Innholdsfortegnelse for Aug-14-14 i The New York Review of Books

The story most media accounts tell of the recent burst of violence in Iraq seems clear-cut and straightforward. In reality, what is happening is anything but. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), so the narrative goes, a barbaric, jihadi militia, honed in combat in Syria, has swept aside vastly larger but feckless Iraqi army forces in a seemingly unstoppable tide of conquest across northern and western Iraq, almost to the outskirts of Baghdad. The country, riven by ineluctable sectarian conflict, stands on the brink of civil war. The United States, which left Iraq too soon, now has to act fast, choosing among an array of ugly options, among them renewed military involvement and making common cause with Iran. Alternatives include watching Iraq splinter and the creation of an…

Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation an exhibition at Tate Britain, London, May 19–August 10, 2014. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Chris Stephens and John-Paul Stonard London: Tate Publishing, 160 pp., $40.00 (paper) (distributed in the US by Abrams) The Books That Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss edited by Richard Shone and John-Paul Stonard Thames and Hudson, 264 pp., $34.95 It is a rare event for an art museum to do a large and ambitious exhibition about a person who was not a visual artist. But then Kenneth Clark, the subject of such a show now at Tate Britain, was for some five decades a unique figure in the cultural life of his country. There have probably been few people in any country with…

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 2: 1923–1925 edited by Sandra Spanier, Albert J. DeFazio III, and Robert W. Trogdon Cambridge University Press, 519 pp., $40.00 1. Ernest Hemingway wrote the first letter in this collection when he was twenty-three, the last when he was twenty-six. In these three years, living mostly in Paris, he fathered his first child, grew disenchanted with his first wife and took up with his second, quit his first job as a reporter, published his first three collections of stories and poems, wrote his first two novels, saw his first bullfight, and began transforming himself from a writer who conveyed inward experience in all its anxious detachment “so that...you actually experience the thing” into an aficionado who praised strength and bravery in “people that by…

The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt Simon and Schuster, 357 pp., $26.00 “Art is long,” wrote the poet Randall Jarrell, “and critics are the insects of a day.” Which is another way of saying that writing book reviews can make you feel like a manic-depressive housefly. You buzz and bang your head on the window out of sheer guilt and frustration. Siri Hustvedt’s novel The Blazing World is liable to induce a particularly twitchy and abject version of housefly headbanging. The windows are shut fast; the book a distinctly mixed bag; a claustrophobic critic feels obliged to air her doubts. But then, along with the guilt, a familiar neurosis sets in. Huge and bestudded though they are, can one’s multiple convex eyes even be trusted? One is forced to ask…

Three Light-Years by Andrea Canobbio, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 356 pp., $26.00 Andrea Canobbio’s remarkable novel Three Light-Years begins with the sort of metaphor, the kind of sweeping statement that, in the work of a less gifted writer, might warn readers to brace themselves for the onslaught of something sententious and bogus. But the paragraph that follows is so artful and intriguing that it dispels whatever unease its opening sentence might have inspired: Even as we are parsing this passage and already admiring the deftness (how apt that word: “deleted”) of Anne Milano Appel’s exemplary translation, the novel has rushed past us. The narrator’s father, a repressed, middle-aged Italian doctor named Claudio Viberti, is working at the computer in the pediatricians’ lounge…

It is hard for me to believe that I was born in Belgrade, and not in New York City, for I have a pretty good idea what it was like to live in New York in 1938. I can picture what the New Yorkers were doing in various neighborhoods and streets, the buildings and apartments they lived in, how they dressed, what they ate in restaurants, and where they went to see a movie and go dancing, while I lay around in my crib on Majke Jevrosime Street in Belgrade, playing with my toes and giving loving looks to a large teddy bear propped up next to me. I even have a photograph to prove it and another one of me, when I was a bit older, being pushed in…

1. The Pipeline On March 12, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, together with his foreign minister, his oil minister, the head of Iran’s central bank, and other senior Iranian officials, took a short flight across the Gulf of Oman to Muscat, the capital of Oman. Occupying the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, where the Persian Gulf meets the Arabian Sea, Oman belongs to a part of the Arab world known for its hostility to Iran’s Islamic Republic. Several of Oman’s closest neighbors, including Qatar, Kuwait, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have been fighting an increasingly brutal proxy war with Iran in Syria; Iran has at various times threatened to block tankers carrying Arabian oil from passing through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, which separates it from Oman. But the…

Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood by Joachim Fest, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers, edited and with an introduction by Herbert A. Arnold Other Press, 427 pp., $16.95 (paper) Since the German word Bildungsbürger, let alone Bildungsbürgertum, is probably untranslatable, Martin Chalmers wisely leaves it in the original and explains the meaning in a footnote. Briefly, a Bildungsbürger was a member of the pre-war bourgeois German elite whose status was marked less by birth than by a solid classical education. Some of the proudest Bildungsbürger were Jews. If sportsmanship, good manners, and fine tailoring were the vaunted signs of the English gentleman, the minimum requirement for a Bildungsbürger was a sound knowledge of Latin and Greek, the classics of European literature, and of course German classical music.…

Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War by Robert M. Gates Knopf, 618 pp., $35.00 From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War by Robert M. Gates Simon and Schuster, 604 pp., $18.99 (paper) 1. Early 2007: American troops are pinned down in the fourth year of a losing war in Iraq and in the fifth of an increasingly desperate one in Afghanistan, crises that still loom over the country and its foreign policy more than half a dozen years later, as Iraq, beset by a jihadist insurgency that sprang from the American invasion, splinters into pieces. Who in those darkest of dark times could have spoken more authoritatively about “crises that seem to come and stay” than President Bush’s newly…

To the Editors: Cass Sunstein’s review of Justice John Paul Stevens’s Six Amendments: Why We Should Change the Constitution [NYR, June 5] omits what I believe is the greatest danger of amending our charter of liberty, namely, diluting the First Amendment. I have taught and lectured on the First Amendment for many years and have conducted research on whether students and others would protect all speech as the Constitution commands. The language is absolute: government “shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech.” There is no exception. Yet courts make exceptions based on nothing more than the statement that “it has always been understood” that certain categories of speech are not protected. See Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942). In questionnaires I have submitted to audiences virtually 100 percent would except…

A Prayer Journal by Flannery O’Connor, edited and with an introduction by W.A. Sessions Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 96 pp., $18.00 For some weeks before I read Flannery O’Connor’s posthumously published A Prayer Journal straight through, I read around it. The book’s length was not the problem. (At forty pages, not including a facsimile of O’Connor’s handwritten notes, this lovely volume rests in the hand like a collection of verse.) Nor was the ostensible subject matter—O’Connor’s Catholicism. Rather, what put me off were the dates she produced it. Written between 1946 and 1947 and more or less abandoned when the burgeoning author was twenty-two, this apprentice work emerged when O’Connor, a Georgia native, was not too long out of the South, and enrolled in the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop.…

My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel by Ari Shavit Spiegel and Grau, 445 pp., $28.00 Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict by John B. Judis Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 432 pp., $30.00 Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land by Norman G. Finkelstein OR Books, 97 pp., $10.00 (paper) 1. In the toxic environment that characterizes much, if not most, debate on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, a special poison is reserved for the liberal Zionist. Such a person, who stands by Israel even as he yearns for it to change, is fated to be hated by both camps: hawkish Zionists despise the liberal for going too far in his criticisms, accusing him of a hand-wringing betrayal of the…

Arnold S. Relman, known to friends and family as Bud, died on June 17, his ninety-first birthday, four months after learning he had a melanoma that would be fatal in a short time. He faced death with characteristic courage and dignity, and spent his last months the way he had spent much of his life—writing about the profession he loved and the system in which it served. Relman was a towering figure in American medicine. He was a medical researcher, a clinician, a medical school professor and department head, the editor of two influential medical journals, and a prolific writer on health care. In 1977, he became editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, and it was in this position that he came to national prominence. Under his leadership, the…

Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality by Danielle Allen Liveright, 315 pp., $27.95 This is a strange and remarkable book. There must be dozens of books on the Declaration of Independence written from every conceivable point of view—historical, political, theoretical, philosophical, and textual—but no one has ever written a book on the Declaration quite like this one. If we read the Declaration of Independence slowly and carefully, Danielle Allen believes, then the document can become a basic primer for our democracy. It can be something that all of us—not just scholars and educated elites but common ordinary people—can participate in, and should participate in if we want to be good democratic citizens. Allen, who is a professor of social science at the Institute…

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China by Evan Osnos Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 403 pp., $27.00 In the late 1970s, when the passing of Mao made it possible for foreign journalists to work in China for the first time in three decades, the first reporters to get in wrote wide-ranging books that addressed nearly everything they could learn.1 Later books by journalists tended to be more specialized. Age of Ambition by Evan Osnos returns to the panoramic tradition, and now, as Chinese society seems to be edging toward a crisis, may be a good time to do it. Osnos begins by noticing a bifurcation in popular Western views of China—roughly, a good China of rising material standards and a bad China of repressive government—and…

Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History by Rachel Laudan University of California Press, 464 pp., $39.95 Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey by Gary Paul Nabhan University of California Press, 305 pp., $29.95 Until recently food was largely of interest to economists, sociologists, and anthropologists, whereas historians have tended to view the subject as marginal, if not downright frivolous. Ever since Claude Lévi-Strauss drew attention to the symbolism of the raw and the cooked, allusions to cooking have made their way into social history. Major events such as famines, grain hoarding, and cannibalism have found a historical niche by drawing attention to the dependence of nations and individuals on growing food, as well as processing, cooking, and eating it. Social scientists have commented on what they call commensality,…

The Embrace of Unreason: France, 1914–1940 by Frederick Brown Knopf, 345 pp., $28.95 Frederick Brown, the accomplished biographer of Zola, Flaubert, and Cocteau, has given us a kind of collective intellectual biography of France from the outbreak of World War I to the calamitous defeat of 1940. Despite the loss of so many talented young men in World War I, France seethed with intellectual energy in those years. Brown has singled out for particular attention Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Léon Daudet, André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle. Lesser lights also get their moment: wartime spy chasers, competing devotees of Joan of Arc on both right and left, admirers of Stalin and Hitler, crooks and gutter journalists. Many of them shared doubts about the Enlightenment’s faith in reason,…

Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems by Charles Wright Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 367 pp., $30.00; $20.00 (paper) If you want to sample the work of Charles Wright, the nation’s new poet laureate, the best place to start may be Bye-and-Bye: Selected Late Poems, a collection whose marvels culminate in selections from Wright’s fine book Sestets (2009). Wright is sometimes thought of as a writer of wisdom literature, a backyard philosopher potting around in a material world he suspects might not even exist. If for their own sakes you are drawn to questions of “belief,” “materialism,” “the ineffable,” and so on, Wright’s “ascetic discipline” might be an “instruction” (I am sampling phrases from the blurbs on the back of this book). But I regard Wright’s focus on these questions to be, in…

To the Editors: In my New York Times review of Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State, I wrote: I say some other things, as well, quite critical of Greenwald. But how can your reviewer, Sue Halperin [“Partial Disclosure,” NYR, July 10], say that I wrote, “those who find value in [Greenwald’s] reporting are, at best, fools”? The question here is not whether the government, in the name of national security, should have absolute veto power over revelation of any government secret. The question is whether the government has any legitimate secrets at all and, if so, how it can keep them secret. In her review, Halperin quotes both Greenwald and Barton Gelman of The Washington Post about how careful they were not…

To the Editors: I am exceedingly grateful to Martin Filler for his long, serious, and respectful treatment of my book, Cubed [NYR, June 19]. He alleges a few misinterpretations of architectural history and errors of fact, at least one of which I’d enjoy disputing (others, too, but vita brevis...), and one more of which is, less enjoyably, a proofreading error introduced by my publishers, Doubleday, that unfortunately I only discovered in his citation. The first is his contention that, against my own description, the World Trade Center towers were “among the brightest elements of Manhatttan’s skyline” the night of the 1977 blackout. A photograph from the New York Daily News of the following day shows precisely what I describe: the towers as enormous tenebrous shafts looming over the surrounding area.…

Uncertain Justice: The Roberts Court and the Constitution by Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz Henry Holt, 401 pp., $32.00 In the Balance: Law and Politics on the Roberts Court by Mark Tushnet Norton, 324 pp., $28.95 Scalia: A Court of One by Bruce Allen Murphy Simon and Schuster, 644 pp., $35.00 1. The Roberts Court, which just concluded its ninth term, was officially launched on September 29, 2005, when Justice John Paul Stevens administered the oath to the newly confirmed chief justice, John Roberts. In a more significant sense, however, the Roberts Court’s birth—or at least conception—should be dated five years earlier, to December 12, 2000. That’s the day the Supreme Court decided Bush v. Gore, ending a recount of the too-close-to-call Florida presidential vote, and ensuring that George W.…

Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality by Jo Becker Penguin, 470 pp., $29.95 Redeeming the Dream: The Case for Marriage Equality by David Boies and Theodore B. Olson Viking, 310 pp., $28.95 Law and the Gay Rights Story: The Long Search for Equal Justice in a Divided Democracy by Walter Frank Rutgers University Press, 236 pp., $29.95 And then came the demand for gay marriage. At first many gay progressives (including me) frowned on this initiative, since it seemed only one more example of assimilation. But we began to see that it was a cause worth fighting for. If bigots oppose gay marriage so vehemently, it must be because marriage is a defining institution for them; gays will never be fully accepted until they can marry and…

The American Health Care Paradox: Why Spending More Is Getting Us Less by Elizabeth H. Bradley and Lauren A. Taylor PublicAffairs, 248 pp., $26.99 The US spends much more per person on medical care than any other country. And yet, by commonly accepted measures of the quality of its national health system, it ranks only in the middle of the other advanced countries belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Elizabeth Bradley and Lauren Taylor argue that this “American health care paradox” is resolved when expenditures on other social services that undoubtedly contribute to improved national and personal health are taken into account. These expenditures include support for such services as housing, education, maternal and child care, disease prevention, nutrition, environmental safety, and unemployment benefits. They also…

The Reef: A Passionate History: The Great Barrier Reef from Captain Cook to Climate Change by Iain McCalman Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pp., $27.00 Australia’s Great Barrier Reef stretches for around 1,430 miles along the continent’s northeast coast, encompassing an area roughly half the size of Texas. Those who have dived into its pristine reaches know firsthand that it is one of Earth’s natural wonders—a coral world of exceptional beauty and diversity. Yet as Iain McCalman’s “passionate history” of the reef makes clear, it is also a stage on which dreams, ambitions, and great human tragedies have been played out. He tells his story by chronicling lives that, either inadvertently or intentionally, have shaped our perception of the coralline labyrinth. Just who discovered the reef is a matter…

Ivory Tower a film directed by Andrew Rossi Andrew Rossi’s documentary Ivory Tower prods us to think about the crisis of higher education. But is there a crisis? Expensive gambles, unforeseen losses, and investments whose soundness has yet to be decided have raised the price of a college education so high that today on average it costs eleven times as much as it did in 1978. Underlying the anxiety about the worth of a college degree is a suspicion that old methods and the old knowledge will soon be eclipsed by technology. Indeed, as the film accurately records, our education leaders seem to believe technology is a force that—independent of human intervention—will help or hurt the standing of universities in the next generation. Perhaps, they think, it will perform…

In memory of Ruth Buczyńska She survived the war in Tarnopol. In darkness and semi-darkness. In fear. She was afraid of rats and heavy boots, loud conversations, screams. She died just now, in darkness, in a hospital ward’s white quiet. She was a Jew. Sometimes she didn’t know what it meant. It’s simple and incomprehensible, like algebra. At times she tried to work it through. The Gestapo knew exactly what it meant to be a Jew. The great philosophical tradition helped, definitions sharp as knives, direct as a Buddhist arrow. She was beautiful. She should have died then, like the other men and women, vanished without a trace, gone without elegies, like so many others, like the air, but she lived a long time, in daylight, in the sun, in…

1. Compared to John Williams’s earlier novels, Augustus—the last work to be published by the author, poet, and professor whose once-neglected Stoner has become an international literary sensation in recent years—can seem like an oddity.* For one thing, it was the only one of his four novels to win significant acclaim during his lifetime: published in 1972, Augustus won the National Book Award for fiction. (Williams was born in Texas in 1922 and died in Arkansas in 1994, after a thirty-year career teaching English and creative writing at the University of Denver.) More important, the novel’s subject—the life and history-changing career of the first emperor of Rome—seems impossibly remote from the distinctly American preoccupations of Williams’s other mature works, with their modest protagonists and pared-down narratives. Butcher’s Crossing (1960) is…

Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography by Richard Rodriguez Viking/Penguin, 235 pp., $26.95; $16.00 (paper) It’s exhilarating to come upon a writer whose moves and positions one can’t anticipate. Writing of Las Vegas in his latest book, Richard Rodriguez dilates a little on Noël Coward’s stay in the Nevada desert (the British playwright found the gangsters there “urbane and charming”); he tells us about the Spanish teenager who in 1829 was perhaps the first European traveler to lay eyes on the valley and gave it its current name (which means “the Meadows”). He circles for a while, as many writers might, around Ozymandias and discovers an eighty-four-foot-long Maya Lin sculpture in the lobby of the Aria Hotel. True to his generally melancholy and paradoxical cast of mind, he notes that Vegas is…

 To the Editors: Readers of John Cassidy’s review of Elizabeth Warren’s book [NYR, May 22] may be puzzled by how she succeeded in winning congressional approval of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His only reference to Congress is: Given this description readers must wonder how the fight succeeded. The answer comes from Senator Warren herself. While I had told her in 2007 that I did not think we had the votes, my views changed after the election of 2008 provided many more Democrats. In April 2009, I told Warren that we would include this in the bill. In contrast to Mr. Cassidy’s depiction, Warren writes that from April on, “[Barney] fought like a tiger to keep the consumer agency in the financial reform package. With Barney on board, the…