Innholdsfortegnelse for May 21, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

MARIANNE BORUCH ’s most recent poetry collection is Cadaver, Speak. Her poem in this issue will appear in her forthcoming collection, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing, to be published in August 2016. G.W. BOWERSOCK is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His latest book is The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam. WILLIAM DALRYMPLE ’s books include The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857 and Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839–42. He is codirector of the Jaipur Literature Festival. ROBERT DARNTON is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian at Harvard. His new book is Censors at Work: How States Shaped Literature. ELIZABETH DREW is a regular contributor to The…

Buddhism Along the Silk Road, 5th–8th Century an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, June 2, 2012–February 10, 2013. Online catalog available at www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2012/buddhism Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist Sculpture of Early Southeast Asia, Fifth to Eighth Century an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, April 14–July 27, 2014. Catalog of the exhibition by John Guy. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 317 pp., $65.00 “People of distant places with diverse customs,” wrote a Chinese Buddhist monk in the mid-seventh century, “generally designate the land that they admire as India.” Xuanzang was a scholar, traveler, and translator. When he wrote these words in the seventh century, he had just returned from an epic seventeen-year, six-thousand-mile overland pilgrimage and manuscript-gathering expedition to the great Indian centers of…

The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity by Peter Brown. Harvard University Press, 262 pp., $24.95 Faith and money lie at the core of all religious institutions, and although faith can exist without money, religious institutions cannot. It was hardly surprising that the French theologian Alfred Loisy declared in 1902 that although Jesus proclaimed the coming of the celestial kingdom, it was the church that actually arrived (“Jésus annonçait le Royaume et c’est l’Église qui est venue”). His insights here and elsewhere led ultimately to his excommunication, but he was right to emphasize the transition from the otherworldly aspirations of early Christianity to the accumulation of ecclesiastical wealth. Jesus famously advised a rich young man to sell what he possessed and give to the poor,…

To the Editors: John Quincy Adams was indeed intellectual and austere, if not haughty and cold, and certainly clueless about his neglected and needy wife Louisa, as Susan Dunn points out [“Angry, Icy, Enlightened Adams,” NYR, June 5, 2014]. But a poem written in the hand of the former president, found in the Library of Congress, shows the “Angry, Icy, Enlightened Adams” was also capable of personal passion—though he kept it private. Adams’s muse was Anna Maria Thornton, the widow of William Thornton, the English polymath who designed the US Capitol. Adams did not think much of Mr. Thornton, the first superintendent of the US Patent Office. With typically severe precision, he regarded Thornton, who was admittedly eccentric, as a jackass. “He is a man of some learning and much…

On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks. Knopf, 397 pp., $27.95 For more than a decade, I have taught a seminar on the literature of medicine for Harvard freshmen. We begin with Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, read stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Kafka, and William Carlos Williams, and then Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars. His portrayals of a skilled surgeon with Tourette’s syndrome and an accomplished autistic artist with eidetic memory—the ability to “see” an object that is no longer present—cause the students to rethink “abnormal” as meaning only “abject.” This year, I also assigned the class Sacks’s recent essay “My Own Life.”1 He had received a diagnosis of metastatic melanoma and wrote that his survival is likely measured in months. He described himself as of “vehement…

What Caused the Crime Decline? a report by Oliver Roeder, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and Julia Bowling, with a foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz and an executive summary by Inimai Chettiar. Brennan Center for Justice, NYU Law School, 134 pp., available at www.brennancenter.org For too long, too many judges have been too quiet about an evil of which we are a part: the mass incarceration of people in the United States today. It is time that more of us spoke out. The basic facts are not in dispute. More than 2.2 million people are currently incarcerated in US jails and prisons, a 500 percent increase over the past forty years. Although the United States accounts for about 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison…

When the Facts Change: Essays, 1995–2010 by Tony Judt, edited and with an introduction by Jennifer Homans. Penguin, 386 pp., $29.95 1. More than a decade ago, I met Tony Judt for the first time. We drank whiskey in the lobby of a smart London hotel. He looked a little out of place: the scholar among the expensively dressed international businessmen and women, a visiting American professor who was also a former Londoner, born and raised in some of the city’s shabbiest neighborhoods. Only a few months earlier, in October 2003, The New York Review had published Judt’s best-known or, more accurately, most notorious essay, “Israel: The Alternative.” There he had declared the Middle East peace process dead, and the prospect of a two-state solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict buried…

Max Beerbohm has always been a minority taste. “There are only fifteen hundred readers in England and one thousand in America who understand what I am about,” he estimated. This did not dismay him. On the verge of being forgotten, he always seems to have the good fortune of being rediscovered and championed by those with a taste for invigorating prose. One such enthusiast, the critic F.W. Dupee, wrote: Rereading Beerbohm one gets caught up in the intricate singularity of his mind, all of a piece yet full of surprises. . . . That his drawings and parodies should survive is no cause for wonder. One look at them, or into them, and his old reputation is immediately re-established: that whim of iron, that cleverness amounting to genius. What is…

From then on Katrina fiercing up from the get-go any girly girl named that. Before too, whole phrases incisor-sharp: fuck you, you fucking fuck! all down the front. New Orleans, black t-shirt sold on the street for mischief and joy years back, pre-nightmare. One has to respect options, I said, three parts of speech pressed into service. Rage on fabric going, gone redundant. End of the World, take that! A thing to slip over your head. Surely piles of them mouthing off on carts to wild up later. Ever after. Day of days. Torn wounded muck of it twisting out to sea, great biblical sweeps: shipwrecked porches, car parts in flight, dogs every bent shape of howl and horrific, dresser drawers jet-streamed smithereens beside warblers battered ancient into once made…

Dear reader dearest inscrutable listener inscrutably harking or regrettably more likely not harking except in that chamber in me that posits you with me every moment I’m speaking or trying to speak Dear reader who may or may not be with me I still remember how once you weren’t here at all so I’d make up a mythical listener and there were good sides to that because I myself could choose the degree of your presence the level of your attention from zero to fifty but then before I knew it you were somehow actually with me though it’s still a mystery as to why you decided to join me but mystery or not in another before I knew it the make-believe between us suddenly altered to your not being…