Innholdsfortegnelse for May-08-14 i The New York Review of Books

In the course of three days in August 1991, during the failed putsch against Gorbachev, the decaying Soviet empire tottered and began to collapse. Some friends and I found ourselves on Lubianskaya Square, across from the headquarters of the fearsome, mighty KGB. A huge crowd was preparing to topple the symbol of that sinister institution—the statue of its founder, Dzerzhinsky, “Iron Felix” as his Bolshevik comrades-in-arms called him. A few daredevils had scaled the monument and wrapped cables around its neck, and a group was pulling on them to ever louder shouts and cries from the assembled throng. Suddenly, a Yeltsin associate with a megaphone appeared out of the blue and directed everyone to hold off, because, he said, when the bronze statue fell, “its head might crash through the…

The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World by George Prochnik Other Press, 390 pp., $27.95 The Grand Budapest Hotel a film directed by Wes Anderson On February 23, 1942, Stefan Zweig and his young wife committed suicide together in Petrópolis, Brazil. The following day, the Brazilian government held a state funeral, attended by President Getulio Vargas. The news spread rapidly around the world, and the couple’s deaths were reported on the front page of The New York Times. Zweig had been one of the most renowned authors of his time, and his work had been translated into almost fifty languages. In the eyes of one of his friends, the novelist Irmgard Keun, “he belonged to those that suffered but who would not and could not…

The Catholic Rubens: Saints and Martyrs by Willibald Sauerländer, translated from the German by David Dollenmayer Getty Research Institute, 311 pp., $45.00 When we visit museums today, not only are the works that we see no longer in settings like those for which they were made, but in many cases the reasons why particular subjects were carved or painted are obscure. The subjects themselves are often unfamiliar, or at least they do not carry for us the kinds of association that they once had for the artists, the patrons, or their contemporaries. This point was tacitly recognized in the development of art history, which began as a process of compiling biographical information about artists and lists of their works. Then, from the middle decades of the nineteenth century, attention was…

The Contest of the Century: The New Era of Competition with China—and How America Can Win by Geoff Dyer Knopf, 308 pp., $26.95 Unbalanced: The Codependency of America and China by Stephen Roach Yale University Press, 326 pp., $32.50 China Goes Global: The Partial Power by David Shambaugh Oxford University Press, 409 pp., $29.95 China Story Yearbook 2013: Civilising China edited by Geremie R. Barmé and Jeremy Goldkorn Canberra: Australian Centre on China in the World, 459 pp., available at www.thechinastory.org In 1890, an undistinguished US Navy captain published a book that would influence generations of strategists. Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 posited that great nations need potent, blue-water navies backed by far-flung naval bases to project power around the globe. His work was…

The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates Ecco, 667 pp., $27.99; $15.99 (paper) Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates Ecco, 482 pp., $26.99 At 667 pages instead of 666, The Accursed is obviously one page too long. Joyce Carol Oates’s extravaganza of demons, vampires, doppelgangers, seduction, possession, murder, and terrible family secrets has been called, by one who should know (Stephen King), “the world’s finest postmodern Gothic novel.” In its pages the devil—or more precisely one of his “satans”—appears in Princeton, New Jersey, in the year 1905 and over the course of fourteen months wreaks havoc on the town’s wealthy and privileged citizens, especially the family of the minister Winslow Slade. When The Accursed was first published last spring, it was widely praised by reviewers (including Francine Prose in these pages). Yet…

The World According to Dick Cheney a film directed by R.J. Cutler and Greg Finton In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir by Dick Cheney, with Liz Cheney Threshold, 565 pp., $16.00 (paper) Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman Penguin, 483 pp., $18.00 (paper) 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars by Kurt Eichenwald Touchstone, 611 pp., $18.00 (paper) 1. I came upon the half-destroyed truck atop a highway overpass outside Fallujah, the cab all shot to hell, the trailer bloodstained and askew, propped at a crazy angle on its blown tires. On the highway below a great black burn scarred the concrete and over it a rust-red slash, the soot and blood marking the spot where, earlier that day in October 2003, the…

To the Editors: Dr. Arnold Relman’s beautiful and tough chronicle [“On Breaking One’s Neck,” NYR, February 6] is a reminder to everyone who has been lucky enough to survive beyond the eighth decade of how frail life can be. His observations on the care he received from doctors, nurses, hospital staff, and his wife and family are very acute and valuable. He provides a list of factors that he feels allowed him to remain alive. He forgets a very important one. In the Massachusetts General Hospital emergency room someone is bound to have said that Dr. Relman had arrived. One does not rapidly forget the editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. I’m sure that helped a lot with his care. I wonder, without taking any merit away from all…

To the Editors: The sympathetic picture entitled Slaves Waiting for Sale, Richmond, Virginia painted by Eyre Crowe that accompanied the article by Drew Gilpin Faust [“The Scholar Who Shaped History,” NYR, March 20] was executed in 1861 while Crowe was in America serving as amanuensis to William Makepeace Thackeray. The two English travelers were headed south by rail and were surprised to hear the first copies in book form of Uncle Tom’s Cabin being hawked on the train (it had earlier appeared in installments). Thackeray refused either to buy or to read the book, having been seriously warned by judicious friends not to commit himself on either side of what was then a volatile issue. Crowe bought a copy on the spot for twenty-five cents and, when the two travelers…

Updike by Adam Begley Harper, 558 pp., $29.99 The Collected Stories: Collected Early Stories, Collected Later Stories by John Updike, edited by Christopher Carduff Library of America, two volumes, 1,949 pp., $75.00 When John Updike was a small boy living at 117 Philadelphia Avenue, Shillington, Berks County, Pennsylvania, with his parents and his maternal grandparents, he would stand on a chair every day after lunch to reach up and get at the “little metal Recipes box, with floral decorations and a red lid,” which stood on top of the zinc-lined, wooden icebox in the kitchen, and which held the family’s cash. He would take six cents from it—a nickel and a penny—so he could buy a Tastykake at Kieffer’s on the way back to his elementary school. This ritual is…

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, translated from the French by Arthur Goldhammer Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 685 pp., $39.95 Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics, isn’t a household name, although that may change with the English-language publication of his magnificent, sweeping meditation on inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Yet his influence runs deep. It has become a commonplace to say that we are living in a second Gilded Age—or, as Piketty likes to put it, a second Belle Époque—defined by the incredible rise of the “one percent.” But it has only become a commonplace thanks to Piketty’s work. In particular, he and a few colleagues (notably Anthony Atkinson at Oxford and Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley) have pioneered statistical techniques that make it possible…

Biology’s Brave New World: The Promise and Perils of the Synbio Revolution by Laurie Garrett Foreign Affairs, November/December 2013 The Principles for the Oversight of Synthetic Biology by the Friends of the Earth US, the International Center for Technology Assessment, and the ETC Group 16 pp., available at www.synbioproject.org The possibility of the deliberate creation of living organisms from elementary materials that are not themselves alive has engaged the human imagination for a very long time. Putting aside Genesis I, which is singularly lacking in any physical details on the bringing forth of life from the waters and the dust, we think immediately of the classical Greek story of the sculptor Pygmalion. Enamored of the unresponsive goddess Aphrodite, he creates an ivory statue of her, which, under the warmth of…

Local Souls by Allan Gurganus Liveright, 344 pp. $25.95 Falls, North Carolina, the setting for the three long stories or novellas that make up Allan Gurganus’s Local Souls, is the kind of place where people end up, come back to, can’t get away from. It has descendants of Confederates who consider themselves aristocrats, new tobacco money that has got old, middle-class, divorced white women stretching child support payments, white professionals, black tobacco workers, and black caddies at the country club, although this microcosm of a new New South has no Latinos. Falls is a farm town, though it has a slum. Falls also has the rural white poor who never dreamed they’d end up living among “the Fallen,” the rich who had their great houses on the River Road until…

Never underestimate the tenacity of libertarianism in contemporary American politics. From the outset of his first term, President Barack Obama dared to take on this strain of American culture by pressing for passage of the Affordable Care Act, which extends health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans—and therefore represents to its critics all the worst that big government has to offer. His opponents fought the bill aggressively in Congress, where they lost. They then turned to the courts, arguing that Congress lacked the power to require people to either purchase health insurance or pay a tax. In essence, they claimed that the federal government could not ask Americans to pitch in for the common good. Again, they lost. And for good reason. In virtually every other developed nation, the idea…

To the Editors: Evelyn Barish’s biography of Paul de Man has its faults, but she deserves a better—and more nearly disinterested—review than the despicable treatment she suffers at the hands of de Man’s old crony Peter Brooks [“The Strange Case of Paul de Man,” NYR, April 3]. Brooks insinuates that Barish’s book found its inspiration in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, a novel (later adapted into a movie) about an amoral confidence man. He lays this conceit at Barish’s door, but Barish is writing not about a fictional character but about a flesh-and-blood personage. As she shows (and as others of us have pointed out and documented over the years), de Man was a cheat, a liar, a forger, a thief, a bigamist, a cad, a swindler, a moocher,…

To the Editors: In his review of Mario Livio’s book Brilliant Blunders [NYR, March 6], Freeman Dyson echoes Livio’s claim that Einstein never called his cosmological constant a “blunder,” and that the statement was the product of the imagination of physicist/cosmologist George Gamow. However, the late Ralph A. Alpher, a student of Gamow who worked with him on what became the Big Bang model, recalled in 1998 to a History of Astronomy Internet Discussion Group that he was with Gamow on the visit to Einstein and indeed the word “blunder” was used to characterize the cosmological constant. Alpher recalled the date as around 1952; Gamow first quoted Einstein in 1956. I discuss this in my book, How Einstein Created Relativity Out of Physics and Astronomy (Springer, 2013). David Topper Senior…

In the end, around seven million Americans signed up for Obamacare by the March 31 deadline, either through the federal exchange or through one of the fourteen exchanges set up by states (plus one in Washington, D.C.) that chose to run their own. That’s the target administration officials hoped for last fall, and considering the enrollment period’s hideous rollout, it came as quite a surprise to most commentators in Washington that it was reached. Republicans and conservatives spent months predicting that few would sign up, and that the law would simply perish of its own Rube Goldberg weight. But the “death spiral” of the Affordable Care Act, so anticipated on the Fox News Channel, failed to materialize. There was quite a rush toward the end, particularly among younger, healthier enrollees,…

Like a flaneur with a magic cane, tender Batyushkov lives at my place— wanders down Zamostie lanes, sniffs a rose, sings Zafna’s praise. Not for a moment believing that we could be separated, I bowed to him: I shake his brightly gloved cold hand in an envious delirium. He smiled at me. “Thank you,” I said, so shy I could not find the words: no one commands such curves of sound, never was there such speech of waves. With oblique words he made us feel the wealth and torments that we share— the buzz of verse-making, brotherhood’s bell and the harmonies of pouring tears. And the mourner of Tasso answered me: “I am not yet used to eulogy; I only cooled my tongue by chance on…

Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade by Walter Kirn Liveright, 255 pp., $25.95 Blood Will Out is an intimate portrait of a professional confidence man. Our hero thinks nothing of assuming false identities, lying strategically, and risking close relationships in order to sustain a life devoted to the art of fabrication. Like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, he comes from a humble background but has high social aspirations. He is motivated by a great “yearning,” a desire to become someone grander than himself. As is true of any successful con artist, he is a scrupulous observer, a careful listener, and a determined flatterer. When he finally does achieve his goals—financial success, esteem, access to worlds formerly closed off to him—he feels vindicated, triumphant,…

FDR and the Jews by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 433 pp., $29.95 FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith by Rafael Medoff David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, 317 pp., $6.99 (e-book) Twenty-odd years ago, I went to the office of the immensely distinguished Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn to ask about objectivity in historical writing. Tolerating my sophomoric questions (in my defense, I was in fact a sophomore), the great man explained that historiography had three phases: heroic history, in which individuals are put at the center and imbued with moral qualities; whig history, in which the personalities recede and the flow of events is presented through a chain of inevitable causation; and a final, neutral type—he called it tragic history—in which…

The Event In February of this year, after a long career of relative obscurity in the ivory tower, I suddenly became notorious.1 In 2010, Penguin India had published a book of mine, The Hindus: An Alternative History, which won two awards in India: in 2012, the Ramnath Goenka Award,2 and in 2013, the Colonel James Tod Award.3 But within months of its publication in India, a then-eighty-one-year-old retired headmaster named Dina Nath Batra, a proud member of the far-right organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), had brought the first of a series of civil and criminal actions against the book, arguing that it violated Article 295a of the Indian Penal Code, which forbids “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class” of citizens. After fighting the case…

To the Editors: As an Englishman, I gained new insights into the “West Lothian Question” and other constitutional issues for the United Kingdom as indirectly put in novel context by Jonathan Freedland in his article about Scottish independence [NYR, March 20]. But three issues appeared to be missing from his treatise. 1) How will the social welfare policies still in force north of the border survive independence when English subsidies from taxation of the rampant capitalism in the southeast of England are no longer available? 2) As Lowland Scots have always tended to side with the English in the intertwined histories of the two countries, how will their split allegiances affect the forthcoming poll? 3) What would the poll result be if the whole of the UK voted on Scottish…

To the Editors: In his review of a book by French historian Jacques Semelin [“Jews : How Vichy Made It Worse,” NYR, March 6] Robert O. Paxton writes: This passage concerning my book calls for a response, which I propose to do in two distinct ways. First, I would like to state formally that Semelin’s appraisal, which Paxton adopts as his own, is defamatory. “Rehabilitating” a regime implies not only a desire to sweep under the carpet its sins, but also adherence, however minimal, to its ideology, as well as an intention to promote its ideas. I am a historian and a rabbi of French origin living in Israel. I have worked for almost thirty years at Yad Vashem, the World Center for Holocaust Research, where I created French-language seminars…