To the Editors: I’d like to introduce your readers to a new literary prize from Albertine, New York’s only French-language bookstore, which offers titles in both French and English translation. The Albertine Prize is a reader’s choice award for the best contemporary French fiction in translation. It aims to introduce American audiences to the best current French and Francophone literature while celebrating the US publishers and translators who helped bring them here.
bookreview
Remembering a Champion of Civil Liberties
To the Editors: David Cole’s review of The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise by Laura Weinrib [NYR, March 23] provides a concise history of the early years of the ACLU. I do, however, have one quibble with the article.
Southern Despair
To the Editors: Since the 2016 election, urban liberals and Democrats have newly discovered “rural America,” which is to say our country itself beyond the cities and the suburbs and a few scenic vacation spots. To its new discoverers, this is an unknown land inhabited by “white blue-collar workers” whom the discoverers fear but know nothing about. And so they are turning to experts, who actually have visited rural America or who previously have heard of it, to lift the mystery from it. One such expert is Nathaniel Rich…
Ending the Cold War: What Shevardnadze Did
To the Editors: Archie Brown’s review of Robert Service’s excellent The End of the Cold War, 1985–1991 falsely diminishes Eduard Shevardnadze’s contribution to improved Soviet–American relations and the cold war’s sudden end. Shevardnadze not only revamped Andrei Gromyko’s Foreign Ministry, but he orchestrated the purge of the Defense Ministry, and persuaded hard-liners in the Kremlin that the time had come for rapprochement with the United States. In forging close relations with secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker, Shevardnadze broke down the anti-Soviet cast of the Reagan administration.
Ryder in the Darkness
Mark Rudman offered to push me around the Albert Pinkham Ryder exhibition in a wheelchair. This turned out to be a very good way to view art. The whole habitual rigmarole of wandering through an art museum is eliminated. The art is simply, emphatically, there, to be looked at, attentively. Everyone should see art in a wheelchair.
Dover and Out
How did Theresa May, who campaigned, albeit in lukewarm fashion, for the Remain side in last summer’s referendum, end up pushing for such a hard-core version of Leave? Any explanation has to begin with the parlous state of the official opposition to the Conservatives now in power. In its postwar history, the Labour Party has rarely been weaker.
Afghanistan: Making It Worse
Afghanistan desperately needs an overarching political strategy, which should include dialogue and diplomacy to deal with the problems that President Ashraf Ghani faces, as well as a regional strategy to counter external support for the Taliban. So far Trump’s team has only come up with excessive use of force. The capacity of the military to create lasting change remains limited. How many more lives will have to be lost before the Trump team figures that out?
The Real Madman
Trump has become the real version of the man Putin plays on television—an unpredictable, temperamental, impetuous man who will push reality past the limits of the imagination. Putin’s relationship to television is different from Trump’s because Putin controls Russian television outright. But war has been good for him, too. It’s all about the ratings for both men, in the end.
Turkey and the Kurds: A Chance for Peace?
Questions remain about the Erdoğan’s long-term objectives. Does he need to suppress the Kurds because he wants a powerful presidency? Or does he need a powerful presidency in order to suppress the Kurds? If his campaign against the Kurds is a strategic shift rather than a mere tactical maneuver, then the Kurdish conflict may be one of those struggles that can never be resolved.
The Intellectual’s Bargain
In 1967 Norman Podhoretz published Making It, the story of how a “filthy little slum child” (as one of Podhoretz’s schoolteachers called him) from darkest Brooklyn grew up to be the editor of a prominent magazine of opinion and a member in good standing of the second generation of writers who long ago came to be known as the “New York intellectuals.” It is a book about the pursuit of ambition, a study of how certain Americans transform themselves in order to get ahead in the world, and how, once upon a time, many of them steadfastly preferred not to admit their ambitions, even to themselves.
Sig Nordal 