Innholdsfortegnelse for February 19, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

Defying the Assassin’s Veto

Timothy Garton Ash The massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in Paris on January 7 was an attempt to impose the assassin’s veto. Where the heckler’s veto says merely “I will shout you down,” the assassin’s version is “dare to express that and we will kill you.” Instead of the academic’s metaphorical “publish or perish” we have the Kouachi brothers’ “publish and perish.” In the quarter-century since the fatwa on Salman Rushdie, this has become one of the largest threats to free speech in the West, and certainly the most extreme. Currently, this threat comes mainly from Islamist killers, but the Italian mafia use it too. We must be concerned about the underlying religious and political ideology, but what changes everything is the use of violence to impose your taboos. If…

14 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

Who Is the Pope?

The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope by Austen Ivereigh. Henry Holt, 445 pp., $30.00 A Big Heart Open to God: A Conversation with Pope Francis by Antonio Spadaro, SJ. HarperOne, 150 pp., $17.99 Pope Francis: Untying the Knots by Paul Vallely. Bloomsbury, 227 pp., $20.95 (paper) On December 22, 2014, Pope Francis delivered the traditional papal Christmas speech to the assembled ranks of the Roman Curia. This annual meeting with the staff of the church’s central administration offers popes the opportunity for a stock-taking “state of the union” address. In 2005, his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI had used the occasion to deliver a momentous analysis of the “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” that he believed had distorted understanding of the Second Vatican Council by presenting…

19 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

The Reporter Resists His Government

Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 285 pp., $28.00 In early 2003, James Risen, an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of The New York Times, prepared a story about a covert CIA effort to undermine Iran’s nuclear program. Before publishing it, he informed the CIA of his findings and asked for comment. On April 30, 2003, according to a subsequent Justice Department court filing, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice met with Risen and Jill Abramson, then the Times’s Washington bureau chief. Tenet and Rice urged the Times to hold Risen’s story because, they said, it would “compromise national security” and endanger the life of a particular CIA recruit. (The agent is referred to in the Justice…

18 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

The Bloodiest Urban Revolution

Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune by John Merriman. Basic Books, 327 pp., $29.99 The Great Terror of 1793–1794 is often considered the bloodiest episode in the history of Paris, thanks perhaps to Charles Dickens. By careful count, Robespierre’s Revolutionary Tribunal ordered 2,639 people executed in Paris between April 1793 and July 1794.1 But at least seven times that many were killed in the final week of street fighting in Paris from May 21 to May 28, 1871. What has become known as the Commune of Paris, the subject of John Merriman’s new book, Massacre, was the bloodiest urban revolution of the nineteenth century anywhere. Merriman likens it to the Saint Bartholemew’s Day massacre of Protestants in Paris in 1572 and to the Armenian massacre of 1915.…

16 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

The Republicans: Divided & Scary

Elizabeth Drew As the new Congress gathered in early January, we were treated to news story after news story about how the Republicans, now in control of both chambers for the first time in eight years, were set to prove that they could “govern.” This was more than an exercise in public relations, though it was that as well. Republican leaders knew they had a problem. They may have prevailed in the 2014 elections, but their party was still seen as too “negative” and obstructionist, and Congress’s approval rating had been hovering at all-time lows in the mid-teens. The Republicans urgently needed to present a new and more positive face to the public. Their leadership believed that by the 2016 election they had to appear qualified to occupy the presidency.…

18 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

What Happened in Poland?: An Exchange

To the Editors: Novelist Louis Begley is inaccurate in suggesting that “some fifteen hundred people” were slaughtered and burned in the 1941 massacre at Jedwabne, Poland [“The Good Place in Vicious France,” NYR, December 18, 2014]. Investigation reveals two hundred or a maximum of four hundred. He references Jan T. Gross’s 2001 bestseller, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland,but avoids Gross’s victim count of “1,600,” which is inaccurate also, yet has become iconic, through many reviews in publications with less standing than The New York Review. The previous review in the Review, by historian Istvan Deak [May 31, 2001], expressed caution regarding Gross’s account:“No book of history should be treated as Holy Writ, especially not a book which is based on a limited number of documents.”…

7 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

Harvard

Inventing the Individual The Origins of Western Liberalism Larry Siedentop “A magnificent work of intellectual, psychological and spiritual history. It is hard to decide which is more remarkable: the breadth of learning displayed on almost every page, the infectious enthusiasm that suffuses the whole book, the riveting originality of the central argument or the emotional power and force with which it is deployed.” –David Marquand, New Republic Belknap Press / $35.00 The Poet Edgar Allan Poe Alien Angel Jerome McGann “McGann [wants] to set the record straight, right an imbalance and show why Poe deserves a place beside Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the venerated father and mother of American poetry. His marvelous short book combines old-fashioned ‘close reading’ with a capacious historical and theoretical sense of Poe’s place in American…

2 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

Prodigal Bob Dylan

Dylan’s Never Ending Tour at the Beacon Theatre, New York City, December 1–6, 2014 The Lyrics: Bob Dylan edited by Christopher Ricks, Lisa Nemrow, and Julie Nemrow. Simon and Schuster, 960 pp., $299.00 1. The opening verses of “Tangled Up in Blue” are among the most famous in Bob Dylan’s repertoire. Readers who know them will find themselves singing along: “Early one morning the sun was shining, I was laying in bed/Wondering if she’d changed at all, If her hair was still red.” Pronouns matter in Dylan, especially his “I” and “you,” whose limitless friction, wearing each other away year after year, Dylan’s songs have often so beautifully expressed. But there’s no “you” in “Tangled Up in Blue,” which is, in a way, the point: the unnamed “she” is lost,…

16 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

Building Anne Tyler’s World

Francine Prose A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler. Knopf, 358 pp., $25.95 Anne Tyler’s twentieth novel is set, like most of her work, in a version of Baltimore that is less like the inner-city war zone mapped in The Wire or the jolly freak shows of John Waters than the paintings of Norman Rockwell and the films of Preston Sturges. Tyler’s white, middle-class characters inhabit houses roomy enough for the discarded furniture and the sentimental detritus of earlier generations. Courtships are conducted on front porches, neighbors besiege the bereaved with covered casseroles, clans convene for summer vacations at the shore. Her Baltimore, we may feel, is a place that no longer exists, if it ever did, except in her novels. Yet her fans will recognize it instantly, with…

14 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

The Girl at the Florist’s

Michael Gorra The Emerald Light in the Air by Donald Antrim. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 158 pp., $22.00 “Stay put and don’t piss off the duck.” That’s the last note Reg Barry gives his Puck before lowering him into a hole—in fact inhabited by a duck—for the start of his open-air production ofA Midsummer Night’s Dream; but of course the director has other things to worry about as well. Hermia appears to survive on a diet of “breakfast cereal and amphetamines”; Titania wants Oberon to stop pinching her nipples. Reg tells her that the abuse is right for the scene, even as he wonders about the wisdom of giving himself a part, in his mid-forties, as one of the play’s young lovers. All that “simulated sex with undergraduates” looks risky.…

14 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

Dante on Trial

Robert Pogue Harrison Dante and the Limits of the Law by Justin Steinberg. University of Chicago Press, 231 pp., $40.00 Reading Dante: From Here to Eternityby Prue Shaw. Liveright, 318 pp., $28.95 When the Black Guelfs seized power in Florence in November 1301 through a coup d’etat backed by Pope Boniface VIII, their first order of business was to liquidate their political enemies among the White Guelfs.1 Dante A lighieri, who was away on a diplomatic mission at the time, was one of them. On January 27, 1302, he was found guilty of corruption, extortion, and misuse of public funds during his two-month term as city prior (the highest office in Florentine government) in 1300. After failing to challenge the court order against him, Dante was condemned in absentia to…

16 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

LETTERS

THE JUDGMENT OF LOVECRAFT To the Editors: I was taken aback at the vehemence of Charles Baxter’s screed on the American supernaturalist H.P. Lovecraft [“The Hideous Unknown of H.P. Lovecraft, NYR,December 18, 2014], nominally a review of Leslie S. Klinger’s The New Annotated H.P.Lovecraft. It seems as if Baxter has some kind of personal animus against Lovecraft. I do not have the space to correct Baxter’s numerous errors, distortions, and misconceptions about Lovecraft’s life. He notes that Lovecraft was a “stranger to joy and that he had “the timid shut-in’s phobia of difference, variety, and diversity. In fact, Lovecraft found a great many things to enjoy in life (aesthetic expression, astronomy, chemistry, anthropology, travel, cats, colonial architecture); his wide correspondence—four million words of which survive—put him in touch with an…

6 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

Justice Deferred Is Justice

Jed S. Rakoff Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 365 pp., $29.95 So-called “deferred prosecutions” were developed in the 1930s as a way of helping juvenile offenders. A juvenile who had been charged with a crime would agree with the prosecutor to have his prosecution deferred while he entered a program designed to rehabilitate such offenders. If he successfully completed the program and committed no other crime over the course of a year, the charge would then be dropped. The analogy of a Fortune 500 company to a juvenile delinquent is, perhaps, less than obvious. Nonetheless, beginning in the early 1990s and with increasing frequency thereafter, federal prosecutors began entering into “deferred prosecution” agreements with major corporations and large financial institutions. In the typical arrangement, the government agreed to defer prosecuting the…

14 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

The Subtle Games of Duane Michals

Storyteller: The Photographs of Duane Michals an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 1, 2014–February 16, 2015, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, March 14–June 21, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition by Linda Benedict-Jones, Carnegie Museum of Art/DelMonico/ Prestel, 240 pp., $75.00 ABCDuane: A Duane Michals Primer by Duane Michals. Monacelli, 184 pp., $40.00 Duane Michals: Collector an exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 1, 2014–March 2, 2015 The photographer Duane Michals is a law unto himself. Ina career spanning more than half a century he has worked in both utilitarian black-and-white and luxuriant color, produced slapstick self-portraits, evoked erotic daydreams, pamphleteered against art world fashions, and painted whimsical abstract designs on vintage photographs. You would be in for a disappointment…

14 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

Some Different Ways of Looking at Selma

On November 18, 1964, not long before Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) took over responsibility for the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, J. Edgar Hoover, closet case and cross-dresser, told a group of women journalists visiting FBI headquarters that he considered King “the most notorious liar in the country.” The following day King issued a statement saying that perhaps Hoover had become overwhelmed by the burdens of his office. He sent Hoover a lengthy telegram of reproach, in which he reiterated his criticisms of the bureau, including its inability to secure convictions for crimes against civil rights workers and its failure to make arrests for the tragic deaths of four girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963 or the murder of three civil…

20 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

THE BIRD ON THE CROCODILE’S BACK

The man can’t stay awake. He falls asleep. It’s noon, it’s afternoon, repeatedly he falls in deep, Seated at his desk or in an armchair, as if to try to write a poem meant A flash flood of sleep and drowning on Parnassus in his tent, Or something else equally not good. The guy’s completely gone and sawing wood, Snoring and snorting—until one snort wakes him— And where is he? he can’t think where he is—which shakes him. He’s upside down and he can see The parachute he’s hanging from is tangled high up in a tree. He passes out again and drools. This apparently is one of the Muse’s rules. He hears the pleasant droning of the plane he jumped from flying away, But he’s in his study and…

2 min

The New York Review of Books|February 19, 2015

Libya Against Itself

Nicolas Pelham The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath edited by Peter Coleand Brian McQuinn. Oxford University Press, 416 pp., $49.95 Gentle Islamism? Mahdi al-Herati is sipping his lemon tea in the open-air café beneath the grand Italian porticos of Algiers Square in Tripoli. He seems a little too casual to be either an international jihadi or the elected mayor of the capital city of a country supposedly rescued from Colonel Muammar Qaddafi and sliding into civil war. Still, Herati is both, although he prefers to call himself a Libyan revolutionary. Since becoming mayor last year, he tells me, he has invited his counterparts in Dublin and Rome to “twin” with Tripoli under its new rulers, the group called Libya Dawn. He has taken other steps to counter Libya Dawn’s reputation…

18 min