Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-18-14 i The New York Review of Books

In late October, the true extent of the disaster that awaited the Democrats began to come into sharp focus. Republican Joni Ernst started pulling away from her Democratic opponent in the Iowa Senate race, one the Democrats needed desperately to win. Some other states that had once seemed as if they could be close were increasingly written off. All the statistical experts from Nate Silver on down jacked up their “X percent chance the Republicans will take the Senate” predictions from 63 or so to 65, 70, 73. In the face of all this, Democratic insiders—the kind who are so inside that they’re already thinking about the next election before the current one has even been held—took comfort in the fact that all this damage could be reversed in 2016.…

Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? by Karen Dawisha Simon and Schuster, 445 pp., $30.00 For twenty years now, the Western politicians, journalists, businessmen, and academics who observe and describe the post-Soviet evolution of Russia have almost all followed the same narrative. We begin with the assumption that the Soviet Union ended in 1991, when Mikhail Gorbachev handed over power to Boris Yeltsin and Russia, Ukraine, and the rest of the Soviet republics became independent states. We continue with an account of the early 1990s, an era of “reform,” when some Russian leaders tried to create a democratic political system and a liberal capitalist economy. We follow the trials and tribulations of the reformers, analyze the attempts at privatization, discuss the ebb and flow of political parties and the growth and…

The news that Patrick Modiano had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature was greeted with jubilation in France. After all, the biggest best seller in the weeks following this year’s summer holidays—the great French rentrée—was Valérie Trierweiler’s unseemly personal account of the private life of the president of the Republic, François Hollande. So the idea that due recognition had been given to a writer distinguished by his subtlety and obsessed with the German occupation, a period that few Frenchmen are willing to face head on, an author with a virtuoso’s command of language, equally at ease with the simple and the complex, the precise and the evocative, restored a certain equilibrium. Modiano found the Swedish jury’s decision “bizarre,” but then Modiano tends to find everything bizarre and complicated, and…

Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World by Jeff Madrick Knopf, 254 pp., $26.95 The Queen of England famously asked British economists why nobody saw the financial crisis coming. Lots of nonroyal people also have a feeling that there’s something wrong with economics. Jeff Madrick, an economics journalist of some accomplishment and considerable intelligence, shares his views on what’s wrong with economics in this engaging book. But methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. Madrick really is a gentleman—and something of a scholar, too. Unless you are already steeped in economics, you will learn much from reading Seven Bad Ideas, including a lucid exposition of the so-called efficient markets theory and a nice essay on the shortcomings of economics as a science. You will also…

Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France by Caroline Moorhead Harper, 374 pp., $27.99 Caroline Moorehead’s Village of Secrets: Defying the Nazis in Vichy France is an account of how people of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and nearby villages in south-central France, and a handful of their admirable leaders, rescued people from the Nazis. Estimates vary from as many as five thousand saved to Moorehead’s guess that the number was probably closer to eight hundred.1 They included men, women, and children, principally Jews but also other undesirables marked by the Germans for deportation and murder.2 The book leaves one with a mixture of elation and great sadness. And it obliges the reader to stare at facts each of which is like the head of a Gorgon.3 First, the project itself…

The New Annotated H.P.Lovecraft edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger, and with an introduction by Alan Moore Liveright, 852 pp., $39.95 1. For adolescents, something about horror never goes out of style. They often feel an excited disgust upon learning how things really are, and their disgust is merely a notch away from the more thoroughgoing pleasures of horror. It is the closest they can come to the sublime. Every teacher of creative writing in every American college and university is no doubt familiar with the tendency of young people, usually young men, to concoct gruesome narratives that take place in an edgily unspecified locale. Mayhem, awkward sentences, paper-thin characterizations, and complicated weaponry vie for the reader’s attention. But always there are the aliens, organic or…

Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof by Alisa Solomon Picador, 433 pp., $22.00 (paper) Tradition! The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, the World’s Most Beloved Musical by Barbara Isenberg St. Martin’s, 240 pp., $26.99 Fiddler on the Roof, which opened fifty years ago and had 3,242 performances, was the longest-running musical in Broadway history. We now have not one but two books about it—Alisa Solomon’s Wonder of Wonders and Barbara Isenberg’s Tradition! We can anticipate numerous revivals in professional theaters, schools, and summer camps. A reading of the Tevye stories by the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, on which much of the musical is based, was staged last summer at the Martha’s Vineyard Playhouse. Norman Jewison’s Academy Award–nominated 1971…

To the Editors: Judge Jed S. Rakoff has written an excellent article about the serious failures of our judicial system and makes a number of excellent recommendations [“Why Innocent People Plead Guilty,” NYR, November 20]. He does, I think, miss a couple of important points. As someone who had a tragic experience with the criminal justice system with my son Aaron Swartz, I know firsthand how difficult it is to get justice, let alone have the presumption of innocence. There are many problems with the judicial system. Given the high conviction rates, it is not in the interest of criminal defense attorneys to take a case to trial. They cannot make money on the trial and because they will likely lose, their record of success will be damaged. Their interests…

 To the Editors: John Searle’s review of my book The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere Is Reshaping Human Reality is astonishingly shallow and misguided [NYR, October 9]. The silver lining is that, if its factual errors and conceptual confusions are removed, the opportunity for an informed and insightful reading can still be enjoyed. The review erroneously ascribes to me a fourth revolution in our self-understanding, which I explicitly attribute to Alan Turing. We are not at the center of the universe (Copernicus), of the biological kingdom (Darwin), or of the realm of rationality (Freud). After Turing, we are no longer at the center of the world of information either. We share the infosphere with smart technologies. These are not some unrealistic artificial intelligence, as the review would have me suggest,…

Picasso’s Masterpieces: The Musée Picasso Paris Collection edited by Anne Baldassari Flammarion/Musée Picasso Paris, 551 pp., $200.00 (distributed by Rizzoli) Picasso and Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style an exhibition at the Pace Gallery, New York City an exhibition at the Pace Gallery, New York City, October 31, 2014–January 10, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition by Jonathan Fineberg, Dan Leers, and Barbara Rose, with photographs by David Douglas Duncan Pace, 255 pp., $80.00 Picasso and the Camera an exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery, New York City, October 28, 2014–January 3, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition by John Richardson, Marvin Heiferman, Paul Hayes Tucker, Mary Ann Caws, and Victoria Combalía Gagosian, 400 pp., $100.00 (paper) No artist has ever embraced the freedom of the imagination with more fierce, hell-bent intensity than Picasso.…

Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty by Diane Keaton Random House, 192 pp., $26.00 The white girl has thin arms, expressive hands, and long hair. The first time we see her is in a series of black-and-white stills taken in a twilight world of bars and clubs and discos. They’re part of the opening credits for the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar, the story of Theresa Dunn—Diane Keaton—who, in the photographs at least, looks a little lost to us, even before we’ve lost her. When the movie proper starts we notice that the white girl has a distinctive gait. Strolling down the street or climbing a flight of stairs, her feet are slightly turned out, like a dancer’s, or a clown’s. You wouldn’t call her fashionable, but she has…

On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller by Richard Norton Smith Random House, 842 pp., $38.00 In his later years the first John D. Rockefeller, known to his family as “Senior,” was said to have handed out 30,000 dimes. Adjusting to hard times when the Depression hit, the country’s richest man dispensed nickels instead. His grandson, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, adjusted to hard times in the second of his four terms as governor of New York by raising the sales tax, only to be pelted with dimes by protesters as he marched in a civic procession on Long Island. Putting the big-spending politician on the receiving end, taxpayers were reminding him that it wasn’t his money that he was pouring into ambitious state buildings, housing subsidies, and welfare programs.…

Let Me Be Frank With You: A Frank Bascombe Book by Richard Ford Ecco, 240 pp., $27.99 Apart from the seemingly silly title, Richard Ford’s new collection of four long stories about Frank Bascombe is pure pleasure. In fact, even that punning phrase “Let Me Be Frank With You” can be grudgingly justified since each story soon evolves into an intense two-person conversation: after a period of hesitation, a series of people end up being—more or less—frank with Frank. Somewhat more faintly, the title also implies Bascombe’s insistence on being accepted for who he is. The failed novelist, former sportswriter, and now retired sixty-eight-year-old realtor has settled into a certain melancholy ease with himself. Such titular tricksiness might seem far-fetched except that Richard Ford never writes an unconsidered word. Without…

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Europa, 331 pp., $17.00 (paper) The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Europa, 471 pp., $18.00 (paper) Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Europa, 418 pp., $18.00 (paper) The Lost Daughter by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Europa, 140 pp., $14.95 (paper) Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Europa, 139 pp., $15.00 (paper) The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein Europa, 188 pp., $14.95 (paper) There is a devastating exchange in The Story of a New Name, the second of…

The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity by Sandra M. Gilbert Norton, 404 pp., $29.95 In the seventeenth century, as the Ming dynasty was falling, its great historian and memoirist Zhang Dai revised his grandfather Zhang Rulin’s History of Cooked Food and renamed it The Old Glutton’s Collection. In his preface, which is all that remains of this lost work, he cites many Chinese classics of gastronomy and he describes Confucius’s refined appetite and way of eating as a kind of incarnate philosophy of how to live. He justifies his presumption in editing his grandfather’s work: The exquisite acuteness and depth of Zhang Dai’s ability to taste is an expression of developed knowledge: not only his own, but also his ancestors’ accumulated knowledge of geography, botany, biology, animal husbandry, techniques…

Porphyry: Red Imperial Porphyry: Power and Religion by Dario Del Bufalo, translated from the Italian by David Graham and Lara Cox Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 296 pp., e95.00 Porphyre: La Pierre Pourpre des Ptolémées à Bonaparte [Porphyry: The Purple Stone from the Ptolemies to Bonaparte] by Philippe Malgouyres and Clément Blanc-Riehl Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 144 pp. (out of print) Byzantine Matters by Averil Cameron Princeton University Press, 164 pp., $22.95 Dialoguing in Late Antiquity by Averil Cameron Center for Hellenic Studies, 85 pp., $19.95 (paper) (distributed by Harvard University Press) Big empires, it appears, like big stones. The moment that the mines of the Urals and the Altai opened up, in the early years of the nineteenth century, the tsars of Russia reached out to fill their palaces with…

To the Editors: David Shulman’s account of how Hamas developed is on the mark [“Gaza: The Murderous Melodrama,” NYR, November 20]. May I add one more way in which Israel contributed to the rise of Hamas. While researching my dissertation (Power and the Palestinian Press: Israeli Censorship on the West Bank, 1967–1991, published in 1992), I discovered that Israel contributed to the rise of Islamism in Gaza by isolating it from the different intellectual currents circulating in the West Bank. For example, the leftist literary and political magazine Al-Kateb (The Writer), whose first issue appeared in November 1979, was allowed to be sold only in East Jerusalem, but not in the rest of the West Bank. However, this influential magazine known for its progressive views on women and its support…

Further information is sure to be forthcoming, but for now our one recourse is to wait, and we, we have been, we have been waiting now for a very long time for something to become clear, although everything remains unclear. The light, even the light is— dim like the light in a basement—and these shambolic trees with their nearly identical trunks tubular as organ pipes and above, instead of leaves, a mass of wispy shadow, reminding me of a feather duster, at least if you were lost in one— do you recognize them? Are they pine trees or some deciduous or ridiculous species, and is it dusk or dawn or an overcast day, and has it stopped or started or never been raining, and are…

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman Verso, 452 pp., $26.95 William Gibson, who invented the word “cyberspace” for his futuristic 1984 novel Neuromancer, has said that the notion came to him when he watched kids playing video games at an arcade in Vancouver. They stared into their consoles, turning knobs and pounding buttons to manipulate a universe no one else could see. They seemed to want nothing more than to vanish through the looking glass: “Cyberspace” was a nonsense word. He hoped it would pass muster for his science-fictional purpose: to evoke a domain that might be created by networked computers—“a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.” Thirty years ago there was no such thing. Now billions of…

Goya: Order and Disorder an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 12, 2014–January 19, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition by Stephanie Loeb Stepanek, Frederick Ilchman, Janis A. Tomlinson, and othersMFA, 404 pp., $65.00 In the summer of 1969, as the violence intensified in Northern Ireland, the poet Seamus Heaney was in Madrid. Like any tourist, he went to the Prado, but not specifically, he later said, “to study examples of art in a time of violence.” He found, nonetheless, that some of Francisco Goya’s work on display “had the force of terrible events.... All that dread got mixed in with the slightly panicked, slightly exhilarated mood of the summer as things came to a head in Derry and Belfast.” He found Goya’s work “overwhelming,” and was fascinated…

By the time I had finished my eight-hundred-page biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1974, I was nearly thirty.1 I had traveled in France, Switzerland, and Italy in search of my fiery, footloose poet. I felt like a veteran after a long campaign in the field. I felt grizzled, anecdotal, displaced. Moreover I had returned with two conclusions about writing biography that were certainly not taught in academia. The first was the footsteps principle. I had come to believe that the serious biographer must physically pursue his subject through the past. Mere archives were not enough. He must go to all the places where the subject had ever lived or worked, or traveled or dreamed. Not just the birthplace, or the blue-plaque place, but the temporary places, the passing places,…

Remembrance an online journal published in Tiantongyuan, China Available at prchistory.org/remembrance In downtown Beijing, just a little over a mile west of the Forbidden City, is one of country’s most illustrious high schools. Its graduates regularly attend China’s best universities or go abroad to study, while foreign leaders and CEOs make pilgrimages to catch a glimpse of the country’s future elite. Founded in 1917, it has been lavishly rebuilt over the past few years, with a sleek new gym, dining hall, and classrooms—a monument to a rising country. But to many Chinese people of a certain age, the Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University conjures up another image—that of a group of fanatical girls torturing their vice-principal to death. For years, the event has been of interest to…

10:04 by Ben Lerner Faber and Faber, 244 pp., $25.00 Ben Lerner’s new novel tells the story of a young American writer (“Ben”) who, like Lerner, lives in Brooklyn. Ben has recently published a very well-received first novel, never named, but which even the most casual observer of contemporary literature will struggle not to conflate with Lerner’s own very well-received debut, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011). Now, thanks to a short story of his that has just appeared in The New Yorker (cf. Lerner’s “The Golden Vanity” in the June 18, 2012, issue of The New Yorker), Ben’s agent believes she can secure him a “strong six-figure” advance for a follow-up novel. At this point (the book’s second paragraph), readers may begin to shift in their seats. Haven’t we read…

In December 2013, the West African Ebola epidemic began in a village near Guéckédou, a trading town in rural Guinea, but the disease wasn’t identified until February. The Guineans promptly notified health officials in neighboring countries, and in Liberia a team of researchers immediately set out for Lofa County, just over the border from Guéckédou, where a number of mysterious deaths had recently occurred. The Liberians at first assumed the deaths were caused by Lassa fever, a far less deadly disease with symptoms similar to Ebola. Liberia had no lab capable of testing for Ebola then, so the researchers sent some blood samples to France. When the results finally came back in late March showing that Ebola was spreading in Liberia too, “fear grabbed us,” said Tolbert Nyenswah, who now…

To the Editors: In his review of five books that deal with public opinion survey research [NYR, October 23], Andrew Hacker attributes to me words that I didn’t write, proposals I don’t espouse, and ideas I don’t embrace. He claims that I believe “strict limits must be set on medical treatments for the elderly” and that “Taylor’s proposal will have to mean denials of care.” But my book, The Next America, doesn’t have a single word on that topic. Nor does anything else I’ve ever written. The book draws on findings from public opinion surveys and census data to explore the many ways America is changing, in realms from race, ethnicity, and immigration, to politics, economics, and religion, to marriage, families, gender relations, longevity, and fertility, to the breathtaking revolution…