Reviews and News:
Happy New Year, everyone. 2017 wasn’t the greatest. There were a lot of bad movies (Sonny Bunch and Kyle Smith remind us of a few good ones), and politics was, well, politics. But not everything was terrible. An actual writer won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and there were some real gems in nonfiction trade. I didn’t read as much as I usually do, but my favorite nonfiction book was Andrzej Franaszek’s Czeslaw Milosz biography. Others that caught my eye: Vito Tanzi’s Termites of the State, Ulrich L Lehner’s God Is Not Nice, and Josephine Quinn’s In Search of the Phoenicians. The last book of 2017 in Columbia’s wonderful Russian Library series also looks worthwhile.
Let’s get 2018 started off right, shall we, with Damion Searls’s account of how Carl Jung came to propose his theory of psychological types: “From the start, Jung’s apparent denial of objective truth in psychology appalled Freud and his followers, who felt Freud had the one true method for reaching the only possible conclusions.”
Algis Valiunas revisits the life and work of James D. Watson, “the evangelist of molecular biology.”
In 1705, Johann Sebastian Bach walked 250 miles from Arnstadt to Lübeck. Horatio Clare makes the same trek.
Daniella J. Greenbaum reviews Leon Kass’s Leading a Worthy Life: “Young people in America, Leon R. Kass writes, ‘are increasingly confused about what a worthy life might look like, and about how they might be able to live one.’ Kass strives to clarify this confusion in his latest book, Leading a Worthy Life, in which he explores topics ranging from courtship to intimacy, human dignity, physician-assisted suicide, eugenics, liberal education, patriotism, and religion.”
The poet Helen Pinkerton has passed away.
The website Acculturated calls it quits.
Stained glass dating from the 13th century has been found in the attic of Westminster Abbey.
The largest early modern map of the world has been stitched together for the first time: “For over 400 years, Urbano Monte’s color world map was spread out over 60 individual pages. Created just 95 years after the discovery of America, the 1587 rendering is one of the earliest world maps; and when placed together, it stretches out a little over 10 feet.”
“For nearly 70 years, Olga M. Ranitskaya’s exceptional palm-sized diary, bound in snakeskin, slumbered in obscurity. Combining whimsical drawings with clever rhyming couplets, the diary — more graphic novel than ordinary journal — portrays the physical and emotional hardships of a spirited stick figure, the author’s alter ego. What makes this diary unique is that Ms. Ranitskaya created it while incarcerated in the Gulag, the Soviet system of forced labor camps where, at its height, Joseph Stalin imprisoned millions of people from the 1930s to the 1950s.” It is now on view at the Gulag History Museum in Moscow.
Essay of the Day:
The French novelist Romain Gary won the Goncourt Prize twice by lying about his identity. It wasn’t the only thing he lied about. “He lied all the time and about many things,” Adam Gopnik writes over at The New Yorker:
“He lied about his background: born Roman Kacew in Lithuania, in 1914, right at the beginning of the European catastrophe, as a poor Jew among poor Jews. He lied about his mother, his father, his education, his literary history, his loves…
“Through it all, he was, puzzlingly but certainly, great: a great man of a special mid-century kind—great in form, in fable, in the entire fiction he made of his life, dedicated to an extravagantly complicated ideal of humanity. Here was a man of steadfast personal courage who spoke up in his writing for those called cowards, for the schlemiels and wise guys and pranksters who, faced with the unimaginable evils of human existence, feigned and dodged and, sometimes, survived. He allowed the contradictions in his own life to become identical to the absurdities of modern existence.”
Photos: Secret pictures from 1890s Norway
Poem: John Poch, “The Moon”
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