The Saga of the Flaming Zucchini

Jenny Uglow — Mon, 20 May 2013 17:00:00 -0400

Jenny Uglow

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat
by Bee Wilson

Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat combines a passionate gathering of information, diligently communicated, and an amused realism that brings us safely down to earth. Tirelessly, Wilson narrates many instances of scientists and engineers, often in cahoots with big business, setting out to solve kitchen problems, especially in inventing modern labor-saving devices like beaters and blenders. “What tulips were to Holland in the 1630s and Internet startups were to Seattle in the 1990s, eggbeaters were to the East Coast of the United States in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s,” Wilson says.

Dürer's Devil Within

Andrew Butterfield — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:52:31 -0400

Andrew Butterfield

In the summer of 1494, soon after his engagement, Albrecht Dürer made a startlingly intimate drawing of his fiancée Agnes Frey. One might have expected a twenty-three-year-old to depict his betrothed as a source of love, or comfort or well-being. Instead, Albrecht showed Agnes twisted up in a knot of anxious introversion. In its frank portrayal of an informal moment of unguarded emotion, there had never been a drawing quite like this before. Typically portraiture was honorific and meant to represent the exemplary virtues of the person shown; Dürer instead often sought to capture the idiosyncratic and psychological characteristics of the people he portrayed. He was fascinated with the close scrutiny of dark and brooding emotion.

Ruthless Iran: Can a Deal Be Made?

Roger Cohen — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:30:00 -0400

Roger Cohen

Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran
by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett are unusual among former staffers of the CIA, the State Department, and the National Security Council in their deep affection for the Islamic Republic of Iran. This attraction, which knows few bounds, finds its apotheosis in Going to Tehran. Their stated goal is “the most objective analysis of Iranian politics.” Yet they find that Iran embraces, “more fully and openly than Turkey, the project of building a state that is simultaneously Islamic and democratic.”

Why Obama Is Not Nixon

Elizabeth Drew — Sat, 18 May 2013 10:30:00 -0400

Elizabeth Drew

References to Watergate, impeachment, even Richard Nixon, are being tossed around these days as if they were analogous to the current so-called scandals. But the furors over the IRS, Benghazi, and the Justice Department’s sweeping investigation of the Associated Press, don’t begin to rise—or sink—to that level. The wise and pithy Matt Dowd, a former Republican operative, said recently, “We rush to scandal before we settle on stupidity.” Washington just loves scandals; they’re ever so much more exciting than the daily grind of legislation—if there is any—and the tit-for-tat between the president and the congressional Republicans over the budget was becoming tedious. Faux outrage is a specialty here.

Is Humbert Humbert Jewish?

Mark Ford — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:45:00 -0400

Mark Ford

The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov
by Andrea Pitzer

The Tragedy of Mister Morn
by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Thomas Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy

Selected Poems
by Vladimir Nabokov, translated from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov, and edited and with an introduction by Thomas Karshan

Stalking Nabokov: Selected Essays
by Brian Boyd

Nabokov’s conception of the artist as quasi-divine inventor means that—as is the case with one of his great heroes, James Joyce—critics tend to find themselves in the role of enchanted hunters looking for clues and connections, spotting recondite allusions, praising the novels’ elaborate artistry, or elucidating labyrinthine patterns. It would take a bold critic to read such a dazzling, seemingly omniscient, and utterly self-conscious oeuvre as depicting the bars of Nabokov’s own cage. Andrea Pitzer doesn’t, perhaps, go quite that far, but she does invite us to step back a little and ponder the oddness of the relationship Nabokov’s writings create between the fictive and the historical.

What Is Autism?

Jerome Groopman — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:30:00 -0400

Jerome Groopman

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum
by Temple Grandin and Richard Panek

I never learned to type. The best I can do is hunt and peck with two fingers while looking at the keyboard. Instead of touch-typing, I was taught how to work with metal: shape flashings, solder wires, drill into tin. My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. L., divided the class into those able to undertake a so-called “academic curriculum” and ultimately attend college, and those like me, only fit for vocational training, destined to work in factories or repair shops. Mrs. L. made clear to us what marked a promising student: neat penmanship, proper posture, and sharp attention to her lessons. It did not take her long to conclude that I lacked all of these indicators.

How to Succeed in Business

Anne Applebaum — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:15:00 -0400

Anne Applebaum

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
by Sheryl Sandberg with Nell Scovell

The End of Men and the Rise of Women
by Hanna Rosin

Sheryl Sandberg is disinclined to talk about luck, and this makes sense: If that’s all it was, then what lessons can she sell to women in Lean In? What will women talk about at Lean In circles? What will they write on the Lean In Facebook page? Her lack of interest in the mechanics of her own career is equally understandable. One can quite see that “Be dishonest about your working hours” or “Be at the right place at the right time” doesn’t have the same ring as “Opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.” That sort of advice wouldn’t have made this book into a best seller.

Mandela & Communism: An Exchange

Bill Keller, Rian Malan, Paul Trewhela — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:30:00 -0400

Rian Malan and Paul Trewhela, reply by Bill Keller

To the Editors:

I enjoyed Bill Keller’s review of my scribblings [“The Heretic,” NYR, March 21] but must take issue with his view of the tiny but hugely influential South African Communist Party (SACP). “Most…members weren’t all that Communist,” writes Keller, seemingly wishing to impute that our Reds were only pretending to believe in the totalitarian Soviet ideal. I’m afraid Mr. Keller is wrong.

'Beat Women': An Exchange

Lyndall Gordon, Joyce Johnson, Andrew O'Hagan — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:30:00 -0400

Joyce Johnson and Lyndall Gordon, reply by Andrew O’Hagan

To the Editors:

What is the Scottish definition of biography? I ask this because Andrew O’Hagan [“Jack Kerouac: Crossing the Line,” NYR, March 21] is the second Scottish reviewer in recent months to call my book The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac a memoir. I suppose it would be futile to point out that I end the book in 1951, six years before Kerouac entered my life, and that my research was not conducted in the bedroom but in the unsexy archives of the Berg Collection, where I tracked Jack’s most important relationship—the one he had with his work.

Can Shell Be Stopped?

Subhankar Banerjee — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:30:00 -0400

Subhankar Banerjee

To the Editors:

On February 27, just as Ian Frazier’s review of my anthology Arctic Voices was being published [NYR, March 7], Shell announced that after both its rigs, Noble Discoverer and Kulluk, suffered heavy damage and were cited for EPA violations, it would not drill in Alaska’s Arctic waters in 2013.

Shell’s mishaps are dissuading other companies that also bought leases in Alaska’s Arctic waters ...

Bolshevik Jazz

Gregory Friedin — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:30:00 -0400

Gregory Friedin

To the Editors:

I very much admired Michael Scammell’s masterful and exhaustively researched biographies, and I read with great interest his nuanced review of Douglas Smith’s Former People: The Last Days of The Russian Aristocracy [NYR, March 7]. All the more surprising, then, is the impression of chronological confusion conveyed in the passage dealing with the fashion for fox-trot, brought to Russia by Americans working for the American Relief Administration in 1921–1923.

'Challenge to the Church'

William Pfaff, Garry Wills — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:30:00 -0400

Garry Wills, reply by William Pfaff

To the Editors:

I cannot object if a person finds a book of mine too onerous or boring to read but, in that case, he should not pretend to review it, as William Pfaff did [“Challenge to the Church,” NYR, May 9]. To spare himself the labor of discussing Why Priests? he wanders back to things remembered from the time when he still read books. We get his views on ...

How She Survived

David D. Hebb — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:30:00 -0400

David D. Hebb

To the Editors:

Many thanks to Professor Robert Paxton for clarifying the question regarding the Flandre/Maréchal Pétain/La Marseillaise story [“Vichy’s Ocean Liner,” Letters, NYR, May 9], but there is more, I think, of interest relating to this ship.

First, it should be noted that this ship was only in small part a Vichy project. The origins of the ship go back at least to December 1938 when ...

Andy Warhol and His Foundation: The Questions

Richard Dorment — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:00:00 -0400

Richard Dorment

After Andy Warhol died in February 1987, his will directed that a foundation should be set up in his name, funded with proceeds from the sale of some 95,000 pictures, prints, sculptures, drawings, and photographs left in his estate. Warhol’s bequest made no provision for the authentication of his artwork. But in 1994 the foundation initiated work on a multivolume catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s art. In the following year the foundation’s directors set up an authentication committee to pass judgment on artworks attributed to him.

Shooting Our Way to Safety

Charles Simic — Wed, 15 May 2013 13:06:11 -0400

Charles Simic

“How many Bostonians wished they had a gun two weeks ago?” Wayne LaPierre asked the rapt crowd at the NRA National Convention in Houston earlier this month. The huge audience of firearm enthusiasts, who call themselves “freedom’s biggest army, its greatest and brightest hope,” clapped in approval, their eyes having been just opened to how differently things would have turned out had the four million Bostonians and the marathon runners all been packing heat and had drawn their weapons and opened fire at the first sound of explosion.

How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled

Paul Krugman — Tue, 14 May 2013 14:00:00 -0400

Paul Krugman

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire
by Neil Irwin

Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
by Mark Blyth

The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America
by David A. Stockman

Austerity economics is in a very bad way. Its predictions have proved utterly wrong; its founding academic documents haven’t just lost their canonized status, they’ve become the objects of much ridicule. None of this should have come as a surprise: basic macroeconomics should have told everyone to expect what did, in fact, happen, and the papers that have now fallen into disrepute were obviously flawed from the start. This raises the obvious question: Why did austerity economics get such a powerful grip on elite opinion in the first place?

Rite of Spring

Christopher Benfey — Tue, 14 May 2013 13:52:53 -0400

Christopher Benfey

Margaret Fuller was known to perform the ancient form of divination in which a passage of Virgil selected at random is assumed to reveal what lies ahead. I thought I might follow Fuller’s lead, and greet the spring by serendipitously dipping into a trusted book for guidance. I determined to draw my first lot on March 21. The previous night, the equinox itself, my wife and I had heard, around midnight, a strange howling in the distance, probably a coyote, or perhaps an owl, though we both allowed ourselves to think that this was a wolf, perhaps a she-wolf, eager to found some new Rome on the outskirts of Amherst, Massachusetts.

Pakistan: A New Beginning?

Ahmed Rashid — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:49:51 -0400

Ahmed Rashid

Although opposition leader Nawaz Sharif was favored going into Pakistan’s fraught parliamentary elections on Saturday, nobody predicted that his party would win so convincingly. The weeks leading up to the vote were marred by the worst election violence in the country’s history, combined with widespread fear that a divided electorate would fail to produce a government with sufficient clout to deal with growing intolerance, multiple insurgencies, and an imploding economy. But the strong victory by Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML) amid high voter turnout now holds the promise of greater stability—and with it the possibility that a civilian government might at last be equipped to tackle some of these challenges.

Literary Journalism: A Discussion

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:45:00 -0400

On April 3, 2013 The New York Review of Books and the Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library presented a panel discussion celebrating the Review’s 50th anniversary. Five regular contributors discussed their careers, their experience writing for editors Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, and their predictions and hopes for the future of literary journalism. We are pleased to present the excerpts below from this program.

A Mind Among Pigs

Gabriel Winslow-Yost — Fri, 10 May 2013 13:14:13 -0400

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Upstream Color, Shane Carruth’s long-awaited second film, begins with an extended sequence of victimization, extraordinary in its deadpan brutality. A young woman (Kris, one of only two characters given real names, played by Amy Seimetz) is stun-gunned outside a bar by a deceptively pleasant-looking man, referred to in the credits as the Thief. He forces a strange grub-like creature down her throat, and she wakes up as a sort of zombie—blank, passive, absolutely credulous and obedient. Over the course of several days, the Thief issues her a series of slightly surreal instructions, takes all her valuables, empties her bank account, even makes her take out a loan on her home to give him more money. Meanwhile, the creature squirms visibly under her skin.

Reading It Wrong

Tim Parks — Thu, 09 May 2013 14:25:44 -0400

Tim Parks

How far is language really able to communicate something new, something that runs contrary to my expectations? One of the intriguing aspects when teaching translation is watching students struggle with sentences that say things they didn’t expect them to say. In many cases, if a writer should come up with some perplexing idea, or, worse still, some declaration running contrary to received wisdom or political correctness, students, but also practiced translators, will end up reducing the text to something more conventional. Do we as readers subconsciously make these “corrections”? How far can they go?

Chavismo After Chávez

Alma Guillermoprieto — Wed, 08 May 2013 17:15:19 -0400

Alma Guillermoprieto

From one moment to the next it wasn’t so funny anymore: Nicolás Maduro Moros, the late Hugo Chávez’s chosen successor, had gone on the campaign trail with the full backing of the chavista state, chavista judicial system, and chavista coffers. Everyone, possibly including the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonski himself, expected him to win an easy victory. Yet on April 14, according to the officially impartial but unashamedly chavista electoral council, Maduro scraped out a tiny victory. Or perhaps he lost. And then chavismo collapsed into a scary collective insanity.

The Ecstasy of a Modern Romantic

Joan Acocella — Tue, 07 May 2013 15:45:00 -0400

Joan Acocella

In her youth Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) more or less created what we now call American modern dance, and she soon became famous for it. She was also a beauty, leaving behind her a trail of glamorous lovers. But by 1927, when she was fifty, all that was over. Duncan was living in a rented studio in Nice. She was barely performing any longer, and years of hard living—above all, heavy drinking—had coarsened her looks. She had no money. She went to parties in order to eat the canapés. Partly, no doubt, to improve her financial situation, she decided to do something that she had talked about for years: write her memoirs.

Imelda's Sweet Sauce

Ian Buruma — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:25:30 -0400

Ian Buruma

Turning the life and times of Imelda Marcos into a piece of musical theater set in a disco is almost too obvious. And yet Here Lies Love, the musician David Byrne’s imagining of Imelda’s inner landscape, mostly works very well. The pop opera, brilliantly staged by Alex Timbers and choreographed by Annie-B Parson, is performed in a made up disco with constantly shifting stages sliding across the floor. As video clips are flashed onto the walls, in a kind of light show of Imelda’s public life, the mostly middle-aged audience is coaxed by a raucous DJ and pink-suited ushers into bopping along with the actors.

The Bombers' World

Christian Caryl — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:00:00 -0400

Christian Caryl

The biggest question surrounding the marathon bombings is the one of motive: Why did they do it? Given what we know so far, it seems likely that it was Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother, who instigated and planned the attacks—but he, of course, is dead. The imprisoned Dzhokhar has told investigators that the brothers undertook the bombings as retaliation against the US for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That sounds plausible enough on the face of things, in view of what we know about the politics of jihadi terrorists in other parts of the world. At the same time, there are many other details of the Tsarnaev brothers’ case that make it seem starkly unique, more of an outlier than something that can be easily slotted into a larger pattern.

My Psychic Garburator

Margaret Atwood — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:36:20 -0400

Margaret Atwood

Most dreams of writers aren’t about dead people or writing, and—like everyone else’s dreams—they aren’t very memorable. If you keep a dream journal, your mind will obligingly supply you with more dreams and shapelier ones, but you don’t always want that, nor can you necessarily make any sense of what you may have so vividly dreamt. Why, for instance, did I dream I had surged up through the lawn of Toronto’s Victoria College and clomped into the library, decomposing and covered with mud? The librarian didn’t notice a thing, which, in the dream, I found surprising. Was this an anxiety dream? If so, which anxiety?

He Conceived the Mathematics of Roughness

Jim Holt — Mon, 06 May 2013 12:30:00 -0400

Jim Holt

The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick
by Benoit B. Mandelbrot

Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity. To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower.

An Original Thinker of Our Time

Cass R. Sunstein — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:15:00 -0400

Cass R. Sunstein

Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman
by Jeremy Adelman

Albert Hirschman, who died late last year, was one of the most interesting and unusual thinkers of the last century. An anti-utopian reformer with a keen eye for detail, Hirschman insisted on the complexity of social life and human nature. He opposed intransigence in all its forms. He believed that political and economic possibilities could be found in the most surprising places. Hirschman’s work changes how you see the world. It illuminates yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His categories become your categories.

Literary Journalism: A Discussion

Fri, 03 May 2013 16:46:10 -0400

On April 3, 2013 The New York Review and the Cullman Center for Scholars & Writers at the New York Public Library presented a panel discussion celebrating the Review‘s 50th anniversary and discussing the future of literary journalism. This podcast features excerpts from remarks by Ian Buruma, Joseph Lelyveld, Zoë Heller, Alma Guillermoprieto, and Andrew Delbanco.

On Sylvia Plath

Elizabeth Hardwick — Fri, 03 May 2013 15:30:00 -0400

Elizabeth Hardwick

In Sylvia Plath’s work and in her life the elements of pathology are so deeply rooted and so little resisted that one is disinclined to hope for general principles, sure origins, applications, or lessons. Her fate and her themes are hardly separate and both are singularly terrible. Her work is brutal, like the smash of a fist; and sometimes it is also mean in its feeling. Literary comparisons are possible, echoes vibrate occasionally, but to whom can she be compared in spirit, in content, in temperament?

LA's Alternate Realities

Martin Filler — Fri, 03 May 2013 12:30:22 -0400

Martin Filler

How can the most architecturally innovative part of the United States also be such a thoroughgoing urban mess? This spring and summer, two complementary exhibitions seek to bring the unfathomableness of LA into focus. The first, Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990,” which is at the J. Paul Getty Museum through July 21, explores how the city emerged through fitful initial development, explosive postwar growth, and a distinctive built legacy. The second, “Never Built: Los Angeles,” which opens at LA’s Architecture and Design Museum on July 13, examines a stunning array of unexecuted projects to show why the city didn’t become something else.

Maggie

Andrew O'Hagan — Fri, 03 May 2013 10:15:00 -0400

Andrew O’Hagan

Politicians have always been disliked and always blamed, but Margaret Thatcher appeared to many people in Britain to have no feeling for the people whose lives were hurt by her policies. No feeling and no understanding. Her stridency appeared to excite boys who remembered their nannies, but to other men and women, the poorer sort, she was the incarnation of blind authority. She knew there were real families out there in Britain’s hinterlands or northern lands, yet, like a crazed statistician or a bad novelist, she couldn’t really imagine what their lives must be like.

Guantánamo and Torture: It's Up to Obama

David Cole — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:32:33 -0400

David Cole

Until now, President Obama has put the blame for failing to deal with Guantánamo on Congress. Without question, Congress has made his job more difficult by obstructing detainee transfers with onerous “certification” requirements. But there are steps the president could nonetheless take. For example, the current law permits the executive branch to waive some of the requirements when the transfer “is in the national security interests of the United States.” Moreover, eighty-six detainees have been “cleared for release” but remain in detention. Fifty-six of them are Yemeni citizens, and it was President Obama, not Congress, who placed their release on hold.

The New York Review of Books

Time Regained!

Ibsen’s Broken Homes

A Light in the Dark

The Saga of the Flaming Zucchini

Dürer's Devil Within

Ruthless Iran: Can a Deal Be Made?

Why Obama Is Not Nixon

Is Humbert Humbert Jewish?

What Is Autism?

How to Succeed in Business

Mandela & Communism: An Exchange

'Beat Women': An Exchange

Can Shell Be Stopped?

Bolshevik Jazz

'Challenge to the Church'

How She Survived

Andy Warhol and His Foundation: The Questions

Shooting Our Way to Safety

How the Case for Austerity Has Crumbled

Rite of Spring

Pakistan: A New Beginning?

Literary Journalism: A Discussion

A Mind Among Pigs

Reading It Wrong

Chavismo After Chávez

The Ecstasy of a Modern Romantic

Imelda's Sweet Sauce

The Bombers' World

My Psychic Garburator

He Conceived the Mathematics of Roughness

An Original Thinker of Our Time

Literary Journalism: A Discussion

On Sylvia Plath

LA's Alternate Realities

Maggie

Guantánamo and Torture: It's Up to Obama