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 Robert Alter 

【Reiner Stach】, who was involved in the new and painstakingly established German edition of Kafka's works that appeared during the 1990s, and who has previously published criticism about Kafka's work, is a biographer unwilling to take a step unless he can document it with authentic primary sources. This commitment leads him to begin his story not with the subject's childhood but in 1910, and to concentrate especially on the next five years, for which abundant documentation is available, particularly in Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer. (He will deal with the remaining nine years of Kafka's life in two more projected volumes.) This procedure creates the effect of a narrative of the life in slow motion. 

【…】 

The years from 1910 to 1915 are properly called "decisive," for it was in this period that Kafka discovered himself as a writer. In the fall of 1912 he wrote "The Judgment" on a long feverish Yom Kippur night. In late September of the same year he began to make rapid progress on his first novel, The Man Who Disappeared. (This is the book that Max Brod would decide to call Amerika.) Like his two other novels, it was to remain unfinished. In November 1912, he wrote "The Metamorphosis." In the summer of 1914, just as Europe was convulsed by war, he launched work on The Trial, and late in that year he produced "In the Penal Colony," which is, along with "The Judgment" and "The Metamorphosis," among his most disturbing stories.   

【…】 

The focus on the period from 1910 to 1915, with a particularly detailed treatment of the span from 1912 to 1914, has the effect of vividly highlighting Kafka's well-known neuroses, chiefly because this was the period of his anguished, self-defeating courtship of Felice. That relationship was the most peculiar extended episode in Kafka's peculiar life, and Stach's account helps make sense of it. "Kafka yearned for lasting intimacy," he comments, "but this intimacy seemed possible only with a woman who was equally removed from the two neurotic archetypal images of the feminine--mother and whore." In fact, Felice does not appear to have held any sexual attraction for Kafka, and the equine features that she exhibits in her photographs suggest that she was no beauty. The lack of sexual appeal in this woman who was practical, business-like, independent, and a Zionist to boot may have actually drawn Kafka to her, for at least initially he had no compelling reasons to think about carnal consummation, which was something that clearly worried him.   

【…】 

Many of his fictions are built around a single arresting image elaborated through a compelling imaginative logic, becoming, as Stach aptly observes, "a demonstration of what an image can yield": a man turned into a bug, a hunter's boat drifting for all eternity on endless rivers, a castle half-hidden in snow and fog, an elusive court that manifests itself in a series of dirty, airless attics. 

原始圖片出處：（1） 

書目資料：
Kafka: The Decisive Years
By Reiner Stach
Translated by Shelley Frisch
(Harcourt, 581 pp., $35)

詳見新共和：DOING JUSTICE TO FRANZ KAFKA（Post date 2006.3.15）

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。

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）

國學大師陳寅恪，博學多聞、識見不凡之外，最為人津津樂道的是，能夠閱讀包括巴利、波斯、突厥、西夏、拉丁、希臘等十幾種語文的能力。他的學生之中，繼承這一特質的，並不多見，季羨林先生是少數的一位。他以精通梵、英、德、巴利、吐火羅等文字，醉心語言研究與經典翻譯，而為世所重。     

如果說，學會一種語文，就像打開一扇窗子，那麼，像陳寅恪、季羨林這樣的語文奇才，他們的視野寬廣，看得高看得遠，自不在話下了。得見滄海之奇，天地之闊的人，卻始終還能保持一種樸厚之情，那更是難得。關於季先生的軼聞，無論是開學時被北大新生當成工友，欣然幫忙看管行李，或是不拘常禮看待女傭，聽任呼喚，在在說明95高齡的季先生之所以被當成「人間國寶」看待，與其說是「充實而有光輝」的學術成就，不如說是「春風大雅能容物」的深情與氣度了。

【…】

從另一個角度來看，此書也是一名老知識份子的追憶錄，從封建舊社會到社會主義新社會，從海外到國內，老先生一輩子不離校園，認真研究，且自認愛國不敢後人，「即使把我燒成灰了，每一粒灰也還是愛國的。」翻讀本書，溫情處處，深情款款，讓人如沐春風，如啜香茗，卻有一段話讓人人怵目驚心：「恭肅虔誠禱祝造化小兒，下一輩子無論如何也別再播弄我，千萬別再把我播弄成知識份子。」時代暗流亂竄，十載牛棚，愛國研究兩不能，然則，異代而興「獨為神州惜大儒」之嘆的，又豈僅季老筆下的陳寅恪、胡適之兩先生了。    

季先生是散文大家，文字清麗典雅，趣味多韻，世所公認，其散文選本多有，透過編輯之力，轉「身世之文」而為「時代之書」，是此書所以超越其餘，更值得一讀之處。

書目資料
清塘荷韻
作者：季羨林
出版：大旗出版
定價：280元 
類別：散文

By Philip Horne （professor of English at University College London）

Twain's writing career began and ended in journalism and debt, but this improvident genius made a massive fortune in his middle years and, by lecturing tirelessly everywhere from Pittsburgh to Ceylon, became perhaps the most celebrated and recognisable person in the world. He lived through the era of slavery, the heyday of the Mississippi steamboats on which he was a pilot (hence his pseudonym, meaning "allow 12 feet") and the civil war (joining a ragtag Southern militia but speedily "absquatulating" to the Wild West). He saw the Virginia City gold rush and the booming corruptions of the post-war Gilded Age (to which he gave its name), the technological explosion of the late 19th century into something recognisably modern, the imperialist moment of the Spanish-American war of 1898 (which he deplored), and the crushing capitalist dominance of the "trusts". "The report of my death was an exaggeration," he remarked; and though he's long buried, there's a sense in which he is still with us.

At least Ron Powers, a former Pulitzer prizewinner, clearly thinks so in this enormous, enjoyable volume.

【…】

There's some substance to his (irritatingly put) suggestion that Twain, through his childhood intimacy with black voices, introduced a new register into American literature: "Mark Twain's baton began to mute the Anglican symphony, and strike up the rhythms of American jazz." And strained boosterism mostly falls away as Powers gets into his stride, propelling us through the phases of Clemens's extraordinary, bewildering life, which ran from 1835 to 1910, from the backwaters of the slaveholding South before the civil war, via the gold-rush saloons of Virginia City, to the courts of Europe, where he dined with emperors and kings. For Powers, The Innocents Abroad (1869), a satirical travel book on Europe and the Middle East, becomes "a liberating force in America's self-definition", while Twain's early Californian hit, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", stirs him to declare, gratuitously echoing Yeats, "American literature . . . was about to be changed, changed utterly". Utterly? Quite a bit, maybe.

These all-American claims - which seem to betray a serious under-rating of Hawthorne, Melville and Thoreau - don't damage the fascination of the story Powers tells. In any case, when it comes to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain's greatest work, we don't need Powers to advertise its continuing power "to blow its outlaw jazz riffs of spoken language", for there's HL Mencken in 1913, calling it "a truly stupendous piece of work, perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English", and TS Eliot acclaiming it as "a masterpiece". Powers is protesting too much on the Twain-as-hipster front, it soon emerges, to defend his hero from the censors who denounce him as a racist and have striven to get Huckleberry Finn banned on the basis of its 211 uses of the word "nigger".

【…】

Twain found his metier as a hypnotically potent "funny man" in his comic lectures, holding his huge, socially mixed audience, as he bragged, in awed silence "along a thousand invisible electrical currents" before releasing a storm of laughter with a "snapper". His best writing worked the same way.

【...】

Powers's immensely rich book, the record of an epic, perplexing life, succeeds above all in freshening up one's appetite for Twain's own pungent prose and his magnificently challenging wit.

書目資料：
Mark Twain: A Life
by Ron Powers
723pp, Scribner, £25

詳見衛報：Sparks from the divine ragbag（2006.2.18）

It is no surprise that conservative Christians admire these books. They teach us to accept authority; to love and follow our leaders instinctively, as the children in the Narnia books love and follow Aslan. By implication, they suggest that we should and will admire and fear and obey whatever impressive-looking and powerful male authority figures we come in contact with. They also suggest that without the help of Aslan (that is, of such powerful figures, or their representatives on earth) we are bound to fail. Alone, we are weak and ignorant and helpless. Individual initiative is limited—almost everything has already been planned out for us in advance, and we cannot know anything or achieve anything without the help of God. 

This is, of course, the kind of mindset that evangelical churches prefer and cultivate: the kind that makes people vote against their own economic and social interests, that makes successful, attractive, and apparently intelligent young men and women want to become the apprentices of Donald Trump, or of much worse rich and powerful figures. This mindset could even be called deluded, since in this world a giant lion does not usually appear to see that the right side wins and all the good people are happy. In Narnia faith in Aslan, who comes among his followers and speaks to them, may make sense: but here on earth, as the classic folk tales have told us for generations, it is better to depend on your own courage and wit and skill, and the good advice of less than omnipotent beings.

書目：

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

a film directed by Andrew Adamson

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis

by Alan Jacobs

HarperSanFrancisco, 342 pp., $25.95

Revisiting Narnia: Fantasy, Myth and Religionin C.S. Lewis' Chronicles

edited by Shanna Caughey

Benbella, 320 pp., $14.95 (paper)

詳見紐約書評：The Passion of C.S. Lewis（2006.2.9）

Richard Sutch and Susan Carter don't expect anybody to take their new book to the beach.

For starters, it weighs 29 pounds. It has five volumes. And it's densely packed with more than a million numbers that measure America in mind-boggling detail, from the average annual precipitation in Sweet Springs, Mo., to the wholesale price of rice in Charleston S.C., in 1707.

"You'd have to be a certain kind of personality type," Professor Sutch said.

"Let's suppose you're a novelist, writing about that period, and you might want to familiarize yourself with it for verisimilitude," he added. "It might be important to a historian — why was there a lot of out-migration from this particular area of the county at that time?"

【…】

Professors Sutch and Carter, who are married and both teach at the University of California at Riverside, are editors in chief of Historical Statistics of the United States, an ambitious expansion of previous compilations that were published by the United States Census Bureau in 1949, 1960 and 1975. This "Millennial Edition" is a privatized version, authorized by the Census Bureau but published by Cambridge University Press.

【…】

The new edition, which sells for $825 and is also available in an online version, is a gold mine for scholars, students and assorted nerds and numbers crunchers, although, as with a gold mine, exposing the veins and nuggets can be challenging. Some tables are not comparable, many do not include percentages, and some contemporary tables are current only to 1990.

"The whole project was designed to present data in raw form rather than highly manipulated," Professor Sutch said. "That makes it more difficult. You have to do a little work to use this."

The couple have been working on the revised collection for 11 years, although they estimate that more than half that time was spent in fund-raising. (Cambridge says the book cost more than $1 million to produce.)

【…】

A discriminating browser can also learn, or be reminded, that:

Fewer than 1 in 10 black children under 5 live with both parents; workers with the highest hourly wages now work the longest hours;

【…】

"Readers may be surprised that the critical skill that's more required than formal statistics is more like literary criticism," Professor Carter said. "You look at a number and don't say that's a fact. You want to say where did it come from, who generated it, why, is it consistent with what we would get from looking at other sources, does it make sense? What sort of insight can the quantitative record give to the qualitative one?"

詳見紐約時報：A Book for People Who Love Numbers

By William Grimes

Park Honan, who has written biographies of Jane Austen, Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and, most recently, Shakespeare, has a seemingly modest agenda. "My aim, in this biography, has been to try to offer the facts of Marlowe's life reliably, and to bring our sense of him up to date," he writes in his introduction.

Easier said than done. The facts are few, so Mr. Honan squeezes them for all they're worth, often forcing connections and piling enormous interpretive weight on mere wisps of phrases. Any biography of Marlowe must rely on intuition and guesswork, but Mr. Honan pushes hard against the limits, and those old friends "might have," "could have" and "probably" get quite a workout.

書目資料：
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
Poet & Spy
By Park Honan
421 pages. Illustrated. Oxford University Press. $32.50.

詳見紐約時報：A Mick Jagger in an Elizabethan Ruff

南飛烏鵲曰：
Ben Johnson 稱Marlowe 的詩句為 “mighty lines”，可見他筆動風雷。當然，比起莎鬍子，馬羅不免矮了一截。我對馬羅的生平不怎麼感興趣，摘選這兩段，喜其字句帶刺，讀來有趣。寫書評就得像這樣。

By：William Grimes

Mr. Stark, the author of "The Rise of Christianity" and "One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism," is sick and tired of reading that religion impeded scientific progress and stunted human freedom. To those who say that capitalism and democracy developed only after secular-minded thinkers turned the light of reason on the obscurantism of the Dark Ages, he has a one-word answer: nonsense.

【…】

Capitalism, and the scientific revolution that powered it, did not emerge in spite of religion but because of it.

If this sounds paradoxical, it shouldn't, Mr. Stark argues. Despite the prejudiced arguments of anticlerical Enlightenment thinkers, free inquiry and faith in human reason were intrinsic to Christian thought. Christianity, alone among the world's religions, conceived of God as a supremely rational being who created a coherent world whose inner workings could be discovered through the application of reason and logic. Consequently, it was only in the West, rather than in Asia or the Middle East, that alchemy evolved into chemistry, astrology into astronomy.

Mr. Stark gets down to cases quickly. He rapidly administers a few bracing slaps to Max Weber's theory that the Protestant ethic of self-denial and reinvestment propelled capitalism, pointing out that capitalism was in full flower in Italy centuries before the Reformation. As Mr. Stark himself concedes, historians have long since dismantled Weber's elegant and highly influential thesis, but he beats this dead horse one more time.

The most persuasive chapters in "The Victory of Reason" describe the early stirrings of free-market enterprise and scientific experimentation on the monastic estates that spread throughout Western Europe after the ninth century. It was during the so-called Dark Ages that Christian monks, throwing off "the stultifying grip of Roman repression and mistaken Greek idealism," developed innovations like the water wheel, horseshoes, fish farming, the three-field system of agriculture, eyeglasses and clocks. "All of these remarkable developments can be traced to the unique Christian conviction that progress was a God-given obligation, entailed in the gift of reason," writes Mr. Stark, who has described himself in interviews, surprisingly, as not religious in any conventional sense.

【…】

Aquinas imagined the case of a grain merchant arriving in a country beset by famine, who knows that a convoy of other grain merchants will shortly arrive. Is he morally obliged to reveal that fact, and thereby put downward pressure on the price of his own grain? In a conclusion worthy of Adam Smith, Aquinas decided that he was not.

Mr. Stark sneaks in one of his most intriguing theories late in the book. He notes that soon after the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, he began showering the church with money and privileges, making it an attractive career for the upper classes. The "church of piety," run by dedicated, poorly paid and ascetic clergy, gave way to the "church of power," which was far less likely to impede the growth of commerce. Had the church of piety prevailed, he writes, "Christianity probably would have continued to denounce usury and to oppose profit and materialism in general, just as Islam still does."

【…】

Weber, in elaborating his thesis about the Protestant ethic, avoided one problem that Mr. Stark addresses but never quite solves. What about France and Spain? As Roman Catholic realms, they fell outside Weber's paradigm, but not Mr. Stark's. Mr. Stark argues that Christianity is necessary but not sufficient for the development of capitalism, which requires political freedom to thrive. Once the capitalist city-states of Italy lost their freedom, they became economic backwaters. Fine, but if the spirit of free inquiry and human equality is inherent in Christianity, why did Spain and France become despotisms in the first place? And, while we're at it, why is it that so many non-Christians - Chinese, Jews and Indians, for example - have taken to business and technology so brilliantly?

By Curtis Sittenfeld

Born in 1882, Virginia Stephen was the third of four children from her parents' marriage; she also had four older half siblings. The stability of the erudite, affluent Stephen home - a household of "books, writers and literary gossip" and "jokes, anecdotes and feuds" - was ruptured by the sudden death of her mother from rheumatic fever when Virginia was 13. Over the next nine years, Virginia's half sister, father and brother also died. This series of tragedies, Briggs argues, accounted for Woolf's adult sense of precariousness, her awareness of the menace lurking beneath tranquility. A feeling of unease strongly influenced Woolf's fiction and replayed itself in her own life, as she tried, often without success, to maintain mental and emotional equilibrium.

【…】

When she married Leonard Woolf in August 1912, Virginia was 30 and almost finished with her first novel. Leonard was also a writer, bright, political and Jewish - Virginia set aside her intermittent anti-Semitism - as well as exceedingly patient with and protective of his wife. From her honeymoon, Virginia wrote to a friend, asking: "Why do you think people make such a fuss about marriage and copulation? . . . I find the climax immensely exaggerated." Subsequent affairs with women, most notably with the married, cross-dressing aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, who inspired Woolf's novel "Orlando," were apparently more gratifying and were approved by Leonard.

Even as she found increasing professional success, Woolf continued to fight the "hairy black devils" of instability. The couple never had children because Leonard believed Virginia did not possess the mental or physical strength. On and off, Woolf struggled with anorexia, insomnia and headaches, and she sometimes heard voices. Many of her breakdowns occurred after she finished writing a novel and were probably, Briggs points out, made worse by treatments in which she was overfed, forced to rest and forbidden to work. Although Briggs does not dwell on Woolf's eventual suicide in 1941, she offers the provocative theory that Woolf's breakdowns were not evidence of insanity, but rather a sensitive person's quite sane response to the darkness and cruelties of life, and particularly to the horrors of World War II.

書目：

VIRGINIA WOOLF
An Inner Life.
By Julia Briggs.
Illustrated. 528 pp. Harcourt. $30.

詳見紐約時報：Yes, Virginia （2005.11.20）

By Jonathan Rosen（editorial director of Nextbook）  

Bloom's Yahweh is the work of an author called the J writer by German 19th-century scholarship, but though Yahweh is a literary character, he is also, through a semi-mystical Bloomian maneuver, real. He is the "man-God" who appears to Joshua with a drawn sword, the jealous, zealous, hungry, hands-on deity who makes Adam out of a mud pie, picnics with the elders on Mount Sinai, chooses Moses and then, with irrational outrage, tries to kill him as he travels back to Egypt. This God made the redactors of the Hebrew Bible so uncomfortable that he was gradually papered over, displaced by priestly sources and the Deuteronomist, and then finally done in by the rabbis of the Talmud, whom Bloom clearly admires, and in some ways even resembles, though he finds their recasting of God as the merciful, covenant-keeping Lord of monotheism a betrayal of the rough, irrefutable reality that Yahweh represents.

【…】

But before he gets to Yahweh, Bloom turns his attention to Jesus, to whom the first half of the book is devoted. The order is important. Bloom offers an excellent explanation of the radical difference between the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. A key difference, Bloom notes, is that the Hebrew Bible ends with II Chronicles and the "heartening exhortation to 'go up' to Jerusalem to rebuild Yahweh's Temple." The reconfigured "Old Testament" ends with the minor prophet Malachi prophesying the return of Elijah, a lead-in to the Gospel of Matthew. In "Jesus and Yahweh," Bloom reverses this revision: Yahweh, though older, isn't superseded, but given the last word.

【…】

Jesus Christ, as opposed to Jesus, is a later theological construct that owes a great deal to Hellenic thought. Christ, for Bloom, is a betrayal of Jesus the man, Yeshua, who clearly lived inside a Jewish world, trusted in the covenant with Yahweh, did not think the Law was death, and would be appalled at, or at least entirely baffled by, the religion created in his name. Jesus belongs on one side of the Judeo-Christian divide, Christ on the other. Bloom is persuasively aware that the Judeo-Christian tradition is a convenient myth that joins two deeply incompatible religions.

Bloom's insistence on the unrecoverable details of the life of Jesus doesn't stop him from using his ear to locate in the gospels the elements that seem to him truest to the real Yeshua, that "greatest of Jewish geniuses." These are found particularly in the gospel of Mark, where Jesus' dark parables, his ambivalence toward his own apostles and toward those he would save, make him a literary, if not a literal, son of the enigmatic, mercurial Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. In Bloom's account, Jesus, with his deep connection to the uncanny Yahweh, can seem like the last real Jew, rather than the first Christian.

書目：
JESUS AND YAHWEH
The Names Divine.
By Harold Bloom.
238 pp. Riverhead Books. $24.95.

詳見紐約時報：So Who Is King of the Jews? （2005.11.27）

By William Grimes

In the early 1960's, Laurence Olivier defined the goal of acting to Michael Gambon, his young protégé at the National Theater. Every member of the audience, he said, both male and female, should want to have sex with you.

The seduction metaphor turns up again and again in "Olivier." The audience watching "Romeo and Juliet" will always respond, Olivier told an interviewer, to "the guy that makes them believe he's alive and breathing and doing it to Juliet." Late in life, he described his profession in purely carnal terms. It was, he told his son Tarquin in risqué language, like being paid to have sex.

【…】

"Olivier" was authorized by the Olivier family. Terry Coleman, a former arts correspondent for The Guardian of London, had access to previously unavailable letters, diaries and recorded interviews, and he has used them, in this lively, scrupulously researched biography, to clarify and correct numerous errors, some created by Olivier himself, and to provide a rich new account of several chapters in Olivier's life, especially his tormented relationship with Vivien Leigh.

Mr. Coleman cannot be accused of fawning. His Olivier is a charismatic genius but also ruthless, autocratic and narcissistic. "Larry was not really interested in people, you see," said Peter Hiley, a longtime assistant to Olivier and Leigh. "He would observe someone, thinking that would make a good something for Shylock, but he was picking up mannerisms; he wasn't wondering what that person was like."

In the manuscript version of "Confessions of an Actor," Olivier wrote: "Artists must be selfish. It is in fact their duty." Throughout his long life, he acted on this faith, virtually ignoring his children, pursuing affairs right and left with young actresses, putting his three wives through hell and trampling professional colleagues in single-minded pursuit of his lofty goals.

Olivier met his match in Leigh. Their love letters, a bizarre mixture of heavy breathing and baby talk - Olivier often refers to Leigh as Mummy - make an already tempestuous relationship seem like a tropical fever from start to finish, stoked by long separations. At the same time, both partners had a cleareyed view of the publicity value of their romance and managed it carefully. Olivier was probably being more revealing than he intended when he told an interviewer in 1940: "We never converse. We only confer."

As Leigh succumbed to manic-depression, the chaos of the relationship finally overwhelmed Olivier. But it took some doing. In his professional life, Olivier courted disorder and crisis. He worked best when overworked, saddled with multiple projects that brought him to the brink of nervous exhaustion or, later in life, serious illness. In 1959, while filming "The Entertainer," he was also playing Coriolanus in Stratford-Upon-Avon, a part for which he devised a typically athletic stunt requiring him to leap from a 12-foot platform onto the stage. He commuted between the two jobs in an ambulance to get some sleep.

【…】

On the other hand, Olivier did spend most of his final decades frantically chasing money. " 'Dracula,' " he wrote to his son in 1978. "God, the shame of it." Bad health and bad films defined Olivier's twilight years, and Mr. Coleman works his way through the sad list without flinching. This is Lear, after all. Pain, suffering and humiliation, doled out in full measure, cannot obscure the glory of Olivier at the height of his powers. He set out to seduce, and he triumphed.

書目：
OLIVIER
By Terry Coleman
Illustrated. 595 pages. Henry Holt & Company. $32.50.

詳見紐約時報：
Ruthlessly Practical, Undeniably Brilliant （2005.11.23）

去到重新開張的「明星咖啡屋」，很多舊物舊景保留下來，然而在舊物舊景間，再也沒有當年那些在這裡思考、聊天、寫稿、編雜誌的青年人們了。沒有環繞著「明星咖啡屋」的那個創意團體，那個曾經掀起過現代詩、現代小說，一路一直闖進「鄉土文學論戰」的創意團體。他們，做為一個創意集團，曾經真切改變了台灣社會。

現階段的台灣社會，就是少了像「月圓會」或「明星咖啡屋」這樣的創意團體吧！今天社會概念下的「創意」，都太職業化、太制式化了，他們或許有能力思考在電視機前惹觀眾哈哈一笑的「綜藝笑話」，卻不再有人積極、興奮地創造、交換足以動搖根本價值的「哲學笑話」了。

詳見 楊照書舖電子報：「創意互動、互動創意──讀「創意工廠MIT」（之一）」

The largest political factor is, of course, the structure of global politics. The flat economic world has been created by an extremely unflat political world. The United States dominates the globe like no country since ancient Rome. It has been at the forefront, pushing for open markets, open trade and open politics. But the consequence of these policies will be to create a more nearly equal world, economically and politically. If China grows economically, at some point it will also gain political ambitions. If Brazil continues to surge, it will want to have a larger voice on the international stage. If India gains economic muscle, history suggests that it will also want the security of a stronger military. Friedman tells us that the economic relations between states will be a powerful deterrent to war, which is true if nations act sensibly. But as we have seen over the last three years, pride, honor and rage play a large part in global politics.

The ultimate challenge for America -- and for Americans -- is whether we are prepared for this flat world, economic and political. While hierarchies are being eroded and playing fields leveled as other countries and people rise in importance and ambition, are we conducting ourselves in a way that will succeed in this new atmosphere? Or will it turn out that, having globalized the world, the United States had forgotten to globalize itself?

選自紐約時報，書評家Fareed Zakaria

短評：當四海一家，隨之而來的是更激烈的競爭。

]]> http://blog.roodo.com/kafka17/archives/103197.html http://blog.roodo.com/kafka17/archives/103197.html 未經我讀 Sun, 01 May 2005 22:12:57 +0800