Reviews and News:
An entertaining guidebook to 12 of the middle age’s most famous illustrated manuscripts: “It starts with the Gospels in the Parker Library, which were probably brought to England by St Augustine in 497 ad, at the outset of our Christian history, and concludes with the 16th-century Spinola Hours, which was rediscovered by Dr de Hamel himself in 1975 and is now in the Getty Museum. In between, we are taken on a world tour of manuscript depositories from Dublin to Munich, Copenhagen to Florence and New York to St Petersburg…There are many fine accounts of medieval manuscripts by notable scholars, but they are, on the whole, addressed to other scholars. None of them conveys so well to an amateur the atmosphere of a great manuscript depository, the excitement of discovery or the impression which the painted page can make on someone who is able to hold it in his hands. At the same time, he provides the historical and artistic context which explains why this is worth doing.”
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In The Guardian, Adam Sisman asks: “John le Carré and I worked for years on his biography. Why is he telling his own story 12 months later?”
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George W. Bush to publish a book of his paintings of veterans. “The book will feature 66 oil paintings and a four-panel mural of military veterans and those in active service” and will be accompanied by stories about each of the subjects told by President Bush in “his inimitable voice.”
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Four of Rembrandt’s “Five Senses” paintings will be reunited for the first time in centuries after The Unconscious Patient was discovered last year. The hunt for the missing Taste painting is on-going. “The paintings were created around 1624-5 when the artist was still a teenager, and depict the five senses—a popular allegorical theme of the day. Each picture shows three figures depicting a sense, with Sight showing a squinting woman trying on a pair of spectacles and Hearing showing three singers. Smell, long thought missing, was discovered last year in the basement of a New Jersey home in the United States, offered at auction for just $500-800 and thought to be by a minor 19th century painting by an unknown artist.”
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“Something remarkable happened in classical Greece, but we didn’t know about it until very recently. Against all historical odds, they nourished a successful class of entrepreneurs and became wealthy.” How did they do it? “The absence of central planning among the Greek poleis facilitated rather than hindered the innovations that created and spread their remarkable prosperity.”
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The intolerable Carl Jung and the woman he married. “Emma Rauschenbach was the daughter of rich Swiss industrialists — a plump, good-natured girl, nicknamed ‘Sunny’, who married young without knowing what she was letting herself in for. Her husband, Carl Gustav Jung, was revered after his death as a guru as much as a doctor — as the mystic and visionary that Freud might have become had he not been so fixated on the role of the libido. As a husband, a father and a younger man, however, Jung appears to have been close to intolerable. He was physically large, selfish, bullying and loud of voice; he cheated at games, had a vile temper and appalling table manners; he thought men should be polygamous but that Emma should be his alone. He was also narcissistic and unbalanced, coming from a family with severe mental health problems.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Foreign Policy, Suzy Khimm writes about the Chinese demand for ginseng and how it is affecting North Carolina:
“On the outskirts of Boone, North Carolina, a small college and ski town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Travis Cornett had turned his bucolic farm into a virtual fortress. He’d started by installing a handful of security cameras across his 12 acres of sloping pine woods. Then he’d nailed 15 bright red signs to tree trunks along the property line that warned, ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted.’ He also kept a .22 Ruger rifle and a Kalashnikov on hand.
“As far as Cornett was concerned, no one was going to touch his ginseng.
“It was the fall of 2013, six years since Cornett had planted his first ‘sang,’ as locals call it: some 40 pounds of seed in a patch of forest shade. Initially, Cornett wasn’t too worried about poachers, well known around Boone for stealing ginseng from land that isn’t theirs. His fledging crop, low growing with green, jagged-edged leaves, had looked like wild strawberry plants. Now, though, it was coming into its prime. The maturing stems were taking on a distinctive purple tinge, their leaves multiplying, their berries turning lipstick red. Cornett knew that the plants’ roots, which are more valuable with age, could soon fetch hundreds of dollars per pound. It was only a matter of time before the rest of his farm, where he’d planted more seed over the years, would grow ripe for profit — and for theft.
“Yet his fortifications weren’t enough. One September afternoon, neighbors saw a scruffy man creeping around Cornett’s land. When Cornett got the news — the security cameras had failed to pick up the intruder — he grabbed a weed whacker and unleashed it on his oldest ginseng, slicing off the leafy tops. If poachers couldn’t spot the decapitated plants, he reasoned, they couldn’t steal the roots.
“A week later, though, he got a call that the trespasser had returned. Just then, the man was walking up a country byway near Cornett’s property, wearing dirt-covered jeans and carrying a backpack. Cornett, who was a few minutes from home, jumped into his black GMC truck and sped through the rural hills until he spotted David Presnell. When confronted, Presnell pleaded with Cornett not to call the cops. Cornett pulled out his cell phone anyway, and Presnell took off running, unzipping his backpack as he went. Then he reached inside and started tossing tan, snaking ginseng roots by the handful into laurel thickets lining the road.
“By the time police arrived several minutes later, nothing was left in Presnell’s bag save some dirt and a few stringy runners. At Cornett’s urging, however, the cops drove to Presnell’s mobile home, where they found several roots strung up to dry. Others were dehydrating on large screened trays. The incursion into Cornett’s property, police suspected, wasn’t a first offense.
“In December 2014, Presnell became the first person in North Carolina to be convicted of felony ginseng larceny on private property. He joined other thieves across Appalachia — the mountainous strip of territory extending from southern New York through the Carolinas down into Mississippi — who’ve been arrested, fined, even imprisoned for various ginseng-related crimes, including poaching, illegal possession, and unlawful trade across state lines. Presnell received 30 months’ probation.
“For Cornett, now a taciturn 39-year-old with brown hair and a goatee, the verdict was a warning shot to other poachers, including one who struck his backyard about a year after Presnell’s arrest. One morning, Cornett found footprints and empty holes where several big, valuable plants had been. He suspects that a former neighbor ‘stole’d every one of them,’ he recalls in his Southern drawl.
“Cornett went into business for the same reason poachers are keen to rob him. The global market for ginseng root, popularly used as an herbal supplement, is estimated at more than $2 billion. Long a staple of traditional Chinese medicine, ginseng products are also ubiquitous in Korea and increasingly popular in Singapore, Malaysia, and other countries with large ethnic Chinese populations. These days, most ginseng is mass-produced on large, pesticide-sprayed farms under the artificial shade of wood and fabric canopies. Wild ginseng, which tends to grow in temperate forests, is considered more potent and fetches a higher price. Plants like Cornett’s, cultivated in the woods, are closer to wild than to conventionally farmed ginseng.
“Due to centuries of overharvesting, however, wild roots are rare commodities. In East Asia, native stocks are nearly extinct; in China and Russia, they are banned from being traded. The only other place where ginseng is indigenous is the eastern half of North America, where it grows amid ferns, trillium, bloodroot, and other low-lying vegetation. Concerned about overharvesting, Canada has prohibited the sale of wild roots. In the United States, it’s still legal — but scientists have observed stocks in Appalachia, where ginseng once flourished, dipping over the last decade.”
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Image of the Day: Caiman and butterflies
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Poem: Bruce Snider, “Territory”
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