The New York Review of Books

Books Held by Kings

Eamon Duffy

A reader climbing the great staircase of the British Library’s modern premises near St. Pancras Station in London is confronted suddenly by that wonderful building’s most wonderful feature. Behind the glass walls of an internal tower six stories high, more than 60,000 sumptuously bound books stretch upward, shelf upon shelf, a cliff-face of leather and gilt lettering gleaming softly through the tinted glass. In that architectural coup de théâtre, a world of learning serves as the visible core of a building created to contain all the learning of the world.

Israel in Peril

David Shulman

Even apart from the disastrous political consequences of current Israeli policy, it is critical to recognize that what goes on in the territories is not a matter of episodic abuse of basic human rights, something that could be corrected by relatively minor, ad hoc actions of protest and redress. Nothing could be further from the truth. The occupation is systemic in every sense of the word. The various agencies involved are all inextricably woven into a system whose logic is apparent to anyone with firsthand experience of it. That logic is one of protecting the settlement project and taking the land.

Philip Larkin: Desired Reading

Christopher Ricks

Fay Godwin/British Library Board

Philip Larkin, 1974

The year 1922 famously saw the birth of High Modernism, mewling and puking as well as shining and sighing in Ulysses and in The Waste Land. 1922 also saw the birth, in Coventry on August 9, of Philip Arthur Larkin. For a poet of his lineage (by Thomas Hardy, out of Christina Rossetti, as it might never have been), most High Modernism ...

What Makes Countries Rich or Poor?

Jared Diamond

There is no doubt that good institutions are important in determining a country’s wealth. But why have some countries ended up with good institutions, while others haven’t? The most important factor behind their emergence is the historical duration of centralized government.

Should Hate Speech Be Outlawed?

John Paul Stevens

Carl De Keyzer/Magnum Photos

A Ku Klux Klan rally in Hico, Texas, 1990

In The Harm in Hate Speech, Jeremy Waldron discusses a loosely defined category of expression that he addressed in a review of Anthony Lewis’s book Freedom for the Thought That We Hate in The New York Review in 2008, and in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Lectures at Harvard University in 2009. Although his references to ...

The Ghost of Desire

Joyce Carol Oates

Edward Gorey Charitable Trust

Drawing by Edward Gorey

In his beautifully spare poem “The Ovenbird,” Robert Frost concludes:

The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

“What to make of a diminished thing” is a proposition that becomes ever more crucial with the ...

Syria: The Citadel & the War

Charles Glass

Ed Kashi/VII

The Citadel, the medieval fortress at the center of Aleppo, Syria. The city has recently been the scene of clashes between government forces and opposition groups.

Archaeologists believe that human beings settled on the hilltop that became Aleppo—some 225 miles north of Damascus—around eight thousand years ago. Cuneiform tablets from the third millennium BC record the construction of a temple to a chariot-riding storm god ...

How the Computers Exploded

Jim Holt

Alan Richards/Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

Robert Oppenheimer and John von Neumann in front of MANIAC, the first digital computer, at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 1952

The digital universe came into existence, physically speaking, late in 1950, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the end of Olden Lane. That was when and where the first genuine computer—a high-speed, stored-program, all-purpose digital-reckoning device—stirred into action. It had been ...

Grief

Robert Pinsky

I don’t think anybody ever is
Really divorced, said Lenny. Also,
I don’t think anybody ever is
Really married, he said. Because

English was really his second language
And because of Yiddish and its displaced
Place in the world, he never really
Believed in his own prose. He wrote

Sentences as a great boxer moves.
Near the end he said “I’m in Hell”—
Something he might have ...

The Dilemma of Madeleine Albright

Paul Wilson

Bill Crandall

Václav Havel and Madeleine Albright at a Plastic People of the Universe concert, Washington, D.C., May 2005

In early March 1998, after the massacre of over sixty Albanian Kosovars by a Serb “anti-terrorist” force at Prekaz, in Kosovo, then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued a statement (she called it laying down “a marker”) outlining America’s position: “We are not going to stand by and watch ...

The Magic of Keith Thomas

Hilary Mantel

Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille/Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource

‘The Concert in an Egg’; painting after Hieronymus Bosch, circa 1561

The English historian Keith Thomas has revealed modes of thought and ways of life deeply strange to us, and he illustrates them with precise evidence. In his Religion and the Decline of Magic his subject is early modern England, roughly between 1500 and 1700.¹ To understand that world ...

Drugs: The Rebellion in Cartagena

Alma Guillermoprieto

Carolyn Kaster/AP Images

President Obama with the Colombian singer Shakira and Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in Cartagena, where he was attending the Summit of the Americas, at which leaders openly discussed the legalization of drugs for the first time, April 15,2012

A couple of decades ago, perhaps, a discussion of the war on drugs declared by Richard Nixon back in 1973 could reasonably have centered on whether ...

Behind the Screen

Martin Filler

Edward Stone Office Archives

The US Embassy in New Delhi, India, designed by Edward Durell Stone

Lives of architects written by their sons are a tradition at least as old as Parentalia (1750), an account by the namesake child of Christopher Wren. Closer to our own day is John Lloyd Wright’s My Father Who Is on Earth (1946), whose subject—the all-controlling but parentally vagrant Frank Lloyd Wright, who ...

The Ultimate Corporation

Bill McKibben

Leslie Philipp/OttOpix

The Strathcona Refinery, owned by Exxon subsidiary Imperial Oil, on the outskirts of Edmonton, Alberta, December 2008

Exxon’s executives, as anecdote after anecdote in Steve Coll’s book makes clear, enjoy easy access to every president. Its confident CEO is “a peer of the White House’s rotating occupants” who can usually count on the administration to see things as he does. In fact, the president ...

The Evil Flies in Africa

Norman Rush

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

From Paul Theroux’s novel The Lower River

Paul Theroux’s new novel, The Lower River, is set in contemporary Malawi. It’s a notable creation, but one that sits oddly in the Theroux oeuvre.

At this point in Theroux’s long and prodigious literary career, each new work necessarily arrives against an established backdrop displaying familiar scenes from the author’s real life—his introduction to ...

A Chinese Murder Mystery?

Ian Johnson

Jason Lee/Reuters

Bo Xilai during the opening ceremony of a concert of revolutionary songs, Chongqing, China, June 29, 2011

Roughly every decade, China’s political system cracks, its veil is rent, and its inner workings are laid bare. 2012, the Year of the Dragon, is turning out to be one of those periods when the country’s high priests can’t quite carry out their rituals as planned.

The ...

The Demonic Trilling

Edward Mendelson

It is hard to recall now the enormous prestige of Lionel Trilling as a literary and social critic during the postwar years. The Liberal Imagination (1950), his first collection of essays, is said to have sold more than 70,000 hardback copies. For the first and last time, a literature professor enjoyed the public eminence normally reserved for an economist like John Kenneth Galbraith or a sociologist like David Riesman ...

Are We Stuck with the Imperial Presidency?

David Cole

Brennan Linsley/AP Images

A picture of outgoing President George W. Bush being replaced with a picture of President Barack Obama in the lobby of the US Naval Station headquarters in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, January 20, 2009

The separation of powers may be the foundation of our constitutional system, but does it still make sense today? James Madison famously argued that checks and balances are an essential bulwark for liberty ...

Bullying the Nuns

Garry Wills

Peter van Agtmael/Magnum Photos

Novices of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2011

The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops’ thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don’t. Nuns have always had a different set of priorities from that of bishops. The bishops are interested in power. The nuns are interested in the powerless. Nuns ...

Can Anything Emerge from Nothing?

Colin McGinn

Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon/RMN/Art Resource

René Antoine Houasse: Birth of Minerva, Fully Armed, from the Head of Jupiter; late seventeenth century

Incomplete Nature is about an important and difficult subject: how life and mind evolved from a world of inanimate matter. It is also about what are the right concepts to use in understanding the nature and workings of life and mind. We need to be ...

Should Obama’s Health Care Be Opposed?: An Exchange

Marcia Angell, reply by Ronald Dworkin

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Getty Images

President Obama with Supreme Court Justices John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor before his State of the Union address on Capitol Hill, January 24, 2012

To the Editors:

I admire Ronald Dworkin greatly, and I certainly defer to him on most legal matters, so it is with some reluctance that I take issue with his essay “Why the Mandate ...

Who Took This Photograph?

Rose Styron

To the Editors:

If anyone has information about this fine photo taken of my late husband, William Styron, I’d be so grateful if you would contact me at styronphoto@gmail.com.

Rose Styron
Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts

Why Like Ike?

Thomas Powers

To the Editors:

Several readers have protested my failure in a recent piece on Eisenhower [NYR, April 26] to mention his approval of covert operations to overthrow governments in Iran and Guatemala. Both of these episodes were unjustified and created a world of trouble that we all live with still. But in my review of two new biographies of Eisenhower I wanted to draw attention to a different matter—his ...

Mozart’s Early Trumpets

Robert R. Holzer, reply by Charles Rosen

To the Editors:

Charles Rosen’s thought-provoking essay “Freedom and Art” [NYR, May 10] contains a small error of fact. He writes, “Mozart sets this [the passage in Don Giovanni’s first-act finale in which the title character greets his guests with “Viva la libertà!”] as a call to arms, with trumpets and drums unheard in the work since the overture.” These instruments, however, have already been heard some 350 ...

Saved by DNA

Paul R. Billings and Hyman Gross

To the Editors:

Richard Lewontin, in his review of DNA uses in forensics [“Let the DNA Fit the Crime,” NYR, February 23], correctly notes that the position of experts including his own has evolved as the testing improved, now employing genomic sites and population databases that yield less biased and more specific information. His contribution and others to my earlier book, DNA on Trial: Genetic Identification and Criminal Justice (Cold ...

A Man of the Amazon

Larry Rohter

To the Editors:

As someone who often traveled and worked with the late Nicolas Reynard in the Amazon for weeks at a time, I imagine that he would have been amused to find himself described in John Terborgh’s essay “Out of Contact” [NYR, April 5] as an “American with limited jungle experience.” Neither of those statements is correct. Nicolas was French, not American, and remained Parisian to his core ...

The Art of the Impersonator

Sanford Schwartz

The end result of Cindy Sherman’s many approaches is a roller coaster of discontent, at times recalling Otto Dix, at other moments Carol Burnett. Sherman can be reproachful and quietly barbed, or merely leaden and gloomy, or showily horrifying, or buoyantly nasty. The works that held me longest were of her strivers and her patronesses. They bring together the poles of Sherman’s thinking: her feeling for contemporary life and for the monstrous.

Do Our Public Schools Threaten National Security?

Diane Ravitch

What makes Joel Klein and Condoleezza Rice’s new report on the schools different from earlier jeremiads is its profound indifference to the role of public education in a democratic society, and its certainty that private organizations will succeed where the public schools have failed. Previous hand-wringing reports sought to improve public schooling; this one suggests that public schools themselves are the problem, and the sooner they are handed over to private operators, the sooner we will see widespread innovation and improved academic achievement.

The Loves of Lena Dunham

Elaine Blair

There are many reasons to love Lena Dunham’s HBO television show Girls, and some of them have nothing to do with sex, but I’m going to begin with the sex scene in the second episode that most critics have mentioned and described with some amount of repugnance or lament. It’s one of the most complicated and intelligent sex scenes I’ve seen.

In Defense of the New York Public Library

Robert Darnton

Few buildings in America resonate in the collective imagination as powerfully as the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. The marble palace behind the stone lions is seen by many as the soul of the city. For a century it provided limitless possibilities of gaining knowledge and satisfying curiosity for immigrants just off the boat, and it still opens access to worlds of culture for anyone who walks in from the street. Tamper with that building and you risk offending some powerful sensitivities.