Reviews and News:
Scholar discovers new evidence that Shakespeare the man was indeed Shakespeare the playwright: “In the Brooke-Dethick feud, it becomes clear that ‘Shakespeare, Gent. from Stratford’ and ‘Shakespeare the Player’ are the same man…Crucially, in the long-running ‘authorship’ debate, this has been a fiercely contested point. But Wolfe’s research nails any lingering ambiguity in which the Shakespeare deniers can take refuge.”
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An essential guide for understanding sea power: “Land and Sea is Schmitt’s ‘history of the battle of sea powers against land powers and of land powers against sea powers.’ Humans, he notes, are by nature land dwellers. We call our planet ‘Earth,’ though water covers most of its surface. Our natural attachment to a particular portion of the planet is integral to the healthy, conservative values of family, nation, and the moral order. Nonetheless, men have turned to the sea. The strength of Crete, Athens, Carthage, and Venice depended upon dominion over the water and seaborne commerce. The most profound turn to the sea, though, began with the oceanic voyages of the Europeans, particularly the English and Dutch. A revolution in thought made this possible. Whereas ancient and medieval man saw himself as static, rooted in a specific patch of land, Renaissance and early modern man saw himself as dynamic, incessantly moving through empty space. This change in perspective launched Europe’s great Age of Exploration. The discovered peoples beyond Europe, unprepared for the new encounter, were reduced to the status, legally and politically, of prey.”
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California’s Matisse: “In the new luxe catalogue raisonné from Yale University Press showcasing the work of artist Richard Diebenkorn, there is something for anyone who cares at all for visual art. Painting, drawing, etching, portraiture, landscape, still life, representation, and abstraction—in a long, peripatetic career stretching across the last half of the last century, he did it all and did it well.”
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Librarians create fake reader to keep books on shelves. “Chuck Finley appears to be a voracious reader, having checked out 2,361 books at the East Lake County Library in a nine-month period this year. But Finley didn’t read a single one of the books, ranging from Cannery Row by John Steinbeck to a kids book called Why Do My Ears Pop? by Ann Fullick.”
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New Gallup poll shows Americans reading as much, or more, than in 2002. 73% of readers prefer print to electronic books.
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My take on the poetry of Christian Wiman: “His style…is very much the fashion. But a couple of things set him apart.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Humanities, Erin A. Smith explains why The Late Great Planet Earth was so popular”
“Long before the Left Behind books crowded the New York Times best-seller list, Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson’s The Late Great Planet Earth introduced millions of readers worldwide to end-times prophecy. An accessible, engaging introduction to the coming apocalypse, The Late Great Planet Earth was the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970s: Ten million copies were in circulation by the end of the decade. It sold more than 28 million copies by 1990, an estimated 35 million by 1999…
“Although evangelical publishing was large and growing rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, mainstream media often ignored its influence or dismissed it. Lindsey, in particular, had a significant public relations problem. ‘Hal Lindsey . . . is an Advent-and-Apocalypse evangelist who sports a Porsche racing jacket and tools around Los Angeles in a Mercedes 450 SI,’ Publishers Weekly said in 1977. ‘And even though his best-selling books of Bible prophecy warn that the end is near, Lindsey maintains a suite of offices in a posh Santa Monica high-rise for the personal management firm that sinks his royalties into long-term real estate investments.’
“Scholars and intellectuals, meanwhile, condemned The Late Great Planet Earth for being theologically wrong, historically inaccurate, and aesthetically bad. ‘Pity those who look to Lindsey’s books to lead them through the Bible,’ wrote one theologian in a book-length debunking. ‘Lindsey’s views represent yet another link in a long chain of mistaken interpretations of God’s Word.’
“As a scholar of popular books, I was fascinated by this gap between popular celebration and frequently justified scholarly condemnation. Why would so many Americans read a bad book with such intensity and passion?”
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Image of the Day: Lapland
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Poem: Andrea Cohen, “After”
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