Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: Martin Wolf on austerity’s failure, Terry Castle on Sylvia Plath’s legacy, Hermione Lee on Willa Cather’s letters, Steve Coll on Obama’s foreign policy, Alfred Brendel on playing the piano. Plus NYRblog posts by Christopher Benfey on summer, David Bromwich on Syria, Tim Parks on death, and Haleh Esfandiari on Iran’s new president.
How Austerity Has Failed Martin Wolf Austerity has failed. It turned a nascent recovery into stagnation. That imposes huge and unnecessary costs, not just in the short run, but also in the long term: the costs of investments unmade, of businesses not started, of skills atrophied, and of hopes destroyed. What is being done in the UK and also in much of the eurozone is worse than a crime, it is a blunder.
The Unbearable Terry Castle Five decades after her death Sylvia Plath continues to provoke inflaming conflict and scandal—and no more corrosively than among those who care most intensely about her.
Willa Cather: A Hidden Voice Hermione Lee Scandals and secrets are not what make the new collection of letters from Willa Cather interesting. In the absence of passionate love letters, the most painful and personal revelations are about Cather’s awkwardness as an imaginative, uncertain, ambitious teenage girl longing to get out of the rural Midwest, and her difficulties with her family. Many of the people around her would become figures in her fiction. But it took a long time for her early experiences to be shaped into writing.
Hard on Obama Steve Coll Vali Nasr’s The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat.				A Pianist’s A–V Alfred Brendel Art and Artists, Bach, Balance, Brahms, Chord, Concerto, Conductor, Dance, Liszt, Mozart, Pedal, Piano, Recording, Schubert, Schumann, and Virtuosity.
					ALSO IN THE JULY 11 ISSUE Elaine Blair on Susan Sontag David Cole on constitutional disobedience Geoffrey O'Brien on The Searchers Dan Chiasson on Charles Simic Walter Kaiser on Janet Ross Michael Chabon on the poetry of rock Frederick Seidel on Rachel Kushner T.H. Breen on Bunker Hill Joshua Hammer on Tunisia A poem by Paula Bohince … and more
Shards of Summer Christopher Benfey Fortune favors those who notice patterns. Hence, the belief in four-leaf clovers. I used to find four-leaf clovers everywhere. Then I read somewhere that one in 10,000 clovers has four leaves. Now I never find them. Fortune favors the uninformed.
Stumbling Into Syria David Bromwich The slide into this war by the US has been gradual, treacherous, and avoidable. It will be a long climb getting back out, and it will need the assistance of countries we prefer not to call friends.
Writing to Death Tim Parks I fear I shall be floating this fanciful idea just to see it shot down, yet it is something my mind has fastened on in recent years: How far is the trajectory of an author’s writing career and the themes that guide it related to the moment and nature of his or her death? Much great narrative writing springs from some unresolved conflict, or we might even say, structural dilemma in the author’s personality. Take the issues of fear and courage, entrapment and freedom.
Iran’s Man in the Middle Haleh Esfandiari The decisive election of Hassan Rouhani as Iran’s new president has been greeted around the world as a sign that Iranians are tired of hardline policies at home and abroad and are ready to embrace change. Rouhani has a track record for looking for compromise and the middle ground. But he will inherit from his predecessor a host of difficult, even insurmountable problems.
Stravinsky’sPetrushkaand Le Baiser de la Fée This adaptation of two ballets emphasizes the disorderly, dream-like quality of both works. (Lincoln Center)		Allan Dwan: The Rise and Decline of Hollywood Studios J. Hobermanrecommends films from an engineer fondly remembered as a “prolific problem-solver.” (MoMA)		The Glimmerglass Festival This summer it will be possible to see and hear works by Wagner, Verdi, Pergolesi, David Lang, and others, writes Philip Gossett. (Cooperstown)