南鵲書廬

Close readers of Mr. Harris’s previous novels, which also include “The Silence of the Lambs” and “Red Dragon,” may recall that Dr. Lecter saw his entire family killed during World War II in Eastern Europe. The new novel, which covers the young Hannibal from age 6 through 20, will shed more light on the circumstances of those deaths, with a focus on Dr. Lecter’s memories of his younger sister, Mischa.

詳見紐約時報：Hannibal Lecter to Drop By for Holiday Helpings（2006.9.19）

By：Eugenie Allen

In Robbins’s utopia, where children and adolescents are free to learn at their own pace, without the burden of standardized tests, carefree Huck Finn would have a better shot at the Ivy League than overprepped Opal Mehta. Better still, Huck would choose a smaller, more nurturing school because he would know that name-brand schools aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, which is another of Robbins’s arguments.

【…】

But Robbins gets the big picture right. Yes, this is a terrible time to be applying to college. With too many talented students vying for too few spots at a handful of top schools, we shouldn’t be surprised that many are buckling under the pressure to be perfect. There are signs that the tide is turning, starting with colleges themselves. Fed up with the hegemony of the College Board and the predations of some private college counselors, more schools are making the submission of SAT scores optional, and adding application questions that invite students to talk about what they do for fun.

書目資料：

THE OVERACHIEVERS

The Secret Lives of Driven Kids.

By Alexandra Robbins.

439 pp. Hyperion. $24.95.

詳見紐約時報：Harvard or Bust（2006.8.6）

By Alan Riding

READ no further if you dislike France, consider the French irritating, find French cooking pretentious and the French art de vivre overrated — because Julia Child liked everything about France. And her memoir, "My Life in France," is an affectionate merci for all that France gave her.

True, Child also did a lot for France — and the American palate — by introducing French cuisine to American homes. But this book, written with her husband's great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme, before Child's death at 91 in August 2004, is really a love story: she loved Paul Child, 10 years her senior; she loved France; she loved French cooking; and she loved life. Listen to her: "The sweetness and generosity and politeness and gentleness and humanity of the French had shown me how lovely life can be if one takes time to be friendly." And a few pages later: "Oh, how I adored sweet and natural France, with its human warmth, wonderful smells, graciousness, coziness and freedom of spirit." Yes, mes amis, that's love!

【…】

Julia and Paul met in wartime Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where they were working for the Office of Strategic Services. They married in 1946 and moved to Washington. In the winter of 1948, Paul, an amateur painter and photographer, was assigned to run the exhibits office of the United States Information Service at the American Embassy in Paris, and Julia naturally accompanied him. Unlike Paul, she had never been to Europe, spoke no French and had no experience of French cuisine. But on their first day in France, in November 1948, as they drove their imported sky-blue Buick station wagon from Le Havre to Paris, they lunched at a restaurant in Rouen and there Julia's life changed. She recalls the "epiphany" in mouth-watering detail — oysters, sole meunière, salad, cheese and coffee — and concludes: "It was the most exciting meal of my life."

原始圖片出處：（1）

書目資料：

MY LIFE IN FRANCE 

By Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme.

Illustrated. 317 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

詳見紐約時報：Becoming Julia Child

南飛烏鵲曰：
小時候和母親隨旅行團遊歷歐洲。到了法國，母親要求導遊晚上帶我們去嚐嚐法式料理。記得那晚吃了些生蠔和烤蝸牛，其餘已記不詳細了。當時年紀小，於飲食全無講究，覺得生蠔的滋味無甚特別，倒是烤蝸牛這道菜讓我情有獨鍾。

By Roy Blount Jr.

Richard Lingeman's survey of seven eminent literary friendships, each deftly sketched, is remarkably absorbing, given its brevity across two centuries and the fact that its cast of characters changes every 30 pages or so.

【…】

To readers who take great writers personally, this book may seem, as it is, a bit — how shall I put it — crowded. Insofar as reading good stuff is erotic, there is something awkward about curling up simultaneously with two writers who were more fond of each other (Herman Melville admired Nathaniel Hawthorne's "spicy and slowly oozing heart") than they can conceivably have been of us. Would anyone know how to respond on finding himself or herself nestled, as it were, between Henry James and Edith Wharton? (Not an utterly idle speculation. James, we learn, tended to fix Wharton up with men he was attracted to.)

Why does anyone write but in search of a soul mate? A good ear readily lent to what the writer has in mind. A confidant on call to respond with the right sigh or shudder or chuckle when the writer has, to his or her own tentative satisfaction, made things clear. It is childish to expect this imaginary friend, the ideal reader, to be embodied in another person, perhaps especially in another writer, whose expectations are comparably — which doesn't mean compatibly — childish. Someone who comes close to filling that bill brings great relief, confirmation and potential for betrayal.

【…】

Hemingway valued Fitzgerald as a rival he could flatter, then overtake, then dump on: "Scott was a coward of great charm." Melville found in flinty Hawthorne a sort of voluptuous dark star, one of the inspirations for a novel "broiled" in "hellfire," perhaps to its detriment, at least in the marketplace. Lingeman duly notes the homoerotic element in both friendships, unavoidably in the latter. He finds no evidence, however, to support either the Brokeback rumors about Hemingway and Fitzgerald, in their day, or the widely accepted current opinion that Melville drove Hawthorne away by coming on to him physically. "One suspects," concludes Lingeman on rather vague grounds, that in fact an envious Melville drew away from Hawthorne, whose stock had risen as Melville's had bottomed out.

書目資料：

DOUBLE LIVES

American Writers' Friendships.

By Richard Lingeman.

255 pp. Random House. $24.95.

詳見紐約時報：Henry and Edith and Scott and Ernest（2006.5.14）

By: Paul Krugman

Warsh tells the tale of a great contradiction that has lain at the heart of economic theory ever since 1776, the year in which Adam Smith published "The Wealth of Nations." Warsh calls it the struggle between the Pin Factory and the Invisible Hand. On one side, Smith emphasized the huge increases in productivity that could be achieved through the division of labor, as illustrated by his famous example of a pin factory whose employees, by specializing on narrow tasks, produce far more than they could if each worked independently. On the other side, he was the first to recognize how a market economy can harness self-interest to the common good, leading each individual as though "by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention."

What may not be obvious is the way these two concepts stand in opposition to each other. The parable of the pin factory says that there are increasing returns to scale — the bigger the pin factory, the more specialized its workers can be, and therefore the more pins the factory can produce per worker. But increasing returns create a natural tendency toward monopoly, because a large business can achieve larger scale and hence lower costs than a small business. So in a world of increasing returns, bigger firms tend to drive smaller firms out of business, until each industry is dominated by just a few players.

But for the invisible hand to work properly, there must be many competitors in each industry, so that nobody is in a position to exert monopoly power. Therefore, the idea that free markets always get it right depends on the assumption that returns to scale are diminishing, not increasing.

For almost two centuries, economic thinking was dominated by the assumption of diminishing returns, with the Pin Factory pushed into the background. Why? As Warsh explains, it wasn't about ideology; it was about following the line of least mathematical resistance. Economics has always been a discipline with scientific aspirations; economists have always sought the rigor and clarity that comes from using numbers and equations to represent their ideas. And the economics of diminishing returns lend themselves readily to elegant formalism, while those of increasing returns — the Pin Factory — are notoriously hard to represent in the form of a mathematical model.

書目資料：

KNOWLEDGE AND THE WEALTH OF NATIONS

A Story of Economic Discovery.

By David Warsh.

426 pp. W. W Norton & Company. $27.95.

詳見紐約時報：The Pin Factory Mystery

By  Alastair Macaulay

When Laurence Olivier died in 1989, the superlatives that had greeted his acting for more than fifty years found a renewed currency. According to one theatre story, someone bumped into John Gielgud at the time and said: “Why, John! How marvellous to see you alive! I keep seeing these headlines saying ‘Greatest Actor Dies’”.

Nobody, in truth, worked harder to earn that title than Olivier. Born in 1907, he found stardom first as a romantic hero, bringing this phase to its climax during the Second World War, in the 1939–41 films in which he appeared as Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights), Maxim de Winter (Rebecca), Mr Darcy (Pride and Prejudice), and Nelson (Lady Hamilton). But already, since playing a controversial West End Romeo in 1935–6, he had begun to mark out the territory of a classical actor, the most imaginative and heroic of his day. (His physical daring alone – in some roles, throwing himself nightly off upper platforms or down flights of stairs – was exhilarating. The many injuries of his career included a broken ankle, two torn cartilages, two broken calf muscles and three ruptured Achilles tendons.) He conquered, more completely than any other actor of his century, all four leading tragic Shakespearean roles (Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, Othello); he also excelled in the great warrior roles of Henry V, Hotspur, Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus, and made them (as he had Stanhope in the 1928 premiere of Journey’s End) icons of leadership. Like every great actor, he was obsessed with truthfulness; but it was part of his particular courage that he wanted, and needed, to examine his characters’ dark sides: the Oedipal aspect of Hamlet, Iago’s homosexual fascination with Othello (like few other Othellos, he played Iago first), Othello’s self-love and lack of self-knowledge. But, before he reached Hotspur, Lear, Titus, or Othello, he had embarked on his next great project: to adapt Shakespeare for the screen. All previous efforts to capture the plays on film look quaint (the best is Max Reinhardt’s 1935 Midsummer Night’s Dream) when set alongside Olivier’s 1944 Henry V, which remains both a piercingly imaginative piece of cinema and an inspiring account of the play. Hamlet (1948) and Richard III (1955) proved worthy sequels.

【…】

Coleman tells us that Olivier in 1935 had already declined MGM’s offer to film Romeo and Juliet with Moira Shearer. Well, he is not the first to have muddled the late British ballerina and film star with Norma Shearer, the 1930s Hollywood leading lady. But he muddles the reader more seriously when he says that Vivien Leigh’s first West End leading role, in The Mask of Virtue, came in 1937 (it was 1935); a number of other dates are wrong, too. Readers at his publishers, Bloomsbury, should have fixed these, along with Coleman’s repeated though not consistent spelling of “Checkhov”.

【…】

Olivier’s criticism of Gielgud’s Shakespearean verse-speaking was that at some points Gielgud allowed his beauty of voice “to dominate his performances and, if he was lost but for a moment, he would dive straight back into its honey”. The reverse was true of Olivier: he never indulged the considerable beauty of his own polychromatic voice, but was so intent on communicating that he sometimes lacked Gielgud’s lightness of touch and relaxation. Gielgud was a great tragedian and player of noblemen, but he was also a master of high comedy. One never likes Olivier more than when he was generous enough to call Gielgud’s 1937 Joseph Surface (The School for Scandal) “the best light comedy performance I’ve ever seen, or ever shall see”. A pity Coleman omits this.

原始圖片出處：The Official Website of Sir Laurence Olivier

書目資料：
Terry Coleman
OLIVIER
608pp. Bloomsbury. £20.

詳見泰晤士文學增刊：Olivier over them all (2006.3.29)

By  Stephen Greenblatt 

David Riggs's The World of Christopher Marlowe and Park Honan's Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy both concern themselves centrally with Marlowe's secret life as a spy. Neither has very much new documentary evidence to add to the tangled web of fact and speculation that Charles Nicholl expertly wove in The Reckoning. For sheer narrative pleasure, Nicholl's book remains unrivaled, but its focus is sharply on Marlowe's murder. Nicholl has very little to say about the plays and poems that make this murder seem a catastrophe for literature comparable to the killing of Pushkin. Both Riggs and Honan, by contrast, have a specific interest in literary lives—Riggs has written a fine biography of Ben Jonson; Honan of Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and others —and both are determined, as Nicholl is not, to tease out the relation between Marlowe's espionage and his art. 

【…】 

"Poets and intelligence agents," 【David Riggs】 writes, "had special skills in the decoding and recoding of texts; they shared a proficiency in wordplay, the various species of allegory and ironic allusions." When he was recruited at Cambridge, Riggs suggests, Marlowe's "assignment was to create the ene-mies that justified the exercise of state power; the crown encouraged him to voice what it regarded as sedition and heresy." This elegant formula-tion enables Riggs to make an un-usually powerful connection between matters that seem sharply opposed: Marlowe's work as a double agent and his work as a playwright. The theology student at Cambridge gave people the distinct impression that he was an ardent Catholic; the professional playwright in London gave people the distinct impression that he was an atheist. Both poses helped to create the enemies that the state undertook to crush. 

【…】 

Honan thinks that Frizer, who hoped to thrive as Thomas Walsingham's business agent, decided to kill Marlowe because he feared that Marlowe's unsavory reputation was a liability to his master: "As patron of a well-known, flagrant 'atheist,' Walsingham risked damaging his own reputation, and so depriving his agent of profits and security." Riggs, more intriguingly, thinks that Marlowe was killed at the command of Queen Elizabeth herself. She did not have to be explicit: a few ominous words, spoken in the right ears, would have been enough. 

【…】 

【David Riggs's】 argument only makes sense, I think, on one condition: that someone in the government, perhaps the Queen herself, had actually seen Marlowe's plays and taken in their terrible, subversive power. That power does not reside either in outrageous aphorisms or in plot outlines: Faustus makes a pact with the devil, but in the end, like the homosexual King Edward and the Jew Barabas, he pays for his transgression with his life. Even the Nietzschean superman Tamburlaine finds that his will to power cannot escape the natural limitations of his mortal body. None of this really matters. What happens again and again in Marlowe's plays is that the incantatory power of his verse releases a destructive energy that cannot be contained within any conventional boundaries. 

書目資料：
The World of Christopher Marlowe
by David Riggs
Owl Books, 411 pp., $17.00 (paper)

Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy
by Park Honan
Oxford University Press, 421 pp., $32.50

詳見紐約書評 53.6：Who Killed Christopher Marlowe?

南飛烏鵲曰：
Stephen Greenblatt 在哈佛教書，近作《Will in the World》由Norton出版。（這本書我去年10月初買了，一直沒看，目前諸事縈心，短期間內是抽不出時間讀這本書了。）

如果Greenblatt教授的設想屬實，那麼Marlowe憑藉詩才成名，也以詩才賈禍，結束短暫的一生；才如江海，是天眷也是詛咒。

做個不怕官的新聞記者──讀王健壯的「凱撒不愛我」（摘錄）

文：楊照

王健壯在［凱撒不愛我］書中寫了五十二位記者的故事，讀著讀著，越來越有讀使徒列傳的感覺，而且是那種羅馬帝國時代，會為了信仰被送到競技場中，赤手空拳面對獅子的那種使徒。王健壯寫的記者，都有一定程度［英雄主義］的個性傾向，也就是清楚意識到自己面對著強大恐怖的敵人，然而不管敵人多強大，不，正因為敵人多麼強大，所以一定要站得直挺得穩，而且要找出辦法來給敵人帶來頭痛的煩惱。

【…】

政治人物理應怕記者，不過現實中，政治卻有太多方法可以整記者或收買記者，更多時候，反而是記者怕政治人物怕官員吧！記者怕官員時，怎麼辦？與其讀［聖經］求上帝，不如讀讀［凱撒不愛我］。

詳見楊照書舖電子報 （2006.3.3）

In some ways, art history is like an episode of "The Sopranos." A relatively small number of artists are welcomed into the family of the famous, their works immortalized in museums and on postcard racks — in other words, they are made. But hit men, otherwise known as critics and scholars, are lurking around every corner, waiting to whack even the most sterling reputation.

Almost no one is safe. Not even, as it turns out, Whistler's mother.

This month, the publisher Pearson Prentice Hall is introducing the first thoroughly revised version of "Janson's History of Art," a doorstopper first published in 1962 that has been a classroom hit ever since Horst Woldemar Janson wrote it while working at New York University. For a generation of baby boomers, it defined what was what and who was who in art, from Angelico (Fra) to Zurbarán (Francisco de).

【…】

But in many colleges, the book, while as familiar as furniture, had become something to teach against, its clear narrative of art's development, focused mostly on Europe, muddied considerably since the early 1960's by changes in scholarship that began to place art more solidly in a social and political context.

【…】

The book's new authors warn that because their approach diverges from the model H. W. Janson pioneered — the showcasing of individual geniuses and masterpieces — the exclusion of works should not necessarily be looked at as beloved artists being unceremoniously escorted out of the canon. But because Janson, as it is called, was so influential in undergraduate courses for so long, some teachers say they cannot help but view the revision that way.

"I can see the reasons, artistically, for dropping Whistler's mother," said Mickey McConnell, an instructor who until recently taught a survey course at the University of New Mexico and has used Janson for years. "But it's become so well known, such a part of the culture. What if there's a cartoon in The New Yorker that uses it as a reference? Younger students aren't going to know what it's talking about."

圖片原始出處：（1）

書目資料（亞馬遜書局）

Hardcover：1056 pages

Publisher：Prentice Hall; 7 edition (February 6, 2006)

Language：English

List Price：107.33

詳見紐約時報：Revising Art History's Big Book: Who's In and Who Comes Out?（2006.3.7）