Innholdsfortegnelse for April 4, 2019 i The New York Review of Books

On January 14, the eighth anniversary of the Tunisian revolution, I joined the crowds passing through metal detectors to gather in Tunis’s Avenue Habib Bourguiba. A few people carried pictures of protesters killed in 2011. Children waved little Tunisian flags. At one end of the avenue, a concert was taking place. Most political parties had set up stands, and there were speeches about how much the revolution had accomplished so far (from parties in the government) and how little (from the opposition). Strangers in the street engaged in polite but animated political arguments, and small groups leaned in to listen. Eight years after the Arab Spring began in Tunisia, this is the only country in the region where such scenes of spontaneous public debate can still be witnessed. And yet…

Chris Marker, les 7 vies d’un cinéaste an exhibition at the Cinémathèque française, Paris, May 3–July 29, 2018; and the Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, September 19, 2018–January 6, 2019. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Raymond Bellour, Jean-Michel Frodon, and Christine Van Assche. Paris: Cinémathèque française, 400 pp., €45.00 In 1962, two months after the Algerian War ended, Chris Marker went around Paris with the cinematographer Pierre Lhomme asking people what made them happy. The two of them were shooting a film, Le Joli Mai, about what had happened to the city during the twenty-three years since France had last been at peace. In the answers they got, happiness was rarely the dominant note. A sidewalk suit salesman griped about his wife. Two rich boys lurked around the stock…

You Know You Want This: “Cat Person” and Other Stories by Kristen Roupenian. Scout, 225 pp., $24.99 It has happened only twice in nearly seventy years: a short story appears in The New Yorker and goes viral, setting off an avalanche of responses. Some readers, fooled by its up-to-date style, misinterpret it as a piece of reportage. Others attack the author as a sadist or a misanthrope. And many more are simply confused about what it means. Is it an allegory for the suffering that women face under patriarchy? A screed that indicts contemporary society more generally? Or just a tale taken from everyday life in which something goes horribly wrong? The first of those viral stories, from 1948, was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a parable about a woman in…

City of a Million Dreams: A History of New Orleans at Year 300 by Jason Berry. University of North Carolina Press, 412 pp., $35.00 Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, devastating an area seven times the size of Manhattan, flooding 80 percent of the city, ruining buildings, forcing a million people to flee, and stranding millions more in misery. Many of us remember this as a great failure of George W. Bush’s administration and of his appointee to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” Brown. Jason Berry, in City of a Million Dreams, a sweeping history of his native city, thinks it was something else: “the worst civil engineering disaster in American history.” (Brown does not get a single…

2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak Coming a report by Kingsmill Bond. 41 pp., September 2018, available at carbontracker.org A New World: The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation a report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation. 88 pp., January 2019, available at irena.org “Kingsmill Bond” certainly sounds like a proper name for a City of London financial analyst. He looks the part, too: gray hair expertly trimmed, well-cut suit. He’s lived in Moscow and Hong Kong and worked for Deutsche Bank, the Russian financial firm Troika Dialog, and Citibank. He’s currently “new energy strategist” for a small British think tank called Carbon Tracker, and last fall he published a short paper called “2020 Vision: Why You Should See the Fossil Fuel Peak…

Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future by Kate Brown. Norton, 420 pp., $27.95 Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham. Simon and Schuster, 538 pp., $29.95 Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy. Basic Books, 404 pp., $32.00 On the night of April 25, 1986, during a planned maintenance shutdown at the Chernobyl power plant in northern Ukraine, one of the four reactors overheated and began to burn. As plant engineers scrambled to regain control of it, they thought for a moment that there had been an earthquake. In fact, a buildup of steam had propelled the two-hundred-ton concrete top of the reactor’s casing into the air, with masses of radioactive material following close behind when…

Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, and Their Journey into the Syrian Jihad by Åsne Seierstad, translated from the Norwegian by Seán Kinsella. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 418 pp., $28.00; $16.00 (paper) Having a conspicuous authorial presence in reportage serves as both an overture and a safeguard. It establishes a complicity between author and reader, allowing the two to learn at the same pace. And it makes the author’s motives and methods more transparent than they might otherwise be. If the author errs in judgment or fact, he or she will do so in plain sight. One of the distinguishing features of the Norwegian writer Åsne Seierstad—indeed, one might say, a leitmotif of her work—is her disdain for this convention. This was apparent in her first book to achieve international…

Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means by Pamela Herd and Donald P. Moynihan. Russell Sage Foundation, 344 pp., $37.50 (paper) The Office of Management and Budget is required by law to produce a widely neglected annual report, the Information Collection Budget of the United States Government (ICB), which quantifies the annual paperwork burden that the government imposes on its citizens. The most recent ICB finds that in 2015, Americans spent 9.78 billion hours on federal paperwork.1 The Treasury Department, including the Internal Revenue Service, accounted for the vast majority of the total: 7.36 billion hours. The Department of Health and Human Services was responsible for 696 million hours imposed on (among others) doctors, hospitals, and the beneficiaries of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. The Department of Transportation accounted…

Since its discovery by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, the tomb of Tutankhamen has become one of the most famous cultural heritage sites in the world. However, the tomb’s status as a “must-see” attraction for visitors to Egypt led to concerns regarding its condition. A multiyear collaboration between the Getty Conservation Institute and the Egyptian authorities sought to preserve the tomb and protect it from damage over the long-term. Completed in fall 2018, the project has helped preserve this important site for future generations. Learn more at getty.edu/world A World of Art, Research, Conservation, and Philanthropy. GETTY CONSERVATION INSTITUTE + GETTY FOUNDATION + GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE + J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUM Members of the project team undertaking wall painting conservation in the burial chamber of Tutankhamen’s tomb. Photo: Lori Wong.…

Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide by Taner Akçam. Palgrave Macmillan, 261 pp., $39.99 (paper) Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide by Hans-Lukas Kieser. Princeton University Press, 532 pp., $39.95 TripAdvisor currently ranks the Baron Hotel fourth among the nineteen establishments it mentions in Aleppo. In reality, the city’s most venerable hotel has been shuttered since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, though intrepid visitors who brave the dangers outside and enter its cool, faded vestibule can still see T.E. Lawrence’s hotel bill and admire the desk where Agatha Christie once worked on Murder on the Orient Express. The brothers Onnig and Armenak Mazloumian, who founded the hotel before World War I, were convivial and enterprising Aleppans, part of an Armenian community whose…

The British in India: A Social History of the Raj by David Gilmour. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 618 pp., $35.00 In The Lion and the Eagle (2018), Kathleen Burk’s recent book comparing the British and US imperial experiences, she notes that few American public servants chose to make their lives in their nation’s overseas possessions or client states. Most preferred to serve out their appointed terms in faraway places, then return thankfully home. Their British counterparts, by contrast, often remained for decades or even lifetimes in the colonies, and above all in India, “the jewel in the crown.” In 1971 I made a film for BBC TV in Simla, the summer capital of the Raj, about a cluster of elderly English ladies who had “stayed on.” Their houses were full…