Reviews and News:
Bach’s God: “Previous Bach scholarship tended to take a more secular tack. Many of us grew up with an Enlightenment Bach, a nondenominational divinity of mathematical radiance. Glenn Gould’s commentary on the “Goldberg Variations” spoke of a ‘fundamental coordinating intelligence.’ One German scholar went so far as to question the sincerity of Bach’s religious convictions. But the historically informed performance movement, in trying to replicate the conditions in which Bach’s works were first played, helped to restore awareness of his firm theological grounding.”
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Art for the people: “Founded by Alice Walton, the heiress of the Wal-Mart fortune, and constructed with funds north of one billion dollars by the Walton Family Foundation, Crystal Bridges bucks all conventional wisdom on who, where, when, why, and what a major museum should be.”
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The full horror of the Siege of Leningrad revealed: “Devastating eye-witness accounts of starvation and despair — long suppressed in Russia— finally see the light, thanks to Alexis Peri’s painstaking research”
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The strange art of the posthumous portrait: “In the half-century between the 1810s and the 1860s, a number of American artists—many of them self-taught—made their living by painting portraits of the dead. It was a difficult art to master.”
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A life of Philip Sassoon: “Brilliant personalities, such as Churchill, attracted Sassoon. He idolised the Prince of Wales, but as they were both spoilt and snappish men, they often bickered. He supported the “King’s party” during the abdication crisis of 1936, and was implicated in Churchill’s botched attempts to keep the rackety monarch on his throne. Unlike Churchill, he wanted international peace at any cost, and convinced himself that Hitler’s promises were dependable.”
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“Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project takes us back to the 1860s—not just by setting its story then but also by adopting some of the textual tricks of the ‘sensation novelists’ whose work thrilled and scandalized readers of the period. It is impossible to read His Bloody Project without thinking, for instance, of Wilkie Collins’s great 1868 novel The Moonstone, which T. S. Eliot famously called ‘the first, the longest, and the best’ English detective novel. Like The Moonstone, His Bloody Project offers us multiple perspectives on the mystery at its center, compiling “authentic” documents and narratives in different voices so that rather than simply finding out what happened, we have to figure the truth out for ourselves as best we can. While in Collins’s novels the testimonies generally converge on a consistent story, however, the modernity of Burnet’s thriller lies in the irresolution he allows to persist right to the end. The result is gripping reading, but ultimately not wholly satisfying—it’s more a clever simulacrum than a substantive original.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, Anthony Daniels argues that progressive political ideas are ruining medical research:
“Medical journals have thus gone over to political correctness—admittedly with the zeal of the late convert—comparatively recently. Such correctness, however, is now deeply entrenched. With The New England Journal of Medicine for July 16, 2016 in hand, I compared it with the first edition I came across in a pile of old editions in my slightly disordered study: that for September 13, 2007, as it happened, which is not a historical epoch ago. What started as mild has become strident and absurd.
“The first article in the earlier NEJM concerned the insufficient use of typhoid vaccination in those parts of the world in which the disease is still prevalent. It was titled ‘Putting Typhoid Vaccination on the Global Health Agenda.’ ‘The Global Health Agenda’: the very phrase is a masterpiece of suggestio falsi and suppressio veri, which one suspects immediately (and correctly) of having a vast hinterland of saccharine, politically correct, and potentially dictatorial sentiment. In an article titled “Global Health Agenda for the Twenty-First Century,” we find: ‘Health in its own right is of fundamental importance and, like education, is among the basic capabilities that give value to human life (Sen & Sen 1999). It is an intrinsic right as well as a central input to poverty reduction and socioeconomic development. Health-related human rights are core values within the United Nations and WHO, and are endorsed in numerous international and regional human rights instruments. They are intimately related to and dependent on the provision and realization of other social and economic human rights such as those of food, housing, work and education.’
“Apart from being execrably written, this is, where it can actually be understood, the most patent nonsense. My rights are not infringed because I fall ill; I have, for example, no right to an unenlarged prostate though I would much prefer to have one; and there can be no right to immortality as there is to freedom from arbitrary arrest.
“Just because something is nonsense, of course, does not mean that people fail to believe it, and the notion that health care is a human right is now all but unassailable, and unassailed, in our medical journals (which see every sectional interest but their own). I used to ask medical students whether they could find any good reason for providing medical attention to people other than that they had a right to it: and on the whole they could not, so thoroughly had the notion of rights entered their mind and destroyed their moral imaginations.”
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Image of the Day: Kite and starlings
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Poem: Jodie Hollander, “Ruts”
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