Reviews and News:
Sam Leith reviews Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang: “Say what you like about Jonathon Green…He works his ring off. He works like a wop.”
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Bob Dylan will not attend the Nobel Prize ceremony.
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How the beach became a vacation destination: “In the 1730s, the bathing machine appeared on Britain’s beaches. A small cabin on wheels, it was designed to allow its upper-class occupant access to the sea in privacy. This unlikely contraption heralded a new habit among the nobility, who began to visit the coast not for travel or for work, but for health and fun. By the turn of the 19th century the machine could be found on beaches across Europe, and reached rare levels of decadence; King Alfonso XIII had a luxury bungalow mounted on rails to allow the royal family to bathe in peace on the shores of San Sebastian. Today the bathing machine may be long forgotten, but seaside holidays are ubiquitous.”
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Pop’s phonemes: Why does Justin Timberlake say “may” not “me”?
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This year’s “inclusive” National Book Award winners, who “bring us together.”
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Museum deems new Van Gogh sketches inauthentic.
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Essay of the Day:
In Books & Culture, Donald A. Yerxa completes his three-part series on World War I with a look at the war’s Middle-Eastern front:
“Our understanding of the Great War in the Middle East has been significantly enhanced by the near simultaneous publication of two magisterial narratives: Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans and Sean McMeekin’s The Ottoman Endgame. Both books seek to better integrate the Ottoman fronts into the overall history of World War I. It was a vast military canvas that included major campaigns in the Caucasus, the Dardanelles, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. Rogan, a fellow at Oxford University’s St. Antony’s College, contends that the Ottoman entry into the war, more than any other development, transformed a European conflict into a world war. But the war in turn transformed the modern Middle East. McMeekin, who has taught at two universities in Turkey and has written a number of important books dealing with the origins of World War I, challenges the notion that the Middle East was a sideshow of the war. The conflict in the Ottoman theaters, McMeekin contends, might well be called the ‘War of Ottoman Succession,’ spanning twelve years from 1911 to 1923—an epic struggle out of which the modern Middle East was forged.
“We also have Kristian Coates Ulrichsen’s The First World War in the Middle East and Rob Johnson’s The Great War and the Middle East, two monographs that focus on military and strategic matters. Like McMeekin, Ulrichsen, a research fellow at Rice University, is especially keen to combat the dismissive view that the Middle Eastern theaters of war were distractions that drained troops and resources from the all-important Western Front. While Ulrichsen and McMeekin make a good case for the importance of the Ottoman theaters, they don’t undermine the primacy of the Western Front. But they demonstrate how pivotal World War I was to the creation of the modern Middle East. Ulrichsen’s main contribution to our understanding is in revealing the especially vicious fighting and demanding conditions in the Middle Eastern theaters. Extended and vulnerable lines of communication created extremely difficult logistical challenges as all sides sought to sustain an industrialized conflict in a largely pre-industrial region. The huge logistical demands had a ‘devastating impact on non-combatants already living close to or under the margins of subsistence.’ Even more traumatic were the hardships created by forced displacements. This reached appalling dimensions with the genocide of 1915, in which approximately a million Armenians were killed.”
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Image of the Day: Restoration of the United States Capitol Dome
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Poem: J. P. Celia, “On My Late Grandmother Still Receiving Mail”
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