Home//The New York Review of Books/May 7, 2015/In This Issue
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015CONTRIBUTORSDAVID COLE is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center.FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His new book, Dreams of Earth and Sky, a collection of his writings in these pages, will be published in April.MARK FORD ’s Selected Poems and a volume of essays, This Dialogue of One, were published last year. He teaches in the English Department at University College London.IAN FRAZIER is the author of ten books, including Great Plains, Family, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia.ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches European history at Princeton. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe.EDITH HALL is a Professor in the Department of Classics and the Centre for…2 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015The New Deal1. During the months of negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran, opponents of a deal have loudly anticipated failure, either because a deal wouldn’t be reached, wouldn’t be good enough, or wouldn’t be upheld by Tehran. Charging that the impending deadline made the US too eager to reach a deal, House Speaker John Boehner unaccountably made the pressure worse by announcing that if a deal wasn’t struck soon, Congress would immediately impose new sanctions on Iran—an act that would preemptively destroy any hope of a final agreement. Republican presidential candidates one-upped each other in expressing disapproval of the negotiations. Scott Walker promised to revoke the deal on “day one” in the White House. Ted Cruz said that anyone who doesn’t reject the deal “isn’t fit to be president.” Senate Foreign…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Einstein as a Jew and a PhilosopherEinstein: His Space and Times by Steven Gimbel. Yale University Press, 191 pp., $25.00Why would anybody want to write another book about Albert Einstein? Why would anybody want to read it? These are two separate questions, but both of them have satisfactory answers. In spite of the large number of books already written about Einstein, there is still room for one more.There were several good reasons for writing this book. Yale University Press is publishing a big series of short biographies under the heading “Jewish Lives.” Among the twenty already published are Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Rothko, and Leon Trotsky. Among the twenty-five announced as forth coming are Benjamin Disraeli, Bob Dylan, Jesus, and Moses. Einstein obviously belongs on this list.John Reed in his eyewitness report, Ten…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Ukraine: Inside the DeadlockLast September, a few weeks before Ukraine’s general election, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, then as now prime minister, issued a pamphlet listing his aims. One was stark: “To get through the winter.” Given that rebel soldiers in the eastern part of the country paint “To Kiev!” on their tanks, that Ukraine relies on Russia for much of its energy, and that its economy is in dire straits, it is nonetheless safe to say that he has succeeded. The rebels, despite inflicting two major recent defeats on the government forces, have not advanced significantly. Winter power cuts in regions unaffected by the war were short and survivable. Also, while the current cease-fire, agreed to on February 12, is not expected to last, Ukraine and its government have not collapsed, nor do they show…17 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015An American Hero in China1. One night in September, three hundred people crowded into the basem*nt auditorium of an office tower in Beijing to hear a discussion between two of China’s most popular writers. One was Liu Yu, a thirty-eight-year-old political scientist and blogger who has written a best seller explaining how American democracy works. Her fans call her “goddess”—for her writings and her stylish looks.1But this evening, Liu was just a foil for the other writer: Peter Hessler, a low-key New Yorker journalist. Based in China until 2007, he later wrote on the American West and now lives in Egypt. Hessler has written three books on China and a collection of essays, all published in the US, and been recognized withIn China, however, he has been transformed into a writer of cult-figure proportions…18 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015The Angry New Frontier: Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty1. At the end of June, the Supreme Court will likely declare that the Constitution requires states to recognize samesex marriages on the same terms that they recognize marriages between a man and a woman. If it does, the decision will mark a radical transformation in both constitutional law and public values. Twenty-five years ago, the very idea of same-sex marriage was unthinkable to most Americans; the notion that the Constitution somehow guaranteed the right to it was nothing short of delusional.One sign of how far we have come is that the principal ground of political contention these days is not whether same-sex marriages should be recognized, but whether persons who object to such marriages on religious grounds should have the right to deny their services to couples celebrating samesex…14 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015A Strangely Funny Russian GeniusRussia is the funniest country in the world. Some countries, like America and England, are funny mostly on purpose, while others, like Germany and France, can be funny only unintentionally. (But that counts! Being funny is tricky, so any way you do it counts.) Russia, however, is funny both intentionally (Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov) and unintentionally (Vladimir Putin singing, as he did at a televised event a few years ago, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill”). Given the disaster Russian history has been more or less continuously for the last five centuries, its humor is of the darkest, most extreme kind. Russian humor is to ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling is to a petting zoo. Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die.Surveys that measure such distinctions…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015TO THE KNIFEYou were what made us cryin the light to start withwe could see you were thereand we saw what you werewe were hiding from youand would have been happyto go on with the dreamthat you could not find uscold flame sight without eyesline where both shores the seenand the unseen come downinto nothing to passbetween to separateto open to dividewhat had been once from whatonce it had been to tellapart bringing alwaysthe touch of the presentthough the dread of you flaresup far ahead of youand the memory ofyou lingers and goes onburning ahead of youwe plead with you who haveno ears for us we begin private and in vaindo not see us at allever we are not hereor if you see us donot touch us wherever youwere going to touch…1 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Sensual SapphoSappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works translated from the ancient Greek by Diane J. Rayor, with an introduction and notes by Andre Lardinois. Cambridge University Press, 173 pp., $70.00In about 300 BC, a doctor was summoned to diagnose the illness afflicting Antiochus, crown prince of the Seleucid empire in Syria. The young man’s symptoms included a faltering voice, burning sensations, a racing pulse, fainting, and pallor. In his biography of Antiochus’ father, Seleucus I, Plutarch reports that the symptoms manifested themselves only when Antiochus’ young stepmother Stratonice was in the room. The doctor was therefore able to diagnose the youth’s malady as an infatuation with her. The cause of the illness was clearly erotic, because the symptoms were “as described by Sappho.” The solution was simple: Antiochus’ father…18 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Two PoemsEARLY ONE MORNINGHere is Memory walking in the darkthere are no pictures of her as she isthe coming day was never seen beforethe stars have gone into another lifethe dreams have left with no sound of farewellinsects wake flying up with their feet wettrying to take the night along with themMemory alone is awake with meknowing that this may be the only timeONCE LATERIt is not until laterthat you have to be youngit is one of the thingsyou meant to do laterbut by then there issomeone else living therewith the shades rolled downhow could you have been young thereat that timewith all that was expectedthen what happened tothe expectationsthere is no sign of them therea shadow passes across the window shadewhat do they know in therewhoever they are…1 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015LETTERSA DOOR FOR CATHOLIC WOMENTo the Editors:In Eamon Duffy’s otherwise very wellinformed “Who Is the Pope?” [NYR, February 19], he remarks that “He [Pope Francis] has made clear his belief that Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacedotalis (Priestly Ordination) has settled ‘definitively’ the question of women’s ordination—‘that door is closed.’” And “so, it was asked, how did Papa Wojtyła know that the ordination of women was impossible . . . ?”Ordinatio Sacerdotalis deals only with the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood. This is an important distinction because it does NOT deal, in any way, with women’s ordination to the diaconate—female deacons exist in the New Testament (Romans 16:1–2), in the Anglican Church, and, closer to Rome, in the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Orthodox Church…4 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015TO THE KNIFEYou were what made us cryin the light to start withwe could see you were thereand we saw what you werewe were hiding from youand would have been happyto go on with the dreamthat you could not find uscold flame sight without eyesline where both shores the seenand the unseen come downinto nothing to passbetween to separateto open to dividewhat had been once from whatonce it had been to tellapart bringing alwaysthe touch of the presentthough the dread of you flaresup far ahead of youand the memory ofyou lingers and goes onburning ahead of youwe plead with you who haveno ears for us we begin private and in vaindo not see us at allever we are not hereor if you see us donot touch us wherever youwere going to touch…1 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Jihad: The Lessons of the CaliphateThe Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East by Eugene Rogan. Basic Books, 485 pp., $32.00 Just over a hundred years ago, in November 1914, a turbaned and bespectacled cleric stood on the exterior balcony of the great al-Fatih mosque in Istanbul. He read a fatwa that, among other things, enjoined all Muslims to fight against the British and French in a war taking place further north, in which a million men had already fallen. France, Russia, and Britain were allies. Their enemies were Germany and Austria -Hungary; and these, the Central Powers, were now being joined by the mightiest Muslim ruler in the world, the caliph Mehmet Reshad. The al-Fatih (“Conque -ror”) mosque had been built to celebrate the capture of Istanbul (then Constantinople) in…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015How We Got to Where We AreThe Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century by Jurgen Osterhammel, translated from the German by Patrick Camiller. Princeton University Press, 1,167 pp., $39.95 In 1903, in his Maxims for Revolutionists, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” In his stunning book on the history of the nineteenth century, the German historian Jurgen Osterhammel suggests a different approach: the unreasonable Osterhammel set himself a seemingly impossible agenda, the reasonable historian executed it, and the combination yields a great work. It may well have seemed unreasonable for Osterhammel, at the beginning of his career, to turn to Asia as his principal field…14 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015CONTRIBUTORSDAVID COLE is the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center. FREEMAN DYSON is Professor of Physics Emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His new book, Dreams of Earth and Sky, a collection of his writings in these pages, will be published in April. MARK FORD ’s Selected Poems and a volume of essays, This Dialogue of One, were published last year. He teaches in the English Department at University College London. IAN FRAZIER is the author of ten books, including Great Plains, Family, On the Rez, and Travels in Siberia. ANTHONY GRAFTON teaches European history at Princeton. His most recent book is The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe. EDITH HALL is a Professor in the Department of…2 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015A Tale of Woe and GloryThe Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky an exhibition at the Musee du quai Branly, Paris, April 8–July 20, 2014; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, September 19, 2014– January 11, 2015; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 9–May 10, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Gaylord Torrence. Skira Rizzoli/Musee du quai Branly, 317 pp., $65.00A kind of twilight invites silence in a show of Plains Indian art and material culture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that records their long moment of glory before the United States Army whipped them, as whites liked to say at the time, and confined them to reservations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The twilight is easily explained. Much of the art in the…16 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015A Tale of Woe and GloryThe Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky an exhibition at the Musee du quai Branly, Paris, April 8–July 20, 2014; the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, September 19, 2014– January 11, 2015; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 9–May 10, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Gaylord Torrence. Skira Rizzoli/Musee du quai Branly, 317 pp., $65.00 A kind of twilight invites silence in a show of Plains Indian art and material culture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that records their long moment of glory before the United States Army whipped them, as whites liked to say at the time, and confined them to reservations in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The twilight is easily explained. Much of the art in…16 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Growing Up Too BlackGod Help the Child by Toni Morrison. Knopf, 178 pp., $24.95 The title of Toni Morrison’s new novel echoes that of the sly, langorous Billie Holiday ballad “God Bless the Child.” But while the child in the song is blessed, or deserves to be blessed, because he’s “got his own”—something, presumably money, that will enable him to thrive regardless of what “Mama may have”—the children in God Help the Child have nothing: no power, no agency, no protection from the unfeeling or predatory adults around them. The novel begins with a woman who calls herself Sweetness absolving herself for having had a daughter whose skin is much darker than her own, and explaining why she has mistreated little Lula Ann: It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE“I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary”: The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms selected, translated from the Russian, and edited by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto. Academic Studies Press, 586 pp., $69.00, $35.00 (paper)Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms edited and translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich. Ardis, 288 pp., $16.95 (paper)The Old Woman by Daniil Kharms, adapted by Darryl Pinckney, directed by Robert Wilson, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, June 22–29, 2014Moi Muzh Daniil Kharms [My Husband Daniil Kharms] by Marina Durnovo with Vladimir Glotser. Moscow: B.S.G. Press, 196 pp.OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism edited by Eugene Ostashevsky, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich. Northwestern University Press, 258 pp., $22.95 (paper)An Invitation for Me…1 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015An American Hero in China1. One night in September, three hundred people crowded into the basem*nt auditorium of an office tower in Beijing to hear a discussion between two of China’s most popular writers. One was Liu Yu, a thirty-eight-year-old political scientist and blogger who has written a best seller explaining how American democracy works. Her fans call her “goddess”—for her writings and her stylish looks.1 But this evening, Liu was just a foil for the other writer: Peter Hessler, a low-key New Yorker journalist. Based in China until 2007, he later wrote on the American West and now lives in Egypt. Hessler has written three books on China and a collection of essays, all published in the US, and been recognized with In China, however, he has been transformed into a writer of…18 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015The Ravishing Painting of Piero di CosimoPiero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., February 1–May 3, 2015; and the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, June 23–September 27, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition by Gretchen A. Hirschauer, Dennis Geronimus, and others. National Gallery of Art/Galleria degli Uffizi, 248 pp., $60.00; $40.00 (paper)Great nineteenth-century critics taught us to imagine the Italian Renaissance as a world of nymphs walking gracefully on flowery meadows. They liked Piero di Cosimo, who painted his share of nymphs, but they did not have a great deal to say about him. Jacob Burckhardt praised the “extraordinarily solid composition and characters” of Piero’s Immaculate Conception with Saints in the Uffizi and the “completely charming details” of his Liberation of Andromeda. There he stopped.…20 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Peter Carey’s Hidden HistoryAmnesia by Peter Carey. Knopf, 307 pp., $25.95It is not hard to see Felix Moore, the supposed writer of Amnesia, as an alter ego of the novel’s actual author, Peter Carey. Moore is a muckraking Australian journalist, but also a sometime novelist, most notably of the soon-tobe-filmed satire Barbie and the Deadheads. He is, throughout the book, a writer in search of a character, attempting to construct from vague and contradictory impressions a life that could inhabit his pages. He types on an old Olivetti, as Carey did in his early days. He even refers to himself, ironically, as a national treasure—a description that applies without the irony to Carey himself.More importantly, Carey gives Moore aspects of his own biography. They seem to be roughly the same age (Carey is…17 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015The Deadly Art of Double DeceptionFor years I wondered whether the ingenious premise of Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution” influenced John le Carre to use the same premise in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. So I asked him, and he replied. But first the facts.“Witness,” written in 1924, is a short story of just twenty-six pages. Leonard Vole is on trial for murdering an elderly woman whose will makes him the principal beneficiary. The woman’s maid reports, and ultimately testifies, that she heard a man speaking with her employer at 9:30 PM on the night of the murder. Leonard tells his solicitor that he returned home that night at 9:20 PM, and that his wife can verify the time, providing him with an alibi.Questioned by Leonard’s solicitor, the “wife,” Romaine…6 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015A Strangely Funny Russian GeniusRussia is the funniest country in the world. Some countries, like America and England, are funny mostly on purpose, while others, like Germany and France, can be funny only unintentionally. (But that counts! Being funny is tricky, so any way you do it counts.) Russia, however, is funny both intentionally (Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov) and unintentionally (Vladimir Putin singing, as he did at a televised event a few years ago, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill”). Given the disaster Russian history has been more or less continuously for the last five centuries, its humor is of the darkest, most extreme kind. Russian humor is to ordinary humor what backwoods fundamentalist poisonous snake handling is to a petting zoo. Russian humor is slapstick, only you actually die. Surveys that measure such…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Syria: Death from Assad’s ChlorineChlorine, which is widely used for water purification, sanitation, and the manufacture of modern medicines, is essential for human well-being in today’s world. As epidemics of waterborne diseases escalate across Syria in besieged and opposition-held areas, the Syrian government’s systematic withholding of the primary means to decontaminate water in these areas can be considered an indirect weapon of mass destruction. However, although minute quantities of chlorine are life-saving, if too much is inhaled in its gaseous form, it can cause death in under thirty minutes. Recently, the Syrian government has used chlorine directly against civilians as a chemical weapon. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has thus transformed a principal element of public health into a tool of both disease and terror. 1. Good Chlorine Human life depends on water—clean water. Attempts…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Sensual SapphoSappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works translated from the ancient Greek by Diane J. Rayor, with an introduction and notes by Andre Lardinois. Cambridge University Press, 173 pp., $70.00 In about 300 BC, a doctor was summoned to diagnose the illness afflicting Antiochus, crown prince of the Seleucid empire in Syria. The young man’s symptoms included a faltering voice, burning sensations, a racing pulse, fainting, and pallor. In his biography of Antiochus’ father, Seleucus I, Plutarch reports that the symptoms manifested themselves only when Antiochus’ young stepmother Stratonice was in the room. The doctor was therefore able to diagnose the youth’s malady as an infatuation with her. The cause of the illness was clearly erotic, because the symptoms were “as described by Sappho.” The solution was simple: Antiochus’…18 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Two PoemsEARLY ONE MORNING Here is Memory walking in the darkthere are no pictures of her as she isthe coming day was never seen beforethe stars have gone into another lifethe dreams have left with no sound of farewellinsects wake flying up with their feet wettrying to take the night along with themMemory alone is awake with meknowing that this may be the only time ONCE LATER It is not until laterthat you have to be young it is one of the thingsyou meant to do later but by then there issomeone else living there with the shades rolled downhow could you have been young there at that timewith all that was expected then what happened tothe expectations there is no sign of them therea shadow passes across the window shade…1 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015LETTERSA DOOR FOR CATHOLIC WOMEN To the Editors: In Eamon Duffy’s otherwise very wellinformed “Who Is the Pope?” [NYR, February 19], he remarks that “He [Pope Francis] has made clear his belief that Pope John Paul II’s 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacedotalis (Priestly Ordination) has settled ‘definitively’ the question of women’s ordination—‘that door is closed.’” And “so, it was asked, how did Papa Wojtyła know that the ordination of women was impossible . . . ?” Ordinatio Sacerdotalis deals only with the question of women’s ordination to the priesthood. This is an important distinction because it does NOT deal, in any way, with women’s ordination to the diaconate—female deacons exist in the New Testament (Romans 16:1–2), in the Anglican Church, and, closer to Rome, in the Armenian Apostolic Church and…4 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015The New Deal1. During the months of negotiating a nuclear agreement with Iran, opponents of a deal have loudly anticipated failure, either because a deal wouldn’t be reached, wouldn’t be good enough, or wouldn’t be upheld by Tehran. Charging that the impending deadline made the US too eager to reach a deal, House Speaker John Boehner unaccountably made the pressure worse by announcing that if a deal wasn’t struck soon, Congress would immediately impose new sanctions on Iran—an act that would preemptively destroy any hope of a final agreement.Republican presidential candidates one-upped each other in expressing disapproval of the negotiations. Scott Walker promised to revoke the deal on “day one” in the White House. Ted Cruz said that anyone who doesn’t reject the deal “isn’t fit to be president.” Senate Foreign Relations…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Growing Up Too BlackGod Help the Child by Toni Morrison. Knopf, 178 pp., $24.95The title of Toni Morrison’s new novel echoes that of the sly, langorous Billie Holiday ballad “God Bless the Child.” But while the child in the song is blessed, or deserves to be blessed, because he’s “got his own”—something, presumably money, that will enable him to thrive regardless of what “Mama may have”—the children in God Help the Child have nothing: no power, no agency, no protection from the unfeeling or predatory adults around them.The novel begins with a woman who calls herself Sweetness absolving herself for having had a daughter whose skin is much darker than her own, and explaining why she has mistreated little Lula Ann:It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015RECENT BOOKS ABOUT UKRAINEA number of recent books provide essential background on Ukraine. Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post–Cold War Order by US academics Rajan Menon and Eugene B. Rumer (MIT Press, 2015) is a short and insightful primer that concentrates on the current crisis to give readers a brief but useful introduction to the history of the country.Coming at the subject from a different angle is Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West by British scholar Andrew Wilson (Yale University Press, 2014), who in 2000 wrote The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, which is now in its third edition (Yale University Press, 2009) and takes the country’s modern history up to 2009. For the new book he observed the Maidan revolution.To anyone who wants to delve deeper into the history of…1 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Einstein as a Jew and a PhilosopherEinstein: His Space and Times by Steven Gimbel. Yale University Press, 191 pp., $25.00 Why would anybody want to write another book about Albert Einstein? Why would anybody want to read it? These are two separate questions, but both of them have satisfactory answers. In spite of the large number of books already written about Einstein, there is still room for one more. There were several good reasons for writing this book. Yale University Press is publishing a big series of short biographies under the heading “Jewish Lives.” Among the twenty already published are Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Rothko, and Leon Trotsky. Among the twenty-five announced as forth coming are Benjamin Disraeli, Bob Dylan, Jesus, and Moses. Einstein obviously belongs on this list. John Reed in his…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Ukraine: Inside the DeadlockLast September, a few weeks before Ukraine’s general election, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, then as now prime minister, issued a pamphlet listing his aims. One was stark: “To get through the winter.” Given that rebel soldiers in the eastern part of the country paint “To Kiev!” on their tanks, that Ukraine relies on Russia for much of its energy, and that its economy is in dire straits, it is nonetheless safe to say that he has succeeded. The rebels, despite inflicting two major recent defeats on the government forces, have not advanced significantly. Winter power cuts in regions unaffected by the war were short and survivable. Also, while the current cease-fire, agreed to on February 12, is not expected to last, Ukraine and its government have not collapsed, nor do they show…17 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015RECENT BOOKS ABOUT UKRAINEA number of recent books provide essential background on Ukraine. Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post–Cold War Order by US academics Rajan Menon and Eugene B. Rumer (MIT Press, 2015) is a short and insightful primer that concentrates on the current crisis to give readers a brief but useful introduction to the history of the country. Coming at the subject from a different angle is Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West by British scholar Andrew Wilson (Yale University Press, 2014), who in 2000 wrote The Ukrainians: Unexpected Nation, which is now in its third edition (Yale University Press, 2009) and takes the country’s modern history up to 2009. For the new book he observed the Maidan revolution. To anyone who wants to delve deeper into the…1 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Jihad: The Lessons of the CaliphateThe Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East by Eugene Rogan. Basic Books, 485 pp., $32.00Just over a hundred years ago, in November 1914, a turbaned and bespectacled cleric stood on the exterior balcony of the great al-Fatih mosque in Istanbul. He read a fatwa that, among other things, enjoined all Muslims to fight against the British and French in a war taking place further north, in which a million men had already fallen. France, Russia, and Britain were allies. Their enemies were Germany and Austria -Hungary; and these, the Central Powers, were now being joined by the mightiest Muslim ruler in the world, the caliph Mehmet Reshad.The al-Fatih (“Conque -ror”) mosque had been built to celebrate the capture of Istanbul (then Constantinople) in 1453 by…16 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015How We Got to Where We AreThe Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century by Jurgen Osterhammel, translated from the German by Patrick Camiller. Princeton University Press, 1,167 pp., $39.95In 1903, in his Maxims for Revolutionists, George Bernard Shaw wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” In his stunning book on the history of the nineteenth century, the German historian Jurgen Osterhammel suggests a different approach: the unreasonable Osterhammel set himself a seemingly impossible agenda, the reasonable historian executed it, and the combination yields a great work.It may well have seemed unreasonable for Osterhammel, at the beginning of his career, to turn to Asia as his principal field at a…15 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015The Angry New Frontier: Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty1. At the end of June, the Supreme Court will likely declare that the Constitution requires states to recognize samesex marriages on the same terms that they recognize marriages between a man and a woman. If it does, the decision will mark a radical transformation in both constitutional law and public values. Twenty-five years ago, the very idea of same-sex marriage was unthinkable to most Americans; the notion that the Constitution somehow guaranteed the right to it was nothing short of delusional. One sign of how far we have come is that the principal ground of political contention these days is not whether same-sex marriages should be recognized, but whether persons who object to such marriages on religious grounds should have the right to deny their services to couples celebrating…14 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE“I Am a Phenomenon Quite Out of the Ordinary”: The Notebooks, Diaries, and Letters of Daniil Kharms selected, translated from the Russian, and edited by Anthony Anemone and Peter Scotto. Academic Studies Press, 586 pp., $69.00, $35.00 (paper) Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms edited and translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich. Ardis, 288 pp., $16.95 (paper) The Old Woman by Daniil Kharms, adapted by Darryl Pinckney, directed by Robert Wilson, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, June 22–29, 2014 Moi Muzh Daniil Kharms [My Husband Daniil Kharms] by Marina Durnovo with Vladimir Glotser. Moscow: B.S.G. Press, 196 pp. OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism edited by Eugene Ostashevsky, translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky and Matvei Yankelevich. Northwestern University Press, 258 pp., $22.95…1 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015The Ravishing Painting of Piero di CosimoPiero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., February 1–May 3, 2015; and the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, June 23–September 27, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition by Gretchen A. Hirschauer, Dennis Geronimus, and others. National Gallery of Art/Galleria degli Uffizi, 248 pp., $60.00; $40.00 (paper) Great nineteenth-century critics taught us to imagine the Italian Renaissance as a world of nymphs walking gracefully on flowery meadows. They liked Piero di Cosimo, who painted his share of nymphs, but they did not have a great deal to say about him. Jacob Burckhardt praised the “extraordinarily solid composition and characters” of Piero’s Immaculate Conception with Saints in the Uffizi and the “completely charming details” of his Liberation of Andromeda. There he…20 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015Peter Carey’s Hidden HistoryAmnesia by Peter Carey. Knopf, 307 pp., $25.95 It is not hard to see Felix Moore, the supposed writer of Amnesia, as an alter ego of the novel’s actual author, Peter Carey. Moore is a muckraking Australian journalist, but also a sometime novelist, most notably of the soon-tobe-filmed satire Barbie and the Deadheads. He is, throughout the book, a writer in search of a character, attempting to construct from vague and contradictory impressions a life that could inhabit his pages. He types on an old Olivetti, as Carey did in his early days. He even refers to himself, ironically, as a national treasure—a description that applies without the irony to Carey himself. More importantly, Carey gives Moore aspects of his own biography. They seem to be roughly the same age…17 min
The New York Review of Books|May 7, 2015The Deadly Art of Double DeceptionFor years I wondered whether the ingenious premise of Agatha Christie’s “The Witness for the Prosecution” influenced John le Carre to use the same premise in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. So I asked him, and he replied. But first the facts. “Witness,” written in 1924, is a short story of just twenty-six pages. Leonard Vole is on trial for murdering an elderly woman whose will makes him the principal beneficiary. The woman’s maid reports, and ultimately testifies, that she heard a man speaking with her employer at 9:30 PM on the night of the murder. Leonard tells his solicitor that he returned home that night at 9:20 PM, and that his wife can verify the time, providing him with an alibi. Questioned by Leonard’s solicitor, the…6 min
