Innholdsfortegnelse for January 19, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

The Killing Wind: A Chinese County’s Descent into Madness During the Cultural Revolution by Tan Hecheng, translated from the Chinese by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian. Oxford University Press, 505 pp., $34.95 The Xiao River rushes deep and clear out of the mountains of southern China into a narrow plain of paddies and villages. At first little more than an angry stream, it begins to meander and grow as the basin’s sixty-three other creeks and brooks flow into it. By the time it reenters the mountains fifty miles to the north, it is big and powerful enough to carry barges and ferries. Fifty years ago, these currents transported another cargo: bloated corpses. For several weeks in August and September 1967, more than nine thousand people were murdered in this region.…

The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution by Robert Parkinson. University of North Carolina Press, 742 pp., $45.00 It is a commonplace that being an American is a matter neither of blood nor of cultural connections forged over time. It is, instead, a commitment to a set of ideals famously laid down by the country’s founders, and refined over generations with a notion of progress as a guiding principle. The Declaration of Independence, with Thomas Jefferson’s soaring language about the equality of mankind and the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” is the most powerful statement of those ideals. It is sometimes called America’s “creed.” Of course, what it means to be an American is not—has never been—so simple a proposition. Seeing the…

To the Editors: It’s impossible to disagree with most of Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s harsh assessment of Tony Blair’s role in the Iraq war [“Tony Blair’s Eternal Shame: The Report,” NYR, October 13, 2016], but two of his many charges do need qualification. First, Wheatcroft accuses Sir Jeremy Heywood, the UK cabinet secretary, of “obstruct[ing]” the Chilcot inquiry into the war and “deplorably [trying] to protect Blair” by resisting Chilcot’s requests for permission to quote in his published report secret exchanges between Blair and George W. Bush about the war. But a more charitable and equally valid interpretation is that Heywood’s main motive was to protect not Blair but the principle that heads of state and government (like other senior public figures and diplomats) ought to be able to communicate frankly and…

Michael Tomasky Far from becoming easier to process, what seemed incomprehensible the night of November 8 has only become more so. This is for numerous reasons, but the chief one is clearly that Trump will take the oath of office under suspicions about his legitimacy far greater than those faced by any modern president. We learned—conveniently for Trump, after the election—that the CIA holds “the consensus view” that Russia intervened to elect him and defeat Hillary Clinton. That revelation came from The Washington Post on December 9. The next day, The New York Times added the astonishing detail that Russia, according to the paper’s sources, had hacked Republican Party e-mail servers as well as Democratic ones— but had made no effort to go public with the Republican information, as it…

Had I been cryogenically frozen in January 2005, I would have gone to my provisional rest as a happy European. With the enlargement of the European Union to include many post- Communist democracies, the 1989 “return to Europe” dream of my Central European friends was coming true. EU member states had agreed on a constitutional treaty, loosely referred to as the European constitution. The unprecedented project of European monetary union seemed to be confounding the deep skepticism that I and many others had earlier expressed.* It was amazing to travel without hindrance from one end of the continent to another, with no border controls inside the expanding zone of states adhering to the Schengen Agreement and with a single currency in your pocket for use throughout the eurozone. Madrid, Warsaw,…

A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster by Joshua Partlow. Knopf, 422 pp., $30.00 It is only two years since Hamid Karzai, leader of Afghanistan since the beginning of the American intervention, stepped down from the presidency, but amazingly many Afghans are regretting the day he left. Afghanistan is in a precarious state. The economy has taken a dive since 2014, when most American troops withdrew. Assistance programs and lucrative contracts have dried up and thousands have been put out of work. Insecurity has increased as the Taliban has sharply escalated its offensive to seize territory and unseat the Afghan government. Political divisions within the Afghan leadership compound the unease. President Ashraf Ghani, who took office in September 2014, appears isolated in the Arg, the…

Kerry James Marshall: Mastry an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, April 23–September 25, 2016; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 25, 2016– January 29, 2017; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, March 12–July 2, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Helen Molesworth. Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago/Skira Rizzoli, 280 pp., $65.00 Two things hit the viewer pretty soon into the Met Breuer’s exhibition of Kerry James Marshall’s beautiful work: figure after figure in his canvases is black, really black, so much so that that blackness becomes his signature. But Marshall’s black people are not Kara Walker’s haunting silhouettes, questioning presences stepping through the scrim of history. The blackness he gives his subjects is luminous, vibrant, and dense. Secondly, the viewer notes…

On April 24, 2013, just weeks before Edward Snowden went public with his leaks about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency, General Keith B. Alexander, then the head of the NSA, welcomed a group of Swedish intelligence officials to a secret three- day meeting at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. In the delegation were Ing var Akesson, the longtime director of Sweden’s National Defense Radio Establishment (known as the FRA, for Forsvarets radioanstalt), a shadowy Swedish government intelligence agency, and five members of Akesson’s senior staff. One of the aims of the meeting was to discuss Sweden’s growing importance to the NSA. In a 2008 law, the FRA had been given expansive powers by the Swedish government to vacuum up all communications traveling over fiber optic networks into…

Belle vue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital by David Oshinsky. Doubleday, 387 pp., $30.00 When I was a boy growing up in Brooklyn in the years following World War II, I did not know that Belle vue was a hospital. I thought it was simply the name for a scary place that housed grotesque and terrifying crazy people. Later on, my brother Robert, a mental patient for most of his adult life, was sent to other infamous facilities, including a state hospital for the criminally insane, Rikers Island, and an insulin shock ward at Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens. I was Robert’s caretaker and advocate during these years, yet when, five years ago, I received a message telling me he had stuffed a toilet…

Arrival a film directed by Denis Villeneuve Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang. Vintage, 281 pp., $16.00 (paper) What tense is this? I remember a conversation we’ll have when you’re in your junior year of high school. It’ll be Sunday morning, and I’ll be scrambling some eggs. . . . I remember once when we’ll be driving to the mall to buy some new clothes for you. You’ll be thirteen. The narrator is Louise Banks in “Story of Your Life,” a 1998 novella by Ted Chiang. She is addressing her daughter, Hannah, who, we soon learn, has died at a young age. Louise is addressing Hannah in memory, evidently. But something peculiar is happening in this story. Time is not operating as expected. As the Queen said…

I have often wondered why nineteenth- century French novelists were quite literally obsessed with painters and painting, while in the 1700s Diderot was the only writer of his generation to take an interest in art criticism. What a striking contrast: not one major novelist of the 1800s failed to include a painter character in his work. This is not surprising for Balzac and Zola, who had ambitions to bring every aspect of society to life in their fiction; but read Stendhal, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, Anatole France, Huysmans, Maupassant, Mirbeau, and of course Proust, and you enter a world in which painting is surprisingly important. What is more, all these novelists explored not only how a painter sees things but also how he represents them, and this produced a new…

THE BASTARD SYCAMORE To the Editors: Thomas Pakenham, in his appreciative review of Fiona Stafford’s The Long, Long Life of Trees [NYR, December 8, 2016], refers to the “sycamore.” But what tree is this? Platanus occidentalis, called “sycamore” in North America, or Acer pseudoplatanus, called “sycamore” in the UK? From the description, it sounds like the latter, but a scientific name would have eased confusion for American readers. Javier Peñalosa Buffalo, New York Thomas Pakenham replies: There are actually three sycamores: a fig, a maple, and a plane. The first is the biblical one, which the tax collector Zacchaeus climbed to see Jesus as Jesus rode his donkey through Jericho on his way to Jerusalem. This is Ficus sycomorus, one of the great fig trees, which is found all the…