Arts+ Selects
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
MEASURING THE WORLD
Daniel Kehlmann
Daniel Kehlmann’s crowd-pleaser about Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), who laid the foundation for number theory, and about Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the famous naturalist, comes as a long-distance treat, like imported chocolate. Mr. Kehlmann, an Austrian who has published six books since his birth in 1975, tells the parallel stories of Gauss and of Humboldt as if they were everymen, exemplary for the trouble they encounter while merely leading their lives. “Measuring the World” compares with Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pécuchet,” in which two men set out to programmatically investigate the nature of the world but succeed only in frustrating themselves. Not a rigorous book, perhaps, Mr. Kehlmann’s novel can be heartily recommended. It is a light book that makes you feel smart.
– Benjamin Lytal (November 15)
AMONG THE RIGHTEOUS
Robert Satloff
Holocaust “minimization,” if not outright denial, is pervasive and officially blessed in Arab press, scholarship, and political discourse. State-run newspapers in Egypt, which has made peace with Israel, repeatedly undermine the reality of the Holocaust by challenging the number of Jews who died in Hitler’s genocidal campaign and by equating “Nazism” with “Zionism.” Robert Satloff, a historian and expert on modern Arab affairs who heads the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, says he wrote “Among the Righteous” to answer a narrow question: Did any Arabs save any Jews during the Holocaust? Was there he asks a Muslim Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by, among other ruses, providing them with Swedish passports? Or an Arab Oskar Schindler? Mr. Satloff concludes that the record of Middle Eastern Arabs towards the Jews is not unlike that of Europeans.
– Judith Miller (November 8)
THE AENEID
Virgil, translated by Robert Fagles
The poet Virgil was famed for licking his verses into shape the way a mother bear licks her newborn cub to give it form. He was rough and meticulous at once. He spoke Latin like a yokel, except when he was declaiming poetry. In his new translation, Mr. Fagles isn’t as interested in the sonorous line or passage as he is in the hurtling energy of “The Aeneid.” He approvingly quotes C. S. Lewis’s remark on the “enormous onward pressure” of the poem and he conveys this pressure superbly.
– Eric Ormsby (November 1)
WALT DISNEY
Neal Gabler
First the bad news: Walt Disney is not in the deep freeze somewhere in Tomorrowland. Neil Gabler, the spoilsport biographer, delivers the news that Uncle Walt was, in fact, cremated and his ashes interred “in a remote corner of the Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, not far from his studio.” Well, at least his spirit hovers near the epicenter of the American imagination. Disney would appear on his television programs as the avuncular host who brought home the coonskin caps and made the tales of Davy Crockett a weekly adventure story. Rember the “Mickey Mouse Show!”? Who can forget the afternoon thrill of watching the fetching Annette Funicello wearing the same mouse ears we had donned? Disney re-created the concept of family entertainment in a new medium, carrying on what Dickens did for serialized novels. Like that other Walt, Disney was the poet of possibilities. Dreams do not die in Disneyland. And to see how they live on, I recommend that you read Neal Gabler’s buoyant new biography of the artist.
– Carl Rollyson (November 8)
THE LAY OF THE LAND
Richard Ford
“The Lay of the Land” is a great American novel that never resorts to paranoid hyperbole or beatific road-running. Richard Ford’s long-time protagonist Frank Bascombe, the seasoned salesman and the worn-out husband, is happy just to be a neutral observer. Mr. Ford’s novel is a huge book, and like many epics can be too episodic. Not deeply moving, it at least convinces the reader that its picture of America is real and will do all of us a service, like the time capsule Bascombe’s son Paul buries at its end, near the beach.
– B. L. (November 8)