Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: Hannah Arendt and the Holocaust, China’s dream, India’s growth, the magic of Titian, understanding Iran’s nuclear program, and literature without style.
Arendt & Eichmann: The New Truth Mark Lilla Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem was published fifty years ago, first as a series of articles in The New Yorker and then, a few months later, as a book. It’s hard to think of another work capable of setting off ferocious polemics a half-century after its publication.
Dreams of a Different China Ian Johnson China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has declared, “I think that achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is the greatest Chinese dream in modern times.” Xi’s definition of China’s dream has caused much discussion. While the slogan seems to directly mimic the term “American dream,” it is almost the antithesis of that dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Which India Matters? Pankaj Mishra Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya claim that India has been transformed “from a basket case into a powerful engine of growth.” They are convinced that faster growth and freer markets remain the best remedy for poverty, inequality, pollution, and ill-health. A contrasting view—that “there is something defective in India’s ‘path to development’”—and a very different list of priorities appear in Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze’s An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions.
Also in the November 21 issue: Alan Rusbridger on press freedom, Margaret Atwood onDave Eggers, April Bernard on Elizabeth Gilbert, Edward Mendelson on Norman Mailer, andmore.
					A Magician in Pigment Ingrid D. Rowland Titian was a painter of astonishing versatility, a master of landscape, of portraiture, of sacred painting, historical painting, mythology, a magician who could turn a dab of pigment into a flame, a pleat, a thunderbolt, a twinkle in the eye, a Cupid’s wing.
Iran’s Plutonium Game Jeremy Bernstein It was almost a forgone conclusion that negotiations with Iran would hit a road block when it came to the so-called IR-40 heavy water reactor located in Arak. Whatever the IR-40’s intended use, it is not to produce electric power. What it does produce is plutonium—something that is useful for making a bomb.					Literature Without Style Tim Parks Style is predicated on a strict relation to a specific readership and the more that readership is diluted or extended, particularly if it includes foreign-language readers, the more difficult it is for a text of any stylistic density to be successful.
MUSIC Bath Mozartfest Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Few places could be more apt for performing the music of the Enlightenment epoch than Bath.		FILM At Berkeley Fredrick Wiseman’s new film offers the virtual experience of sitting in class at America’s preeminent public university.		PHOTOGRAPHY The World ofThe New York Review La Maison Française of NYU presents an exhibition of photographs byDominique Nabokov.		EVENTS The renowned Croatian writer and editor Slavko Goldstein is in the United States for a series of events in connection with his new memoir 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning. Istvan Deák has called the book “among the greatest writings on the witches’ cauldron that was Hitler’s Europe in 1941.” See thecalendar for a full listing of book events with Charles Simic, Daniel Mendelsohn, Colm Tóibín, and more.