Innholdsfortegnelse for April 23, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

MARCIA ANGELL is a Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. COLIN B. BAILEY is the Director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which comprise the De Young and the Legion of Honor. His book Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris was awarded the Mitchell Prize for the best art history book of 2002–2003. ANDREW BUTTERFIELD is President of Andrew Butterfield Fine Arts. He is the author of The Sculptures of Andrea del Verrocchio, among other books. CALEB CRAIN is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation and a novel, Necessary Errors. ZOË HELLER is the author of Everything You Know, Notes on a Scandal, and…

Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces from Florence Cathedral an exhibition at the Museum of Biblical Art, New York City, February 20–June 14, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Timothy Verdon and Daniel M. Zolli. Museum of Biblical Art/Giles, 200 pp., $49.95 The Museum of Biblical Art, lodged in a relatively small space on Broadway near Lincoln Center, is now showing nine sculptures by Donatello, one of the greatest of all Renaissance artists. Never before have so many of his best works been shown together in the United States. Among the works on view is Donatello’s large sculpture of the Old Testament prophet Habakkuk. “Speak, damn you, speak!” Donatello, we are told, repeatedly shouted at the statue while carving it. The dream of a statue that can…

The Audience a play by Peter Morgan, directed by Stephen Daldry, at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, New York City, March 8–June 28, 2015 “When a monarch can bless, it is best that he should not be touched,” Walter Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution. “It should be evident that he does no wrong. He should not be brought too closely to real measurement. He should be aloof and solitary.” The impulse behind this advice was less worshipful than shrewd. Monarchy, Bagehot understood, was a magic act; its glamor and beauty—its ability to enlist “the credulous obedience of enormous masses”—could be sustained only as long as the masses were kept at a safe distance from the smoke and mirrors: Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you…

The Devils’ Alliance: Hitler’s Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941 by Roger Moorhouse. Basic Books, 382 pp., $29.99 In the vast literature about Stalin and Hitler during World War II, little is said about their being allies for twentytwo months. That is more than an odd chapter in the history of that war, and its meaning deserves more attention than it has received. Two factors were involved in this neglect. One was that after Hitler chose to conquer Russia he did not succeed; Stalin emerged as one of the supreme victors of World War II. The other was the Western Powers’ relative lack of interest in Eastern Europe. Yet the war broke out in 1939 because of Eastern Europe, as a result of the British (and French) decision to oppose the German…

As the iceberg shears off the submarine periscope, the noise is less groan, more wild animal shriek. “Trust me,” said the captain piloting toward gunfire to see what the Russians are up to these days. The sea ice resembles a cracked white lung steadily swelling then sinking as high tide fades away. Already birds and barnacles and butterflies are shifting their habitats poleward, the eelgrass and jellyfish will be fine, but the basements of coastal cities will begin to flood, an inch at a time. The polar bear at the zoo makes the child start to cry: why doesn’t he move? Animals who cannot acclimate to shifting conditions engender scientific argument over what breaks first: the heart or the brain. In the heart of the Arctic, underwater microphones listen for…

Life After Faith: The Case for Secular Humanism by Philip Kitcher. Yale University Press, 175 pp., $25.00 So far, one of the chief lessons the twenty-first century has taught us is that you can’t deduce anything from what century it is. President Obama likes to denounce Vladimir Putin’s power politics in Ukraine as belonging to the nineteenth century, but Putin seems to have no problem conducting a nineteenth-century foreign policy in the year 2014. Likewise, ISIS’s beheadings of “infidels” evoke the seventh century, and West Africans living in terror of Ebola are reenacting the Black Death of the fourteenth. To say that these things should not exist today is itself a kind of primitive incantation, which attempts to banish as historical things that every day prove themselves utterly contemporary. A…

The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses by Kevin Birmingham. Penguin, 417 pp., $29.95 1. One small scene from the annals of heroic modernism is the moment when, in the winter of 1921, the French novelist and critic Valery Larbaud gave the world’s first-ever talk on James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, at Shakespeare & Company, an Anglophone bookstore and lending library in Paris, run by a young American woman called Sylvia Beach. The book had still not been published— and Joyce was not well known. No critic had examined his work in depth, and not many of even the most literary people in England or America had heard of him. But in the last two or three years, Larbaud explained, Joyce had acquired an “extraordinary notoriety”— he had…

Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker by Thomas Kunkel. Random House, 384 pp., $30.00 In 1942 The New Yorker published Joseph Mitchell’s profile of a homeless man in Greenwich Village named Joe Gould, whose claim to notice—the thing that separated him from other sad misfits—was “a formless, rather mysterious book” he was known to be writing called “An Oral History of Our Time,” begun twenty-six years earlier and already, at nine million words, “eleven times as long as the Bible.” Twenty-two years later, in 1964, the magazine published another piece by Mitchell called “Joe Gould’s Secret” that ran in two parts, and that drew a rather less sympathetic and a good deal more interesting portrait of Gould. Mitchell revealed what he had kept back in the profile—that…

1. Nothing is more crucial to the survival and independence of organisms—be they elephants or protozoa—than the maintenance of a constant internal environment. Claude Bernard, the great French physiologist, said everything on this matter when, in the 1850s, he wrote, “La fixité du milieu intérieur est la condition de la vie libre.” Maintaining such constancy is called homeostasis. The basics of homeostasis are relatively simple but miraculously efficient at the cellular level, where ion pumps in cell membranes allow the chemical interior of cells to remain constant, whatever the vicissitudes of the external environment. More complex monitoring systems are demanded when it comes to ensuring homeostasis in multicellular organisms—animals, and human beings, in particular. Homeostatic regulation is accomplished by the development of special nerve cells and nerve nets (plexuses) scattered…

The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me: An Aristocratic Family, a High-Society Scandal and an Extraordinary Legacy by Sofka Zinovieff. Harper, 436 pp., $35.00 It was an oddity of growing up in the small Berkshire town of Faringdon in the 1950s that Lord Berners’s name was often mentioned. He was, in a way, a part of the landscape. A tall slender tower on a hill at the edge of the town was the goal of all our childhood walks, its red-brick walls rising scarily blank to a high-up viewing chamber and Gothic crown that showed above the surrounding pines. This was Lord Berners’s Folly, said to be the last great folly built in England, and stridently opposed by the town when it was first planned in 1934. Before…

Havel: A Life by Michael Žantovský. Grove, 543 pp., $30.00 Few people have been better positioned to write about Václav Havel than Michael Žantovský. He had known Havel since the mid-1980s, and was his press secretary, spokesman, and adviser for two and a half years, from early 1990 to mid-1992. During that time, he says, he spent more time with Havel than he did with his own family. In 1992, as Czechoslovakia slid inexorably toward separation, Žantovský left his position (for reasons I will get into later) and, with Havel’s blessing, went on to a distinguished career of his own, first as ambassador to the United States for the new Czech Republic, then as a senator in Prague (where he chaired the Committee on Foreign Relations and sponsored the country’s…

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. Grove, 300 pp., $26.00 After her father died in 2007, Helen Macdonald, a historian and naturalist at Cambridge University, began to dream about a goshawk she had encountered several years before. A concerned citizen had found the hawk unconscious—evidently the hawk had flown into a fence and knocked herself out—and had brought her, in a box, to a bird-of-prey center where Macdonald was then working. Macdonald and her coworkers dimmed the lights. They opened the container: A short scuffle, and then out into the gloom, her grey crest raised and her barred chest feathers puffed up into a meringue of aggression and fear, came a huge old female goshawk. Old because her feet were gnarled and dusty, her eyes a deep, fiery orange,…

Legacies of the War on Poverty edited by Martha J. Bailey and Sheldon Danziger. Russell Sage, 309 pp., $39.95 (paper) Although an accurate estimate of how the poverty rate has changed since 1964 would show that we are much closer to achieving President Lyndon Johnson’s original goal of eliminating poverty than most readers of this journal probably believe, it would not tell us how effective specific antipoverty programs have been. The poverty rate could have declined despite the War on Poverty, not because of it. Assessing specific strategies for reducing poverty is the main task that Martha Bailey and Sheldon Danziger take on in Legacies of the War on Poverty. When Johnson initiated the War on Poverty, he reportedly said that its political success depended on avoiding handouts. The initial…

America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill. Random House, 512 pp., $28.00 Steven Brill has achieved the seemingly impossible—written an exciting book about the American health system. In his account of the passage of the Affordable Care Act (now known as Obamacare), he manages to transform a subject that usually befuddles and bores into a political thriller. There was reason to think he might pull it off; his lengthy 2013 Time magazine exposé of the impact of medical bills on ordinary people was engrossing. But his success also owes much to the Bob Woodward method of writing best sellers about government policy: interviews with hundreds of insiders, many anonymous, some evidently willing to talk to him to increase…

Manet Paints Monet: A Summer in Argenteuil by Willibald Sauerländer, translated from the German by David Dollenmayer. Getty Research Institute, 79 pp., $19.95 Online articles and blogs, and the streaming of lectures, have placed the last nails into the coffin of the small art book devoted to an illustrated talk by an eminent scholar, accessible to specialists and general readers alike. The Walter Neurath Memorial Lectures and the Council of the Frick Lecture Series are two such casualties (the former’s demise in 2000 preceded the Internet Age). And so the Getty Research Institute is to be commended for commissioning David Dollenmayer’s fine translation of Willibald Sauerländer’s Manet Malt Monet: Ein Sommer in Argenteuil, a lecture given in Munich in the summer of 2004, published by Verlag C.H. Beck of that…

‘SHAKESPEARE IN TEHRAN’ To the Editors: I am sorry to see an article by my colleague Professor Stephen Greenblatt in your journal titled “Shakespeare in Tehran” [NYR, April 2] whose content is a departure from the views he expressed while he was in Iran. Thus, I am somewhat bewildered by the article especially regarding some of what I believe to be unfounded or exaggerated claims about Iran and Iranians. Regarding the less important issue, meaning his flawed characterization of my personality and my writings (without mentioning my name), all I need to say is that his quotes were taken out of context from my articles. The central theme of my writings that he alluded to is the injustice of the sanctions imposed on the Iranian civilians largely due to the…

Believer: My Forty Years in Politics by David Axelrod. Penguin, 509 pp., $35.00 In a debate before the 2008 New Hampshire primary, the suddenly embattled Hillary Clinton—finally recognizing the threat posed to her candidacy by the upstart junior senator from Illinois—had something to say about the stirring promises of transformative post-partisan change he’d been making. She said she’d been fighting for change all her life in politics but cautioned: “We don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.” David Axelrod, the Chicago political consultant who orchestrated the themes of Barack Obama’s campaign and coined its rapturous slogan “Yes We Can,” immediately pounced on the dose of dour realism Clinton had just delivered. “I recognized the opportunity that Hil lary had handed us,”…

Benjamin Netanyahu has won again. He will have no difficulty putting together a solid right-wing coalition. It’s true that his erstwhile ally and present enemy, Moshe Kahlon, a relatively moderate Likudnik who now heads his own party, Kulanu, holds the balance of power between the left and right blocs in his hands; but there’s no reason to think that he’ll refrain from joining the Netanyahu government, probably as finance minister. With Kahlon’s party, the Likud and its hard-core satellites have fifty-four of the 120 Knesset seats. The so-called left, led by the Zionist Union of Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni (which is really somewhere in the center-right) and including the one true leftist party, Meretz (five seats) and the Joint List of Arab Parties, can muster forty-two seats. In the…

Outline by Rachel Cusk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 249 pp., $26.00 1. Rachel Cusk’s new novel, Outline, has been praised as a fresh direction, perhaps an artistic advance from her previous work. Her earlier novels are well written, conventional, and selfrevealing; and Outline is well written, arty, and reticent. She has written seven novels before it, receiving a Whitbread Prize for her first, Saving Agnes, and was shortlisted for later ones. She has also written three controversial memoirs. One is a travel book about Italy that brought her the menace of lawsuits (The Last Supper); the other two recount her experiences of motherhood (A Life’s Work) and then divorce (Aftermath). In both of those books she detailed her personal views as an apostate from received opinions and brought down vicious…

Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels by Henry Roth, with an introduction by Joshua Ferris. Liveright, 1,279 pp., $39.95 When Henry Roth’s debut novel, Call It Sleep, was published in 1934, critics judged it second as a work of fiction, and first as a work of anthropology. An autobiographical account of immigrant Jewish life on the Lower East Side, the book was praised in the New York Herald Tribune as “the most accurate and profound study of an American slum childhood that has yet appeared”; the New York Times reviewer wrote that it “has done for the East Side what James T. Farrell is doing for the Chicago Irish.” The New Masses, a Marxist journal, debated whether the novel was sufficiently revolutionary. This arid political criticism might have…

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine. Graywolf, 169 pp., $20.00 (paper) Claudia Rankine’s Citizen opens: When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows. The reader is forewarned: what follows will explore what happens when the “devices” are switched off, not just the smart phone or the iPad, but techniques of evasion and compromise that let the poet exist in the present. There’s also the suggestion that the repudiated “devices” are poetic, rhetorical tricks that ornament or soften. Accordingly, Rankine’s language is prose, plain, direct, conversational, though simultaneously uncanny and reverberant, continually wrongfooting the reader, swapping referents, mixing the physical and metaphysical at will. (It’s not just “you” “stacked among your pillows”…

The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret History of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe by David I. Kertzer. Random House, 549 pp., $32.00; $20.00 (paper) During the past fifty years, most of the debate on the Catholic Church’s relationship with fascism has focused on the wartime period and the Vatican’s response to the Holocaust. Did the virtual silence of Pius XII, who became pope in early 1939, about the mistreatment and extermination of Europe’s Jews facilitate Hitler’s Final Solution, as his critics insist, or was it, as Pius’s defenders maintain, a heroic act of selfdiscipline that prevented Nazi reprisals against the many thousands of Catholic institutions that were secretly hiding and helping Jews? The debate, as Pius XII inches his way toward sainthood, has become somewhat sterile…

The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei, Vol. 5: The Dissolution by an unknown author, translated from the Chinese by David Tod Roy. Princeton University Press, 556 pp., $39.95 In teaching Chinese-language courses to American students, which I have done about thirty times, perhaps the most anguishing question I get is “Professor Link, what is the Chinese word for ______?” I am always tempted to say the question makes no sense. Anyone who knows two languages moderately well knows that it is rare for words to match up perfectly, and for languages as far apart as Chinese and English, in which even grammatical categories are conceived differently, strict equivalence is not possible. Book is not shu, because shu, like all Chinese nouns, is conceived as an abstraction,…