. Because the ball               on a string. Because rubber bands for hands. Because the ball a banner. Because where else do Generals               meet defeat without blood. Because the best offense               is a quick depantsing. Because mercy, not pity. Because the bucket               of water tossed               on the cries of the crowd turns like tears to confetti.…

Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace by Leon Panetta, with Jim Newton Penguin, 498 pp., $36.00 What is the process by which someone becomes a Washington eminence? A young person, of either Republican or Democratic persuasion, hits town with big dreams, perhaps alighting from Union Station to join the taxi queue and take in that first, breath-stopping glimpse of the Capitol dome. He has a contact or two, or perhaps a low-level assignment already waiting for him, and onward he charges to bend the beast to his will. It’s all very exciting at first. He beams with self-regard as he learns to navigate the tunnels that join the Capitol to the House and Senate office buildings; he lets his government ID dangle conspicuously around his neck…

Cemeteries of the Great War by Sir Edwin Lutyens by Jeroen Geurst Rotterdam: 010, 470 pp., $59.95 (distributed in the US by DAP/ Distributed Art Publishers) The Architecture of Diplomacy: The British Ambassador’s Residence in Washington by Anthony Seldon and Daniel Collings Paris: Flammarion, 236 pp., $65.00 1. Forty years ago it would have seemed preposterous to assert that the two greatest architects of the twentieth century were Le Corbusier and Edwin Lutyens. Although each was considered supreme in his respective sphere—Le Corbusier among modernists, Lutyens among traditionalists—their comparative influence differed tremendously. Whereas Le Corbusier’s precepts became the predominant lingua franca of world architecture, Lutyens embodied the final effulgence of Classicism, which the Modern Movement had supposedly rendered irrelevant. Unequal as these antithetical figures may still seem to some, their…

A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal by Ben Macintyre Crown, 368 pp., $27.00 Can there be anything left to say about Kim Philby, arguably the most successful spy of his generation, perhaps of all time? After all, scores of books have been written about him and his circle of fellow Soviet-controlled British spies, who sought before and after World War II to bring communism to Europe and the United States. Especially now that the ideal of so many like-minded young men and women in places such as Cambridge and Oxford in the 1930s has become rusted, what is the point of recounting the Philby saga once again? Yet Ben Macintyre has managed to lend it a fresh lease on life by dwelling on psychology, friendship, and…

Remembrance an unofficial journal published in Tiantongyuan, China available at prchistory.org/remembrance On the last stretch of flatlands north of Beijing, just before the Mongolian foothills, lies the satellite city of Tiantongyuan. Built during the euphoric run-up to the 2008 Olympics, it was designed as a modern, Hong Kong–style housing district of over 400,000 people, with plentiful shopping and a subway line into Beijing. But it was a rushed job, and planners neglected to put in parks, open spaces, or anything for the public other than roads, which were quickly choked with cars. Construction was pell-mell, and the area has aged quickly, its towers crumbling and cracking. This rootless suburb is home to Remembrance, an underground journal that deals with one of China’s most sensitive issues: its history. E-mailed to subscribers…

Zambia: The First 50 Years: Reflections of an Eyewitness by Andrew Sardanis I.B. Tauris, 370 pp., $28.00 (paper) Africa: Another Side of the Coin: Northern Rhodesia’s Final Years and Zambia’s Nationhood by Andrew Sardanis I.B. Tauris, 340 pp., $24.00 (paper) The 1980 Coup: Tribulations of the One-Party State in Zamba by Goodwin Yoram Mumba Lusaka, Zambia: UNZA Press, 221 pp., $45.00 Rethinking African Politics: A History of Opposition in Zambia by Miles Larmer Ashgate, 321 pp., £75.00 The Musakanya Papers: The Autobiographical Writings of Valentine Musakanya edited by Miles Larmer Lusaka, Zambia: Lembani Trust, 125 pp., £18.95 (paper) Tiny Rowland: A Rebel Tycoon by Tom Bower London: Heinemann, 416 pp. (1993) There’s a lot of money to be made in Africa, with its vast reserves of oil and gas, its…

To the Editors: Concerning Martin Heidegger’s bizarre metaphysical equivalence between mechanized food production and the death camps [“Heidegger in Black,” NYR, October 9], it must be maintained that this remark was not deleted from a manuscript that was later published. The statement was made in a speech in Bremen in 1949 and was published intact in volume 79 of the Gesamtausgabe (Collected Edition) in an essay called “Positionality” (“Das Ge-Stell”). This speech was also edited and expanded (without the statement) in the essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” published in Vorträge und Aufsätze in 1954. Heidegger exacted some deletions and emendations to conceal his political opinions, but he didn’t apparently try to conceal this one. Bruce Heinly Harrison, Tennessee Peter E. Gordon replies: In his December 1949 Bremen lecture, “Das Ge-Stell”…

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein Simon and Schuster, 566 pp., $30.00 Every fall, an international team of scientists announces how much carbon dioxide humanity has dumped into the atmosphere the previous year. This fall, the news wasn’t good. It almost never is. The only time the group reported a drop in emissions was 2009, when the global economy seemed on the verge of collapse. The following year, emissions jumped again, by almost 6 percent. According to the team’s latest report, in 2013 global emissions rose by 2.3 percent. Contributing to this increase were countries like the United States, which has some of the world’s highest per capita emissions, and also countries like India, which has some of the lowest. “There is no more time,” one…

Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think by Paul Dolan, with a foreword by Daniel Kahneman Hudson Street, 235 pp., $25.95 Subjective Well-Being: Measuring Happiness, Suffering, and Other Dimensions of Experience a report by the National Research Council, edited by Arthur A. Stone and Christopher Mackie National Academies Press, 188 pp., $44.00 (paper); available online at www.nap.edu When I was working in the federal government in 2010, I asked a colleague how things were going. His answer was unusual: “My moment-by-moment happiness is pretty low, but my life satisfaction is great.” As it happens, he was an expert on the last two decades of social science research on happiness (often called “subjective well-being”), and he was referring to two different measures of that elusive concept. The…

The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession by Dana Goldstein Doubleday, 349 pp., $26.95 Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) by Elizabeth Green Norton, 372 pp., $27.95 Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher by Garret Keizer Metropolitan, 302 pp., $27.00 In 1853, the most important man in nineteenth-century American education gave a speech praising female teachers. Horace Mann was the head of the growing common school system in Massachusetts, where women teachers already outnumbered men by four to one. That helped save money for taxpayers, because school districts could pay women less than their male counterparts. It also capitalized on women’s natural instincts and abilities, Mann argued, converting America’s formerly chaotic, male-led classrooms into domiciles of love…

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson Spiegel and Grau, 336 pp., $28.00 The Growth of Incarceration in the United States: Exploring Causes and Consequences edited by Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western, and Steve Redburn National Academies Press, 444 pp., $74.95 (paper); available at nap.edu Mass Incarceration on Trial: A Remarkable Court Decision and the Future of Prisons in America by Jonathan Simon New Press, 209 pp., $26.95 1. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), an innocent black man, Tom Robinson, is falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small 1930s southern town not unlike Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Alabama. Robinson is tried and convicted by an all-white jury, despite the best efforts on his behalf of Atticus Finch, a white lawyer who…

The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography by Richard H. Davis Princeton University Press, 243 pp., $24.95 How did Indian tradition transform the Bhagavad Gita (the “Song of God”) into a bible for pacifism, when it began life, sometime between the third century BC and the third century CE, as an epic argument persuading a warrior to engage in a battle, indeed, a particularly brutal, lawless, internecine war? It has taken a true gift for magic—or, if you prefer, religion, particularly the sort of religion in the thrall of politics that has inspired Hindu nationalism from the time of the British Raj to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today. The Gita (as it is generally known to its friends) occupies eighteen chapters of book 6 of the Mahabharata, an immense (over 100,000…

Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David by Lawrence Wright Knopf, 345 pp., $27.95 As the head of the Irgun insurgency terrorizing British forces in Mandate Palestine, Menachem Begin became an obsession of his British enemy. He seemed a new sort of Jew, the fighting kind, a disciple of Jabotinsky and his vision of a Jewish army rising up in Palestine. The authorities were desperate to capture him, especially after the Irgun blew up Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946, killing ninety-one people, more than two dozen of them British (a warning to vacate the premises had gone unheeded). A wanted poster described Begin as “medium build, long hooked nose, bad teeth,” wearing “horn-rimmed spectacles,” and measuring “5ft. 9in.” In fact, he was about three inches…

To the Editors: Rory Stewart’s “Afghanistan: ‘A Shocking Indictment’” [NYR, November 6] sets forth in some detail much that has gone terribly wrong in Afghanistan in the last thirteen years, often the fault of the United States and its allies. I am sure his sources and those of Anand Gopal, the author of the book Stewart is reviewing, are accurate. Stewart concludes that not only the effort but the philosophy of “improving governance,” which has been guiding the international community’s and also the new president’s efforts in Afghanistan, have failed and should not be pursued anymore. He belittles what progress has been made in Afghanistan. He doesn’t recognize the tremendous gains in life expectancy, in economic growth, in security, in education (yes, there is a shortage of teachers, but progress…

To the Editors: In a recent interesting review of two books on the nature of science [“What Scientists Really Do,” NYR, October 23], Priyamvada Natarajan briefly discusses the role of the theory of relativity in the rate of satellite clocks that circle the earth as part of the GPS system. She notes that the special theory of relativity—which Einstein published in 1905—predicts that moving clocks run slower than identical stationary clocks. This is something that is verified daily when physicists compare the lifetimes of moving unstable particles to the same particles at rest. But there is a second effect—gravitation—which also predicts slower clock rates. The closer to the surface of the earth, the larger the gravitational potential and the slower the clock. When these two effects are added for the…