The New York Review of Books

Schools We Can Envy

Diane Ravitch

To an American observer, the most remarkable fact about Finnish education is that students do not take any standardized tests until the end of high school. They do take tests, but the tests are drawn up by their own teachers, not by a multinational testing corporation. The Finnish nine-year comprehensive school is a “standardized testing-free zone,” where children are encouraged “to know, to create, and to sustain natural curiosity.”

Willard Mitt Romney

Michael Tomasky

Romney seems in certain ways a fine and even rare person. He is diligent, industrious, and appears to be honest; he applies himself to problems, earnestly studying and following the lead of the data. He is a man of apparently deep personal virtue, generous with his money and time. He is very intelligent and has typically succeeded, wildly so, at nearly everything he’s done (except, interestingly, politics—he’s lost two races and won just one). But with all that, there still seems something missing in the man.

Tom in Rome

Jonathan Galassi

Bolder than Antonio Canova
outdoing the Apollo Belvedere,
you demolish every Red Guide reader’s
half-baked callow notion of an
adequate response to what we see:
forensically investigating Daphne,
how she limb by limb becomes a tree,
you scant the art, stern sage who’s always known
what matters in a figure is the stone.

You are toffee, you are sand in sunlight,
you are handsome, winsome, bright, and lithe ...

Daddy’s Girl

Julian Barnes

Alex Bailey/Pathé Productions Ltd/The Weinstein Company

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady

In the spring of 2001, at the Conservative Party Conference in Plymouth, Margaret Thatcher made a joke. She was then seventy-five, and had been out of office for more than ten years, much of it spent as the hectoring conscience of her party. Now she told the faithful that on her way to ...

Beautiful, Aesthetic, Erotic

Richard Dorment

Laing Art Gallery/Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums, Newcastle upon Tyne

Edward Burne-Jones: Laus Veneris, 1873–1878

Created a baronet by William Gladstone, friend of Sarah Bernhardt, and idol of the Symbolists, by the time of his death in 1898 Sir Edward Burne-Jones was the most celebrated English artist in the world. To his admirers, his art represented the culmination of a literary tradition in painting that stretched back to the ...

The Super Power of Franz Liszt

Charles Rosen

The bicentenary of Franz Liszt (1811–1886) follows hard upon those of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, and Schumann, and he has conserved his place as one of the supreme Romantic composers. Nevertheless, his career as a composer was always cursed by the fact that he was also, it is generally agreed, the greatest pianist who ever lived. The major part of his work was for piano, much of it tailored for himself to perform, many of the pieces presenting a difficulty of execution almost never before seen. As a result, even today most performances of Liszt are generally intended not as a specifically musical experience, but chiefly to display the pianist’s technique.

An Exclusive Corner of Hebron

Jonathan Freedland

Dominique Nabokov

Palestinians outside the Mosque of Abraham, which covers the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Hebron, 1976

If you exclude Jerusalem, Hebron has the largest population of any Palestinian city in the West Bank. It is, along with Nablus, a commercial center, and what serves today as its thronging market square brims with life and trade, noise and fumes. There are stores selling groceries and electronics, as well as sidewalk ...

The New World of William Carlos Williams

Adam Kirsch

If you look at the lingua franca of American poetry today—a colloquial free verse focused on visual description and meaningful anecdote—it seems clear that William Carlos Williams is the twentieth-century poet who has done most to influence our very conception of what poetry should do, and how much it does not need to do. Why is it, then, that almost fifty years after his death, the reputation of Williams still seems to be haunted by a ghost of uncertainty?

New Hampshire Follies

Charles Simic

Christopher Evans/Boston Herald/Polaris

Ron Paul and Mitt Romney at a Republican presidential debate in Manchester, New Hampshire, January 7, 2012

When the fool supports the knave the good man may fold his hands. The fool in league with the knave against himself is a combination that none may withstand.
—Samuel Beckett, Murphy

Doctor, ‘tis a great comfort to know the disease whereof I die.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals ...

Let the DNA Fit the Crime

Richard C. Lewontin

Dominique Nabokov

Central Park, New York City, 1990

Hercule Poirot has an easy time of it. He needs only the logic provided by his “little gray cells” to discern, unerringly, which of the dozen or so guests at the country house or passengers in the sleeping coach have committed the crime, nor is there any doubt that those responsible would be found guilty were a trial to be held. But ...

Gay Night and Day

Colm Tóibín

Dominique Nabokov

Edmund White, New York City, May 2006

In Chapter Four of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma the novel’s hero, Fabrizio, on his travels in Europe, comes across some kind of skirmish or military adventure. When he is injured, he is looked after by a local family until his wound begins to heal. And then in the next chapter he is briefly preoccupied by what he witnessed ...

We’re More Unequal Than You Think

Andrew Hacker

Imagine a giant vacuum cleaner looming over America’s economy, drawing dollars from its bottom to its upper tiers. Using US Census reports, I estimate that since 1985, the lower 60 percent of households have lost $4 trillion, most of which has ascended to the top 5 percent, including a growing tier now taking in $1 million or more each year.

The Gambler in Blood and Iron

R.J.W. Evans

Scala, Florence/BPK, Berlin

Otto von Bismarck with his dogs, Tyras II and Rebecca, July 1891

Life with Otto von Bismarck could be very uncomfortable, even for those on his own side. Shortly after being appointed premier of Prussia in 1862, with a brief to defend monarch and army against an overwhelming liberal majority in parliament, he gave a speech that included the infamous claim that “the great questions of ...

The Grand Comedian Visits the Bible

Harold Bloom

José Saramago (1922–2010), a superb comic novelist, at his best was the peer of Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez. Cain, his last fiction, is a minor work, mostly valuable for its links to such permanent achievements as The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1986), The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), The Stone Raft (1986), and most closely to The Gospel According to Jesus Christ ...

Shadow and Smoke

Charles Wright

Live your life as though you were already dead,
Che Guevara declared.
Okay, let’s see how that works.
Not much difference as far as I can see,
the earth the same Paradise
It’s always wanted to be,
Heaven as far away as before,
The clouds the same old movable gates since time began.
There is no circle, there is no sentiment to be broken.
There are only the ...

The Chinese Are Coming!

Richard Bernstein

Imaginechina/Corbis

A ceremony in Sichuan Province, China, sending off an engineer battalion of the People’s Liberation Army on a peacekeeping mission to Lebanon, January 2011

The day after the Russian parliamentary elections in early December, the Chinese publication Global Times, an English-language newspaper and website managed by People’s Daily, the official organ of the Communist Party official, ran an editorial on how little credit the West gave ...

For Europe: ‘The Firepower Is There’: An Interview

Klaus Regling, interviewed by Sami Zeidan

Thierry Monasse/Polaris

Klaus Regling, head of the European Financial Stability Facility, and Evangelos Venizelos, Greece’s finance minister, during a meeting of eurozone ministers in Luxembourg, October 3, 2011

This interview with Klaus Regling, the head of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), took place on December 17, 2011, and was broadcast on Al Jazeera. The interviewer was Sami Zeidan. A revised and updated version of the interview follows ...

‘The Reactionary Mind’: An Exchange

Corey Robin, reply by Mark Lilla

Mark Peterson/Redux

Tea Party supporters at the Washington Monument, April 15, 2010

To the Editors:

Mark Lilla [“Republicans for Revolution,” NYR, January 12] makes three claims against my book The Reactionary Mind: it fails to take seriously the statements of “conservative intellectuals who lay out benign-sounding political principles”; it’s simplistic, situating the opposition between left and right in a “not overly complex” history of oppressor versus oppressed; it ...

Stalin’s Favorite Novel?

Nairi Petrossian, reply by Orlando Figes

To the Editors:

In his review of a play about Mikhail Bulgakov [“A Double Game with Stalin,” NYR, January 12], Orlando Figes claims that The White Guard by Bulgakov was the favorite novel of Stalin. The latter adored the Bulgakov play The Turbin’s Days, which had been performed in the Moscow Art Theater. It was the first Soviet drama staged in that renowned theater, an important point scored by ...

Russ Feingold in New York

Arien Mack

On Wednesday, February 22, the Center for Public Scholarship at the New School presents an inaugural lecture in the Public Voices series by Russ Feingold. Former US Senator (D-WI) Feingold will discuss his new book, While America Sleeps: A Wake-up Call for the Post-9/11 Era, and former Senator Bob Kerrey will moderate. The event is free and begins at 6:00 PM and will be followed by a ...

Can We Have a Democratic Election?

Elizabeth Drew

Beneath the turbulent political spectacle that has captured so much of the nation’s attention lies a more important question than who will get the Republican nomination, or even who will win in November: Will we have a democratic election this year? Will the presidential election reflect the will of the people? Will it be seen as doing so—and if not, what happens? The combination of coordinated efforts underway to manipulate the election and unlimited amounts of unaccountable money from private or corporate interests involved in those efforts threatens the democratic process for picking a president.

How to Save the Euro

George Soros

My new book, Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States, tries to explain and, to the extent possible, predict the outcome of the euro crisis. It follows the same pattern as my other books: it contains an updated version of my conceptual approach and the application of that approach to a particular situation, and it presents a real-time experiment to test the validity of my interpretation. Its account is not complete because the crisis is still ongoing.

Václav Havel (1936–2011)

Paul Wilson

The five days following Václav Havel’s death on Sunday, December 18, at his country house, Hrádeček (“the little castle”), were unique in modern Czech history. Almost as soon as the news broke, people began gathering spontaneously in public places, not just to pay their respects, but to talk about what it was they had just lost in the passing of this modest, complex, and courageous man who had been their first post-Communist president.

‘The Central Event of Our Past’: Still Murky

Andrew Delbanco

Robert Abbott Sengstacke/Getty Images

James Baldwin and Harry Belafonte in Montgomery, Alabama, during the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, March 1965

Is there a decent way to commemorate war? May and November holidays, parades and monuments, placing wreaths, playing Taps? At Gettysburg, a few months after some 50,000 men and boys had been killed or wounded there, President Lincoln spoke of “our poor power to add ...

The Elections: A Modest Proposal

Max Frankel

Restore Our Future

A still from a television ad paid for by Restore Our Future, a Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney for president

Every election year brings vivid reminders of how money distorts our politics, poisons our lawmaking, and inevitably widens the gulf between those who can afford to buy influence and the vast majority of Americans who cannot. In 2012, this gulf will become a chasm: one analysis ...

The Wrong Leonardo?

Charles Hope

Exhibitions of drawings by Leonardo, almost always based on the uniquely rich collection in the Royal Library at Windsor, are relatively common. But outside the Louvre, which owns four of Leonardo’s pictures, it is rare indeed to have the opportunity of seeing more than a couple of his paintings together. The museums that possess such works are understandably reluctant to loan them, both because of their fragility and because of their fame; and apart from the Louvre, only the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg can make a plausible claim to possess more than one finished picture by him. Yet the exhibition currently at the National Gallery in London includes, according to the sponsor of the exhibition, Credit Suisse, “around half of the 15 or so paintings by Leonardo which are known to be in existence, as well as 50 of his original drawings,” including thirty-three from the Royal Collection. For most of those fortunate enough to have acquired tickets, for which demand vastly exceeds supply, this is an experience that is unlikely to be repeated.

The Mother Courage of Rock

Luc Sante

I first heard of Patti Smith in 1971, when I was seventeen. The occasion was an unsigned half-column item in the New York Flyer, a short-lived local supplement to Rolling Stone, marking the single performance of Cowboy Mouth, a play she cowrote and costarred in with Sam Shepard, and it was possibly her first appearance in the press. What caught my eye and made me save the clipping—besides the accompanying photo of her in a striped jersey, looking vulnerable—was her boast, “I’m one of the best poets in rock and roll.” At the time, I didn’t just think I was the best poet in rock and roll; I thought I was the only one…

Elliott Carter’s Music of Time

Charles Rosen

A German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann, held that the sense of music was given to man to make it possible to measure time. The composer Elliott Carter’s fame comes partly from a reconception of time in music that fits the world of today (although there are many other aspects of his music to enjoy). We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates ...

A Different Kind of Delirium

Charles Baxter

Don DeLillo’s new book of nine stories, The Angel Esmeralda, has at its core a series of situations that lead to trance states experienced by the insulted, the injured, and the vulnerable… Written over the span of the past thirty-three years, the stories specialize in elaborate narrative chronologies in which some key element is missing. These strategic omissions give the stories their distinctive, nagging inscrutability, along with plots that present a mystery that hasn’t been announced, much less solved.

Our Secret American Security State

Steve Coll

Pete Souza/White House

President Barack Obama studying a document held by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper during the presidential daily briefing in the Oval Office, February 3, 2011

What is the American intelligence bureaucracy good for? The question is difficult to ask in a serious way in Washington because it risks raising the hackles of career intelligence professionals and their political sponsors at a time when spy agencies ...