Innholdsfortegnelse for December 3, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

MARCIA ANGELL is a member of the faculty of Global Health and 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 Morgan Library and Museum. His books include Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern Art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris, which was awarded the 2004 Mitchell Prize, and Renoir, Impressionism, and Full-Length Painting. 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. PETER BROOKS , Sterling Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Yale, teaches at Princeton. He is currently at work on a book called Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris.…

The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities by Stephen Breyer. Knopf, 382 pp., $27.95 Perhaps no other member of the US Supreme Court has such an affinity for matters foreign as Justice Stephen Breyer. Married to a British clinical psychologist, and himself a member of France’s exclusive Academie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Justice Breyer has thought long and hard about the relationship between US and foreign law, and the result is his latest book, The Court and the World. One suspects that the impetus for the book may have been the recent debates, within the Court and elsewhere, over whether foreign law (and foreign viewpoints) should have any influence on Supreme Court decisions concerned with domestic matters. In 2002, Justice John Paul Stevens, writing…

I Can Give You Anything But Love by Gary Indiana. Rizzoli Ex Libris, 239 pp., $25.95 In an epilogue to I Can Give You Anything But Love, the writer, actor, and artist Gary Indiana explains his decision to avoid the familiar form of the conventional memoir: At some point I began to prune away anything suggesting the sort of “triumph over adversity” theme that gongs through so much of the so-called memoir genre, paring away most evidence of my eventual career as a writer and artist— which has not, in any case, been an unmitigated triumph over adversity. . . . Eventually I let go of any pretense of documentary reality, and kept instead the evocation of things happening to a person for the first time, of being young and…

The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age by Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, 353 pp., $27.99 The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates. Ecco, 310 pp., $26.99 Jack of Spades: A Tale of Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates. The Mysterious Press, 224 pp., $24.00 Joyce Carol Oates has published three books this year—a memoir, a serious novel, and a thriller. In fact, she has written so many books in so many genres that it is entirely possible to hold opposing views of her, as both underrated and overrated, depending on the sampling of her dozens of books you may choose to read. Let’s start with the memoir, The Lost Landscape, since I have always admired Oates’s nonfiction: her book on boxing, her essays, and her reviews. In her nonfiction we see…

Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind by Edith Hall. Norton, 305 pp., $26.95 1. Edith Hall’s Introducing the Ancient Greeks belongs to a familiar genre: the attempt to sum up ancient Greek civilization in two hundred pages for that elusive and mystical creature, the General Reader. The earliest recognizable example is perhaps R.W. Livingstone’s The Greek Genius and Its Meaning to Us (1912). Livingstone was an Oxford don and future administrator (he wound up as vice-chancellor of the university), and his book had a trail of British successors: H.D. F. Kitto’s The Greeks (1951), M. I. Finley’s The Ancient Greeks (1963), Kenneth Dover’s The Greeks (1980), Oliver Taplin’s Greek Fire (1989). Each of the last three grew out of, or was designed…

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. Doubleday, 720 pp., $30.00 1. The title of Hanya Yanagihara’s second work of fiction stands in almost comical contrast to its length: at 720 pages, it’s one of the biggest novels to be published this year. To this literal girth there has been added, since the book appeared in March, the metaphorical weight of several prestigious award nominations—among them the Kirkus Prize, which Yanagihara won, the Booker, which she didn’t, and the National Book Award, which will be conferred in mid-November. Both the size of A Little Life and the impact it has had on readers and critics alike—a best seller, the book has received adulatory reviews in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, and other serious venues—reflect, in turn, the…

Salomé by Oscar Wilde, adapted and directed by Yael Farber for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in the Women’s Voices Theater Festival, at the Lansburgh Theatre, Washington, D.C., October 6–November 8, 2015 The fortress of Machaerus in the Jordanian desert has stood in ruins ever since the Romans razed it in the year 72. But even in its heyday, Machaerus was nothing more than a grim hilltop fort overlooking the eastern shore of the Dead Sea, its four watchtowers keeping a wary eye on Petra to the south and Philadelphia (today’s Amman) to the north. It was the perfect place to lock a troublemaker in prison and hope that the world would forget about him. Sometime around the year 30, in the reign of the emperor Tiberius, the puppet ruler Herod…

On June 19, 1842, readers of the staid Journal des Débats discovered installment one of The Mysteries of Paris by Eugene Sue on the “ground floor” (the bottom quarter) of their daily newspaper’s front page. Over the following months, the story unfolded in 150 breathless episodes, reaching its end only on October 15, 1843. It was certainly the runaway best seller of nineteenth-century France, possibly the greatest best seller of all time. It’s hard to estimate its audience, since each episode was read aloud, in village cafes throughout France, in workshops and offices. Diplomats were late to meetings, countesses were late to balls because they had to catch up on the latest episode. It was a truly national experience, magnetizing in the way celebrity trials have been in our time,…

Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Charles Marsh. Knopf, 515 pp., $35.00 One night in the fall of 1930, when he was twenty-four years old, Dietrich Bonhoeffer went to a Manhattan movie theater to see the new film of All Quiet on the Western Front. Bonhoeffer, a young German theologian who was spending the academic year at Union Theological Seminary, was accompanied by another foreign student, the French pastor Jean Lasserre. Twelve years after World War I ended, Germans’ resentment of their defeat and of the Treaty of Versailles remained ferocious—a sentiment shared by Bonhoeffer, who lost an older brother in the war. For a German and Frenchman to see this war film together, then, was inevitably a fraught experience. But according to Lasserre’s account of the evening,…

Paul Durand-Ruel: Memoirs of the First Impressionist Art Dealer (1831–1922) revised, corrected, and annotated by Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel and Flavie Durand-Ruel, and translated from the French by Deke Dusinberre. Flammarion, 331 pp., $55.00 Inventing Impressionism: Paul Durand-Ruel and the Modern Art Market Catalog of a recent exhibition at the Musee du Luxembourg, Paris, the National Gallery, London, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, edited by Sylvie Patry, with contributions by Anne Robbins, Christopher Riopelle, Joseph J. Rishel, Jennifer A. Thompson, Anne Distel, Flavie Durand-Ruel, Paul-Louis Durand-Ruel, Dorothee Hansen, Simon Kelly, and John Zarobell. London: National Gallery, 303 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) We needed a reactionary to defend our painting, which Salon-goers said was revolutionary. Here was one person, at least, who was unlikely to be shot as a…

Those Who Write for Immortality: Romantic Reputations and the Dream of Lasting Fame by H. J. Jackson. Yale University Press, 294 pp., $35.00 Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake by Leo Damrosch. Yale University Press, 332 pp., $30.00 Poems by William Blake, selected and introduced by Patti Smith. Vintage, 192 pp., $9.95 (paper) 1. There are many William Blakes, but mine arrived with the tigers in the 1960s. The first line I ever read by Blake was not in a book, but laid out in thick white paint (or should I say illuminated) along a brick wall in Silver Street, Cambridge, England, in 1968. It was not poetry, but prose: “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” It sent a strange shiver down my…

Beethoven’s Symphonies: An Artistic Vision by Lewis Lockwood. Norton, 285 pp., $29.95 The classical music world has been saturated lately with stories about the impending demise of the orchestra and the repertory it plays. Dwindling audiences and rising costs have forced American orchestras to cut personnel, shorten concert seasons, and even cross over to the “dark side” and play popular works unthinkable a decade or two ago (as I write I see that the Louisville Orchestra is scheduled to present a program of music by Led Zeppelin in November). When the Philadelphia Orchestra, the finely tuned instrument of Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy, is forced to file for bankruptcy, has the time come to declare Beethoven dead and buried and consign his symphonies to eternal rest? A tale related recently…

Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawai‘i by Susanna Moore. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 303 pp., $26.00 In mid-January 1778, HMS Resolution and Discovery, sailing on secret instructions from the Admiralty to search for the fabled Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific via the Arctic, unexpectedly encountered a cluster of volcanic islands in the central North Pacific. Captain James Cook, already famous for his two previous circumnavigations of the globe, commanded the expedition. As the ships neared the larger island of Kaua‘i, several outrigger canoes approached; the first shouted exchanges between the ships’ crews and the native paddlers confirmed that here was yet one more far-flung outpost of what Cook had come to call the “Polynesian Nation,” for the islanders spoke many of the same words that the English…

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. Random House, 624 pp., $30.00; $18.00 (paper) Slade House by David Mitchell. Random House, 238 pp., $26.00 “As an experienced editor,” says the pompous publisher Timothy Cavendish in David Mitchell’s third novel, Cloud Atlas, “I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with MAs in postmodernism.” But this declaration is, of course, a tricksy device—and not just because Mitchell’s own MA was in postmodern fiction. Cloud Atlas famously consists of six novellas, all crammed with flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices of various kinds, and each set in a different time and place, from the nineteenth-century Pacific to a postapocalyptic Hawaii. The six are connected by their common themes— including rapaciousness and the dangers of human tribalism—and by the book’s…

The Summit: Bretton Woods, 1944: J.M. Keynes and the Reshaping of the Global Economy by Ed Conway. Pegasus, 453 pp., $28.95 The world’s monetary system moves from tumult to tumult. Europe’s economy is stagnant and menaced with deflation. Greece has flirted both with leaving the euro and with default. America’s economy has fallen into a discouraging pattern of hopeful growth spurts followed by dispiriting slowdowns. Such turmoil has played havoc with world currencies. Late last year, the value of the euro crashed. Earlier this year, the cautious Swiss stunned traders by freeing their currency, permitting it to soar against the euro and raising—sharply—the price of its chocolates and ski chalets for people from Lisbon to Rome. Such volatility has lately been increasing. If, as the Harvard political scientist Jeffry Frieden…

MICHAEL WALZER’S LECTURE To the Editors: Michael Walzer will deliver the twentieth annual Irving Howe Memorial Lecture at 6:30 PM on Monday, December 14, in the Elebash Recital Hall of the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street). The subject is “On Democratic Internationalism.” Walzer is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and the author of Just and Unjust Wars, Spheres of Justice, On Toleration, and, most recently, The Paradox of Liberation, among many other works, as well as editor emeritus of Dissent magazine. Sponsored by the Center for the Humanities, these lectures honor the late critic, editor, and political writer Irving Howe (1920– 1993), who taught at the City University of New York from 1963 to 1986. They are made possible by a…