Innholdsfortegnelse for January 14, 2016 i The New York Review of Books

Hamilton: An American Musical book, music, and lyrics by Lin- Manuel Miranda, at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, New York City War of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Duel That Stunned the Nation by John Sedgwick. Berkley, 455 pp., $27.95 Although Alexander Hamilton never became president of the United States, he is more famous than most presidents, and these days is doubly famous because of the impending decision to remove him from the ten- dollar bill and, more important, because of the hit Broadway show Hamilton. Indeed, the response to this musical has been phenomenal: it is sold out for months. Both the left and the right like this play; President Obama, who took his daughters to see it, said that he was “pretty sure this is the only…

Brodsky/Baryshnikov a theater piece written and directed by Alvis Hermanis, at the New Riga Theatre, Riga, Latvia, October 15–November 7; and the Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York City, March 9–19, 2016 Many emotions are entwined in the theater piece Brodsky/Baryshnikov, which had its premiere at the New Riga Theater in October and will open at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York in March. Its subject is Joseph Brodsky, who was born in Leningrad in 1940 and died in Brooklyn in 1996. Other Russians of Brodsky’s time—notably his great elders Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Boris Pasternak—were made to feel more keenly than he their government’s scorn for artists, but his case too is notorious. Soon after he began circulating verse in samizdat in his late teens, he…

Rodin: The Laboratory of Creation an exhibition at the Musee Rodin, Paris, November 13, 2014–December 6, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition by Catherine Chevillot, Helene Marraud, and Helene Pinet, translated from the French by John Adamson. Paris: Musee Rodin/Faton, 64 pp., €9.50 (paper) Rodin by Raphael Masson and Veronique Mattiussi, translated from the French by Deke Dusinberre, with a foreword by Jacques Vilain, revised and reissued on the occasion of the reopening of the Musee Rodin. Paris: Flammarion/Musee Rodin, 248 pp., $29.95 Picasso Sculpture an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, September 14, 2015– February 7, 2016; and the Musee Picasso, Paris, March 8–September 18, 2016. Catalog of the exhibition by Ann Temkin and Anne Umland. Museum of Modern Art, 320 pp., $85.00 About the origins…

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman, translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan, with a foreword by Thomas Piketty. University of Chicago Press, 129 pp., $20.00 The Price We Pay a film directed by Harold Crooks, inspired by Brigitte Alepin’s 2010 book La Crise fiscale qui vient (The Coming Fiscal Crisis) In some circles, “redistribution” of wealth has become a dirty word, and recent efforts to make the tax system more progressive have run into serious political resistance, above all from Republicans. But whatever your political party, you are unlikely to approve of the illegal use of tax havens. As it turns out, a lot of wealthy people in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere have been hiding money in foreign countries—above…

He was without doubt the dominant figure of seventeenth-century classicism, and many consider him to be the greatest French painter of all time. As an artist he is the equal of Corneille and Racine; however, his is not an art that appeals to popular taste. Everything about him is out of the ordinary. The exquisite beauty of his works remains esoteric. Nicolas Poussin was born in 1594 in the little town of Les Andelys in upper Normandy. After 1612 we hear of him in Paris, Poitou, and Lyon. But his artistic career really began only when he moved to Rome at the age of thirty. With the exception of one brief interval, he would never leave Rome again. There he lived an almost reclusive life as a French exile until…

Memory Theater by Simon Critchley. Other Press, 101 pp., $15.95 Suicide by Simon Critchley. Thought Catalog, 88 pp., $2.99 (e-book) In Samuel Beckett’s novel Malone Dies the eponymous hero becomes obsessed with the idea of reciting a complete inventory of his worldly goods in the few moments preceding his death: a unique occasion, he feels, for producing “something suspiciously like a true statement at last.” Needless to say, despite Malone’s enjoying very few possessions, the reader understands at once that this last desperate bid for control will be beyond him. The world will not stay still, his memory is failing, and the moment of death, or rather the last moments of lucidity in which an inventory might be recited, are impossible to predict. In Memory Theater, Simon Critchley’s hero, who…

Augustine: Conversions to Confessions by Robin Lane Fox. Basic Books, 657 pp., $35.00 His [Augustine’s] monastic base was still combined with travel, always on horseback (without stirrups). —Robin Lane Fox Robin Lane Fox, a British classical scholar, was the historical adviser for Oliver Stone’s godawful movie Alexander. He asked to be, and was, repaid by riding bareback in the movie, in the front line of Alexander’s cavalry. He is an adventurous fellow. Now he tells us he can reveal the hithertounknown deep meanings of Augustine’s Confessions, the book in which Augustine described his own life from his birth in 354, to his early belief in Manichaeism, to his baptism in Milan and the death of his mother, Monnica, in 387. He takes over five hundred pages to get us to…

FORGET & FORGIVE? To the Editors: “America is famously ahistorical,” President Obama tells Marilynne Robinson. “That’s one of our strengths—we forget things,” he adds, noting the murderous consequences of age- old enmities elsewhere [“A Conversation in Iowa, Part Two,” NYR, November 19, 2015]. Obama was not the first president to admire amnesia. Americans should forget Vietnam, urged George H.W. Bush in his inaugural address, for “no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory.” From ancient Athens on, statesmen have enjoined oblivion— forgetting and hence forgiving divisive grievances—for the sake of national unity. But the American penchant for ignoring or, more often, anachronizing the past to support current causes has spawned baleful perversions of history. Long forgotten was slavery’s prime role as the Civil War’s cause. Still…

1. After weeks of student protest about racial inequality on campus, Yale President Peter Salovey announced on November 17 that the university would be making significant changes to address “longstanding inequities.” The announcement came just five days after a group of Yale students delivered a list of demands to Salovey, and it marked a significant victory for the students, and for racial justice. At the same time, however, the Yale controversy offers a vital lesson both in the power of free speech and in the dangers of seeking its curtailment in the name of equality. The Yale dispute deserves attention all the more because it is part of a growing national student movement. A website that has been set up to collect student group demands to end “systemic and structural…

Lulu an opera by Alban Berg, produced by William Kentridge, at the Metropolitan Opera, November 5–December 3, 2015 And all the rest of her a shifting change, A broken bundle of mirrors . . . ! —Ezra Pound, “Near Perigord” A sketch of a standing woman, halfnaked, bending to the side as if posing on demand, the eyes downcast and the lips frowning, brushed in black ink by W illiam Kentridge, is hoisted in front of the Met to announce Kentridge’s new production of Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. It is not a solidly imposing image, not a by now familiar memento of a historic era (like, say, a blow-up of Louise Brooks playing Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box), but rather something that as light passes through it…

Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, edited by Larry Siems. Little, Brown, 378 pp., $29.00; $17.99 (paper) In December 2005, a panel of US military officers at Guantanamo Bay convened a hearing about the case of a Mauritanian prisoner named Mohamedou Ould Slahi. In the midst of the proceedings, Slahi mentioned that he had recently completed a memoir. “When it is released I advise you guys to read it,” he said. “It is a very interesting book, I think.” This once, an author’s generous self- assessment proves to be an understatement. It took ten years for Slahi’s lawyers, editor, and publisher to bring a version of his hand- scrawled, 466-page manuscript to the public. The volume has been carefully edited and annotated by Larry Siems, a writer and human rights…

The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai edited by Robert Alter. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 551 pp., $35.00 First, a disclosure: though I grew up in a ritually observant Jewish household and went to religious school three times a week for six years, my command of Hebrew is close to nonexistent. True, if I happened to run into an Oriental potentate, I could probably flatter and cajole him in phrases that ancient Jews thought appropriate for the Almighty. But I would stumble over buying a melon in Jerusalem or reading the headlines at a kiosk in Tel Aviv. I have over the years fallen short at quite a few things I’ve attempted to learn—downhill skiing without fear, for example, or sight-reading at the piano—but failing to learn basic Hebrew as a language…

In Jackson Heights a film directed by Frederick Wiseman Toward the end of In Jackson Heights, Frederick Wiseman’s wonderfully dreamlike new film—a seeming celebration of a neighborhood in Queens that its city councilman calls “the most diverse community in the whole world”—we see two Cuban grandmothers singing, with great joy and abandon, “Yo Vendo Unos Ojos Negros.” I sell a pair of black eyes Who wants to buy them from me? I sell them for being bewitching Because they paid me badly. One woman is toothless, both women wear baseball caps, and as they sing verse after verse— about sorrow, fading flowers, lost love—their voices grow stronger, their gestures more exuberant. The scene shifts and the women continue to sing as we look down on streets that have, throughout the…

Human Rights in Russia: Citizens and the State from Perestroika to Putin by Mary McAuley. I. B. Tauris, 353 pp., $110.00 In August the Russian supermodel Natalia Vodianova wrote a bitter post on her Facebook page. The previous day, her twenty-seven-year-old sister Oksana, who has autism and cerebral palsy, was taking a customary walk with her caretaker in Nizhny Novgorod, where she lives. They stopped at a cafe in a park and ordered a chocolate bar for Oksana. Then the owner of the cafe told them to “get out of here,” Vodianova wrote. “You are scaring the customers.” The caretaker asked to be allowed to stay until Oksana finished her chocolate bar. The cafe’s security guards intervened, threatening to call a psychiatric ambulance or to lock Oksana in the cellar.…

Ben- Gurion: Father of Modern Israel by Anita Shapira. Yale University Press, 273 pp., $25.00 Clarissa Eden, the widow of Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill’s niece, once asked my late wife, Edna, and me if we had an idea for someone capable of writing her husband’s biography. “What kind of biography do you have in mind?” Edna asked. “I want a big fat book that includes everything,” she said. “I don’t mind if it makes for boring reading, but I want everything in it, so that future historians could use this book as a reliable source book and make their own judgment about my husband’s achievements and failures.” The idea was clear: it is for our generation to report accurately and for future generations to judge soundly. Anita Shapira is…

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, translated from the Japanese by Dennis Washburn. Norton, 1,320 pp., $49.95 The Tale of Genji, scenes from the emperor’s court in eleventh- century Japan organized around the amorous adventures of its hero, Prince Genji, goes deeper than any romance. The main characters, the radiant prince in particular and a number of the women he beguiles, are endowed with a range of emotions sufficiently complex to make them seem true to life even to the modern reader. There is no precedent in Japanese literature for the author’s vision of the storyteller’s task. Speaking through Prince Genji, she makes a case for realism, the gateway to what we consider the modern novel: There are moments when one wants to pass on to later generations the…

In a house in Rafah, at the southern edge of Gaza, I met Sheikh Omar Hams, fifty-one years old, a slender figure dressed in a simple white robe and seated on a mattress on the floor. Hams is director of the Ibn Baz Islamic Institute, based in Rafah, where it also runs a bakery and charity outlets. His mission, he says, is to spread the word of the Prophet Muhammad and to give bread and other aid to the homeless and the poor. Hams is a Salafist sheikh. “A Salaf means an original ancestor—one of those who lived close to the Prophet and observed his actions intimately, followed his ways and his words literally,” he explains. The sheikh teaches his students how to return to those ways, and they in…

With the death of Robert Craft on November 10, 2015, at the age of ninetytwo, the world lost a witness to—and a shaper of—some of the great events in twentieth- century music. Famous to many as “Stravinsky’s assistant,” as the man who helped this essential modern master discover a new course for his later work after The Rake’s Progress, Craft initially became known as the conductor of the first recordings of Webern’s complete works in 1957, of the American premiere of Berg’s Lulu in 1963, of the first multiple collections of Schoenberg’s music on LP, and of many great recordings of early music that provided essential musical discoveries for emerging composers and musicians of the time as well as for the larger public— works by Monteverdi, Schutz, and Gesualdo among…

Flesh and Bone a television series created by Moira Walley-Beckett. Anchor Bay, 2 DVDs, $39.98; 2 Blu-ray discs, $49.99 What did ballet ever do to the world to deserve the way it’s always being represented by writers and filmmakers? Poor ballet! It’s so hard to get right; it’s so fragile an enterprise; it’s so battered by economic and sociological realities. Why does this fiendishly demanding but deeply rewarding process have to be distorted into an orgy of sadism, masochism, and misery? The latest avatar is the eight-part TV series Flesh and Bone, produced by the cable network Starz and starring the dancer Sarah Hay. Yes, Nijinsky went mad, but he was a troubled young man—was it really Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes who pushed him over the edge? Yes, the…

The Man in the High Castle a television series created by Frank Spotnitz and adapted from the novel by Philip K. Dick In October, The New York Times Magazine presented its readers with an unexpected question: “Could You Kill a Baby Hitler?” The response to the online poll was closely divided, with 42 percent of respondents saying they would indeed take the opportunity to kill Hitler when he was a baby, if provided with a time machine. Another 30 percent said no, and the remainder were uncertain. But the response to the question on Twitter, where the baby- Hitler poll became a momentary sensation, was pretty much unanimous: mockery of the entire idea, and of The New York Times for asking such a futile and unanswerable question. (“Can I use…

1. As the concentration of wealth in America has grown, so has the scale of philanthropy. Today, that activity is one of the principal ways in which the superrich not only “give back” but also exert influence, yet it has not received the attention it deserves. As I have previously tried to show, digital technology offers journalists new ways to cover the world of money and power in America,1 and that’s especially true when it comes to philanthropy. Over the last fifteen years, the number of foundations with a billion dollars or more in assets has doubled, to more than eighty. A significant portion of that money goes to such traditional causes as universities, museums, hospitals, and local charities. Needless to say, such munificence does much good. The philanthropic sector…