Innholdsfortegnelse for January 8, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

The poet Mark Strand, a contributor to these pages, died on November 29. 1. JOSEPH BRODSKY The following was given by Joseph Brodsky as an introduction to a reading by Mark Strand at the American Academy of Poets in New York City on November 4, 1986. It’s a tall order to introduce Mark Strand because it requires estrangement from what I like very much, from something to which I owe many moments of almost physical happiness—or to its mental equivalent. I am talking about his poems—as well as about his prose, but poems first. A man is, after all, what he loves. But one always feels cornered when asked to explain why one loves this or that person, and what for. In order to explain it—which inevitably amounts to explaining…

Brando’s Smile: His Life, Thought, and Work by Susan L. Mizruchi Norton, 469 pp., $27.95 1. I was born in 1971, the year before The Godfather and Last Tango in Paris were released, so the first film I saw featuring Marlon Brando was Superman in 1978, in which he plays Jor-El, Superman’s biological father. It was not his finest hour: according to legend, he refused to learn his lines, instead reading them off the diaper of the infant Superman before he laid him in his spiky escape cradle and blasted him off to earth. I next caught up with Brando, the subject of Susan Mizruchi’s new biography, Brando’s Smile, in the 1990 mafia spoof The Freshman. In the film, Brando plays Carmine Sabatini, a dead ringer for Don Corleone in…

Jealousy by Peter Toohey Yale University Press, 257 pp., $27.50 Thank You for This Moment: A Story of Love, Power, and Betrayal by Valérie Trierweiler, translated from the French by Clémence Sebag London: Biteback, 298 pp., £18.99 Love makes the world go round, says the poet, while the cynic says it’s money; and Peter Toohey, professor of classics at the University of Calgary, constructs an entertaining argument for jealousy being the wellspring of a much greater part of our emotional lives, and of a larger proportion of literature, law, and daily existence, than we may have thought. Elsewhere, Professor Toohey has also worked up boredom and melancholy; in those books as in this brisk survey, he proposes some benefits of emotions usually considered to be negative: jealousy is “a potent…

Hack Attack: The Inside Story of How the Truth Caught Up With Rupert Murdoch by Nick Davies Faber and Faber, 430 pp., $27.00 1. In 2003, Andy Coulson was appointed editor of the News of the World, the famous or infamous London Sunday newspaper that in the middle of the last century was the best-selling paper on earth, for which Winston Churchill long ago wrote regularly, and that is mentioned in passing by Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and Evelyn Waugh. Its staple had always been salacious court reports and the like, feeding a characteristically English taste of genteel prurience, but it had become much nastier and more brutal in recent decades. Coulson was obliged to resign his editorship in early 2007 but months later he was hired by David Cameron,…

To the Editors: Alan S. Blinder’s review of Jeff Madrick’s Seven Bad Ideas asks: “What’s the Matter with Economics?” [NYR, December 18, 2014]. Blinder concludes that except for some right-wingers outside the “mainstream” and politicians’ refusal to accept economists’ recommendations, little is the matter and Seven Bad Ideas constitutes “serial exaggeration.” I wish that it was so, but economists’ thinking, based on an ill-conceived view of human behavior and addressed to the wrong problem, is a powerful force in policy circles. Blinder’s textbook, written with William Baumol, is the standard for the mainstream. Both are extraordinarily good economists, liberal and not doctrinaire. I have used their text myself when teaching. Economists, however, have been unable to forecast accurately based on the exposition put forth in B&B and most texts. For…

The Laughing Monsters by Denis Johnson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 228 pp., $25.00 1.  The Laughing Monsters is a curious novel. Denis Johnson describes it as a “literary thriller,” which it technically is. A tale of derring-do, chicanery, and treason, it feels particularly apposite in the immediate geopolitical moment. Its main characters are parasites on the frenzy accompanying the current scramble for Africa. But it is an elusive work. It reminded me of those novelty palm-card portraits of Jesus whose holographic eyes close, open, and follow you around depending on how you tilt the image. Which is to say that I think there are two books here, unhappily married, but each meriting serious review. It’s a surprise, what Johnson has undertaken this time. Johnson isn’t easy to place as a…

Monday, October 27 Something terrible has happened, something big, and now, at 10 o’clock on a bright late-October morning here we are, members of a press gang piling into a car in Mexico City, on the search. We hustle our gear into the car and lock ourselves into the seatbelts eagerly. The story! We are bound for the state of Guerrero, southwest of Mexico City, and for the normal rural—teachers’ college—in the town of Ayotzinapa. Everyone knows what happened; no one understands why. One month ago, on September 26, forty-three students were abducted in one of the poorest states in the Mexican republic, from one of its very poorest public vocational schools—an all-male teachers’ college. The nearby town of Iguala, where the crime took place, is not huge (pop. 130,000),…

To the Editors: As Michael Chabon’s essay about the Brown Sugar Kitchen [“Soul Pleasure,” NYR, November 6, 2014] makes plain, Oakland is a very special place. I would like to remind Mr. Chabon that one of the things Oaklanders really care about is their own particular neighborhood (like many cities, Oakland’s geography is subdivided by neighborhoods that each bear their own special characteristics). The joke about Oakland’s laurels was a good one, but come on, Mr. Chabon: everybody knows that the Laurel is MacArthur Boulevard between 35th and High Street. And there’s a lot happening there, too. Stephen Hassett Reverend St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church Orinda, California…

Forty years ago, in the days of “white flight” from American cities to the suburbs, Ferguson, Missouri was a “sundowner town”—black people did not drive through it at night because they knew they would be harassed by the white police force. Ferguson is now 65 percent black and low income, but its police force is still predominantly white and working class, approximately fifty-three white officers and three black officers. Although black people no longer sneak through town, the police treat young black men as either trespassers or ex- and future prisoners. The hip hop artist T-Dubb-O said that black males throughout the St. Louis area know how old they are from the tone of the police. “When you’re eight or nine, it’s, ‘yo, where are you going?’ and when it’s…

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande Metropolitan, 282 pp., $26.00 In his newest and best book, the surgeon Atul Gawande lets us have it right between the eyes: no matter how careful we are or healthful our habits, like everyone else, we will die, and probably after a long period of decline and debility. The average American, he tells us, spends a year or more disabled and living in a nursing home. Furthermore, the medical system will be of very little help at the end. In Gawande’s words: Gawande wants us to know that the tragedy of old age and death cannot be fixed by modern medicine, so we better find some other way to deal with it. He divides his book into eight…

How did a constitutional law professor, vocal critic of President George W. Bush’s war on terror, and Nobel Peace Prize winner come to oversee an unprecedented campaign of secret targeted killing with drones, as well as the most extensive dragnet surveillance that the world has ever seen? While some have blamed President Barack Obama’s personal failings, and others have argued that these acts vindicate Bush’s policies, both explanations miss a deeper reality. These programs are best understood not as unique to Obama or Bush, or even the United States, but as reflections of how the world is changing in ways that threaten not only fundamental human rights to life and privacy, but the essence of democracy itself. As such, they raise questions that will not go away under this president…

Nora Webster by Colm Tóibín Scribner, 373 pp., $27.00 Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster has been billed as a kind of companion volume to his last novel, Brooklyn. Both are stories of women raised at midcentury in small-town Ireland, where they were not expected to have, much less act upon, desires of their own. Brooklyn’s young Eilis Lacey goes dutifully from the confines of her province to work in America, where, after a time, she comes to appreciate the freedom of emigration, though not without later coming to understand its cost. Nora Webster is a rival study of a woman who stayed put into middle age and found, through marriage, shelter from the intrusiveness of local busybodies. After two decades of such quasi privacy, widowhood has left her once more vulnerable…

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, translated from the Italian and with an introduction by Wayne A. Rebhorn Norton, 947 pp., $39.95 What was he supposed to do? His father, who held a position in an important Florentine banking firm, expected him, perfectly reasonably, to follow in his footsteps. But Giovanni Boccaccio, who was born in or near the Tuscan town of Certaldo in 1313, dreamed of being a poet. When he was seven, before he had even seen a book of poetry, he was, or so he claims, already writing verses. Childhood friends nicknamed him “the poet.” His father was kind and indulgent—though a bastard, little Giovanni was quickly legitimized and given a proper education—but he was not inclined to be reckless. Poets generally starved. Giovanni could study Dante as…

Ardor by Roberto Calasso, translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 420 pp., $35.00 Every year, on a certain Tuesday in October, worshipers of the Golden Goddess, Paidi Talli, gather in a grove of trees somewhere outside the small town of Vizianagaram in southern India. Which grove is chosen depends on the goddess, who will have appeared to her main priest in a dream and announced to him: “I am growing as a tamarind tree in such and such a place.” Always the instructions are specific and detailed. They lovingly apply healing turmeric to the goddess-tree, which (or, rather, whom) they then cut down after exposing her roots. She is carried into the town and lies there, in the street, worshiped by passersby, fermenting internally, and…

Naomi Klein has posted on her website a reply to Elizabeth Kolbert's review of her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, which was scheduled to appear, along with a reply by Kolbert, in the next issue of The New York Review. Under the circumstances, the NYR is posting both letters here in advance of publication.—The Editors To the Editors: According to Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of my book This Changes Everything [NYR, December 4, 2014] humans are too selfish to respond effectively to the climate crisis. “Here’s my inconvenient truth,” she writes, “when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the…

To the Editors: A supercilious review by Mr. Ian Jack of my book The Pity of Partition [NYR, October 23, 2014] has been brought to my attention. Its tone and substance will come as no surprise to those who have come across Mr. Jack’s superficial reporting on India or his ill-informed opinions on the great Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore (The Guardian, May 7, 2011). The publication of his review does some disservice to another important South Asian author, Saadat Hasan Manto, who is the subject of my book. Mr. Jack begins with a hackneyed retelling of Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh,” the one story that is familiar to those with dangerously little learning about Manto and the partition of India. What follows is a summary of Manto’s life drawing…

Grand Design: Pieter Coecke van Aelst and Renaissance Tapestry an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 8, 2014–January 11, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Elizabeth Cleland Metropolitan Museum of Art, 401 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Everyone who was anyone in the sixteenth-century art world liked Pieter Coecke van Aelst. The skilled artisans who wove tapestries and crafted stained-glass windows eagerly used his designs. The greatest patrons paid happily through the nose for the immense tapestries, eight or nine to a series, in which Coecke and those who executed his designs told biblical and classical stories, put the cardinal vices on parade, or celebrated the victories of great men. Monarchs who hated one another—for example, those bitter lifelong enemies King Francis…

To the Editors: Judge Jed S. Rakoff’s article “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty” [NYR, November 20, 2014] is spot on, but doesn’t go far enough. True, we have a federal plea system, not a trial system. True, to call the process “plea bargaining” is a cruel misnomer. There is nothing here remotely like fair bargaining between equal parties with equal resources or equal information. The prosecutors’ power—as Judge Rakoff describes—is extraordinary, far surpassing that of prosecutors of years past, and in most cases, far surpassing the judge’s. Judge John Gleeson, a federal judge of the Eastern District of New York, made this clear during a case involving a charge for which there is a mandatory minimum sentence.1 As a result of the prosecutor’s decision to charge the defendant with an…

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk an opera by Dmitri Shostakovich, directed by Graham Vick Metropolitan Opera, New York City, November 10–November 29, 2014 Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II play by Christopher Marlowe, edited and directed by Michael Boyd Theatre for a New Audience, New York City, November 1, 2014–January 4, 2015 Two especially exciting productions of works rarely performed here—Dmitri Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and Christopher Marlowe’s two-part drama Tamburlaine the Great—converged recently in New York. Jubilantly expansive as each was in its expressive means, each in its way posed questions about how the horrors of history are somehow transmuted into the exuberance of art. Each also obliquely instilled an eerie consciousness of these works as messages displaced in time, sending out signals originally aimed at spectators in…

Frank Gehry an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, October 8, 2014–January 26, 2015, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 13, 2015–January 3, 2016 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Aurélien Lemonier and Frédéric Migayrou, with Eliza Culea Paris: Centre Pompidou, 256 pp., €42.00 (to be published in the US by Prestel in February 2015) Frank Gehry an exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, October 20, 2014–March 16, 2015 Frank Gehry: The Fondation Louis Vuitton edited by Frédéric Migayrou Paris: Fondation d’enterprise Louis Vuitton/Orléans: Éditions HYX, 149 pp., €55.00 The Fondation Louis Vuitton by Frank Gehry: A Building for the Twenty-First Century edited by Anne-Line Roccati Paris: Flammarion, 237 pp., $50.00 (paper) (distributed in the US by Rizzoli) Fondation Louis Vuitton/Frank Gehry by Yves Marchand…

Why the Germans? Why the Jews? Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust by Götz Aly, translated from the German by Jefferson Chase Metropolitan, 290 pp., $30.00 The historian George Mosse liked to tell a hypothetical story: if someone had predicted in 1900 that within fifty years the Jews of Europe would be murdered, one possible response would have been: “Well, I suppose that is possible. Those French or Russians are capable of anything.” Indeed, the wave of pogroms in Russia in the 1880s and the Dreyfus Affair that consumed France in the 1890s stood in stark contrast to the situation of Jews in Germany, who at that point enjoyed the greatest degree, anywhere in the world, of assimilation, social mobility, and access to preeminent positions in business,…

Flora Illustrata: A Celebration of Botanical Masterworks an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, November 15, 2014–February 22, 2015 Flora Illustrata: Great Works from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden edited by Susan M. Fraser and Vanessa Bezemer Sellers New York Botanical Garden/ Yale University Press, 296 pp., $50.00 Botanical gardens, like film stars, have survived by reinventing themselves. Their persistence has been most remarkable. In America, they are linked to big cities for which, like orchestras and libraries, they are items of civic pride. Up and down France, no fewer than eighty-eight sites still class themselves as botanical gardens or public arboretums. In Germany, they number more than a hundred, including several linked to locally based universities, frequent holders nowadays of the…

To the Editors: In “The Mysterious World of the Deaf” [NYR, November 20, 2014], Gavin Francis has provided a scientifically informed and empathic discussion of a critical decision facing parents of deaf children: whether or not to insert cochlear implants to provide the child’s brain with auditory information. In many cases, early implantation enables the child to eventually understand and produce spoken language. But as Francis notes, “15 to 20 percent of recipients gain little benefit.” In addition, for those who are benefited, a prolonged period of audiological training is generally necessary. Francis also underlines the importance of early exposure to language, but with regard to hearing parents he seems to limit the argument to spoken language. As a psycholinguist, I would like to make a plea for providing all…

To the Editors: There is a small error in Ian Jack’s excellent article on the Scottish referendum and beyond, “How the Scots Are Still Scaring Britain” [NYR, November 6, 2014]. One of the “Yes-voting areas” is named as East Dunbartonshire. As Ian Jack will doubtless know, this should have read West Dunbartonshire. They may be close neighbors but the contrasts are stark. Much of East Dunbartonshire consists of affluent suburbs and dormitory settlements of Glasgow. West Dunbartonshire meanwhile still suffers from postindustrial blight and its attendant social problems. To illustrate: in the 2008–2010 Scottish Local Authorities’ league table of life expectancy for males at age sixty-five, East Dunbartonshire ranks first out of thirty-two. West Dunbartonshire is twenty-ninth. As Ian Jack pointed out, “the Yes vote...did best where people were poorest.”…