Innholdsfortegnelse for November 5, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

JOHN BANVILLE ’s new novel is The Blue Guitar. G.W. BOWERSOCK is Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. DAVID BROMWICH is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. His biography, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence, and a collection of his essays, Moral Imagination, were published last year. DAVID COLE is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. LINDA COLLEY is Shelby M.C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton. Her latest book is Acts of Union and Disunion: What Has Held the UK Together—and What Is Dividing It? ELIZABETH DREW is a regular contributor to The New York Review and the author, most recently, of…

Frederick Law Olmsted: Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society edited by Charles E. Beveridge. Library of America, 812 pp., $45.00 The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, Volume IX: The Last Great Projects, 1890–1895 edited by David Schuyler, Gregory Kaliss, and Jeffrey Schlossberg. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1,067 pp., $110.00 Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks edited by Charles E. Beveridge, Lauren Meier, and Irene Mills. Johns Hopkins University Press, 429 pp., $74.95 1. The nearly universal acclaim that greeted the High Line—the linear greenway built between 2006 and 2014 atop an abandoned elevated railway trestle on Manhattan’s lower west side—reconfirmed the transformative effect parks can have on the quality of urban life.1 Real estate prices have soared in the vicinity of this one-anda-half-mile-long wonder of adaptive reuse,…

The Rebel of Rangoon: A Tale of Defiance and Deliverance in Burma by Delphine Schrank. Nation Books, 312 pp., $26.99 In late 2010, I traveled to Myanmar— formerly known as Burma—the resource-rich country of 52 million people bordered by China, Bangladesh, Laos, and Thailand that had been blighted for decades by brutal repression and squandered opportunity. After seizing power from a civilian government in 1962, a military junta plundered the treasury, wrecked the economy, imprisoned and tortured thousands of dissidents, imposed some of the world’s toughest censorship laws, and cut off the country from the West. In August 1988, pro- democracy protests erupted in Rangoon, the capital, and the country’s then dictator, Ne Win, ordered his military to fire into crowds; about six thousand people died. Aung San Suu Kyi,…

It was during the waiter meme scare, that was the short of it. Some had furloughs by the hour, others came crisp to focus. I was lemon-faced, just jungling around, honking for light in hallways, noticing the kilowatt immensity of a bathroom stall. Blindly, my cavities called me to questioned office. I reached around for eiderdown allowance, a tort’s incestuous waiting. This was, after all, but yesterday. How else am I supposed to suppose life significant, aghast in aisles of T84 calculators, febrile as wrinkled springs spigotting off a billboard Danube? I’m a resurrection junkie and collect culture’s dejected viscera for trace evidence of what some call the afterlife’s afterlife. Robust statuary. Like the scene of Psyche & Memory. Draw closer now. Send in the closer now. Give me a…

A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk, translated from the Turkish by Ekin Oklap. Knopf, 599 pp., $28.95 Uniquely among cities, Istanbul bridges two continents. It lies on the southeast frontier of Europe, while its suburbs expand across the Bosphorus straits into Asiatic Turkey. From a European viewpoint, the city may be the site where Asia begins; from the Turkish hinterland, it is the start of Europe. For a millennium and a half it was the fulcrum of two great Eurasian empires, the Byzantine and the Ottoman, and although it is no longer the nation’s capital—Atatürk rejected the city for Ankara—it remains Turkey’s cultural and economic heart. Now its ruptured geography exemplifies the country’s contending identities: the ambivalence toward both Europe and its Asian neighbors, the rankling sense of…

The Mare by Mary Gaitskill. Pantheon, 441 pp., $26.95 The Mare, Mary Gaitskill’s new novel, is the story of a girl and a horse. It grapples with innocence, possibility, and hope. It is about what happens after all her other books. Gaitskill achieved literary notoriety with Bad Behavior, her first volume of short stories, published in 1988. Her beautiful, elegant prose about ugly and inelegant sex, as well as her insistent vision of the inevitable self-destructive distance between people, gave a disturbingly detailed face to the blank carelessness of 1980s Lower East Side scummy chic. The collection made Gaitskill a downtown celebrity. She writes about sex in a casually brutal way, and in Bad Behavior and the two story collections and three novels that have followed, it is not the…

The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom by John Gray. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 179 pp., $23.00 The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power by Steve Fraser. Little, Brown, 470 pp., $28.00 Here are two tracts for the times, the first by a political theorist, the second by a historian, which could not differ more substantially in motive, aim, and subject matter; yet the authors tell oddly similar stories. Both ask us to recognize that the commercial democracies of the West are not the repositories of freedom we have long supposed them to be. The authors agree that we are swayed by a mass delusion, and that the name of the delusion is progress. We will swallow…

To the Editors: In her recent review of The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy [NYR, September 24], Jessica T. Mathews contends that we failed to make our case that the subjugation of women worldwide poses a threat to US national security. Mathews bases her critique on a narrow definition of national security that precludes threats posed by transnational crime, the destabilizing effect of sectarian conflict (as witnessed by events unfolding in the Middle East), militarism, and corruption. Donald Steinberg, former deputy administrator of USAID and now president of World Learning, perhaps said it best: Compare those societies that respect women and those who don’t. Who’s trafficking in weapons, drugs? Who’s harboring terrorists and starting pandemics? Whose problems require US troops on the ground? There’s a oneto-one correspondence. Don’t…

St. Paul: The Apostle We Love to Hate by Karen Armstrong. New Harvest, 143 pp., $20.00 Who Made Early Christianity?: The Jewish Lives of the Apostle Paul by John G. Gager. Columbia University Press, 192 pp., $30.00 Paul’s Summons to Messianic Life: Political Theology and the Coming Awakening by L. L. Welborn. Columbia University Press, 128 pp., $28.00 (paper) Nietzsche Versus Paul by Abed Azzam. Columbia University Press, 209 pp., $28.00 (paper) I doubt that Karen Armstrong really believes that Saint Paul is “the apostle we love to hate,” as the subtitle of her book proclaims, not least because her view of him is so balanced and well informed. But she shows clearly that he is the most enigmatic and controversial figure in the early history of Christianity. He was…

The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera, translated from the French by Linda Asher. Harper, 115 pp., $23.99 1. Milan Kundera is now eighty-six and may well have intended his latest novel, The Festival of Insignificance, his first in fifteen years, to be an expression of “vesperal freedom,” a striking phrase he (or perhaps his longtime translator Linda Asher) coined a few years earlier to describe the liberation some artists feel in their declining years. Picasso, Kundera wrote in the mid-2000s, “abandoned by his crowd, and abandoned as well by the history of painting . . . settles into the house of his art” with “hedonistic delight.” Fellini, in his final films, “savored the ‘joyful irresponsibility’ (his words) of a freedom he had never known before.” And Beethoven, “at the…

ISRAELI TERRORISTS, THEN & NOW To the Editors: While I enjoyed Assaf Sharon’s discussion of the utility and strategic consequences of Jewish terrorism during the Mandate era [NYR, September 24], I found his eagerness to connect the poet-provocateurs of the “Band of Thugs” with today’s right-wing terrorists less than convincing, and a bit mystifying. As Sharon himself has noted elsewhere, the Jewish terrorists of today are largely religious, drawing inspiration from rabbinic authorities including the late Meir Kahane. They share little ideologically with the early (secular) Revisionists except for an idealized conception of the borders of the Jewish state. The “Band of Thugs” took their cues, political and aesthetic, from European high modernism. While Abba Ahimeir’s poetry does contain a measure of “romanticized violence,” his work, but especially that of…