Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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This week on nybooks.com: Reviews of fiction by Dave Eggers, Andrea Barrett, and Elizabeth Gilbert, the life and reportage of Norman Mailer, and how to end the Syrian slaughter. Plus Elliott Carter’s legacy, Steve McQueen’s film about slavery, Josef Koudelka’s photographs of the Wall, a memorial for Tom Foley, a shameless decision on stop-and-frisk, and the Assad regime’s assault on doctors.
When Privacy Is Theft Margaret Atwood Dave Eggers’s The Circle is in part a novel of ideas. What sort of ideas? Ideas about the social construction and deconstruction of privacy, and about the increasing corporate ownership of privacy, and about the effects such ownership may have on the nature of Western democracy.
Syria: What Chance to Stop the Slaughter? Kenneth Roth A negotiated peace may well be the best way to avoid a complete collapse of the Syrian state. But few believe a negotiated peace is anywhere near. Civilian deaths continue, making it urgent to find some way to curtail the slaughter in the interim. Most paths for doing so go through Moscow.
The Strange Powers of Norman Mailer Edward Mendelson Norman Mailer hoped to write a novel great enough to cause “a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” But his best work was his political and cultural reportage. He spent much of his life reporting facts as if he were writing fiction, and performing—for an audience of gossip columnists and shockable reviewers—a fictional version of his life as though it were fact.
Heroines in the Garden April Bernard Andrea Barrett is a splendid writer of what, for lack of any better term, we call literary fiction; Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the extremely popular memoir Eat, Pray, Love, is an energetic scribbler. Barrett writes of science and scientists from profound understanding and passion. Gilbert’s novel is another matter.
					MORE IN THE NOVEMBER 21 ISSUE Francine Prose on Nora Ephron Freeman Dyson on Malcolm Gladwell Walter Kaiser on Bernard Berenson Mark Lilla on Hannah Arendt Alan Rusbridger on surveillance Michael Dirda on Nicholson Baker Tim Parks on Berlusconi Pankaj Mishra on India Masha Gessen on Soviet cooking Roger Lowenstein on The Fed A poem by Louise Glück and more.
Syria’s Assault on Doctors Annie Sparrow The Assad regime has come to view doctors as dangerous, their ability to heal rebel fighters and civilians in rebel-held areas a weapon against the government. Doctors, nurses, dentists, and pharmacists who provide treatment to civilians in contested areas have been arrested and detained; paramedics have been tortured and used as human shields, ambulances have been targeted by snipers and missiles; medical facilities have been destroyed.
Bitter Faces in the Holy Land David Shulman For some minutes after reaching the barrier, we sat and stared. Then my friend said: “One day this monstrosity will come down, as happened in Berlin, and when it does people on both sides will dance in joy.” Photographs by Josef Koudelka
Washington: When Decency Prevailed Elizabeth Drew The presidents, senators, and congressmen who turned out for last week's memorial for former House Speaker Tom Foley knew that he stood as an emblem of a time that now seemed very long past and was perhaps unrecoverable.
How to Uphold Racial Injustice David Cole Achieving justice for racial discrimination has long been fraught with obstacles. During the civil rights era, it was Southern governors and school boards who blatantly obstructed court orders to desegregate schools. In more recent years, the burdens have been erected not by Southern politicians, but by the courts themselves.
Silenced Christopher Benfey Steve McQueen has done something a lot more interesting than make a prequel to Spielberg’sLincoln. The best sequences in 12 Years a Slave are not history lessons. They are, instead, visually ambiguous and open-ended. One feels that McQueen would almost have been happy making a silent film, with a meditative slowness almost non-existent in current Hollywood productions.					Listening to Elliott Carter Tim Page Carter, who died one year ago today, wrote music that rewarded deepest concentration. His audience didn’t come to relax or to “lose itself” in his music; on the contrary, it came for a bracing and mercurial charge, as visceral as it was brainy.