Reviews and News:
Mikhail Gorbachev brought democracy to Russia and was despised for it: “To understand today’s Russia, it is necessary to understand what happened during Gorbachev’s time, how he opened up a hermetically sealed society after 70 years of stifling Communist rule but was unable to solve its deeper problems and was ultimately pushed aside by the ambitious and mercurial Boris Yeltsin. A populist democrat more interested in breaking apart the sclerotic system than reforming it, Yeltsin introduced a raucous version of democracy and a crony version of capitalism that ended up discrediting both in the eyes of Russians who lost their savings while oligarchs snatched up lucrative state assets.”
What it means to be Cuban: “To be Cuban is, in many ways, to wish to be someone else, somewhere else. The disembodied voice of the collective exile community in Exile describes this desire as a longing for alternate national and ethnic identities. ‘We wanted to be Jews. We wanted to be Polish or German. We would have settled for Danish,’ the narrator explains. ‘We explained that where we come from the greatest achievement is to leave.’ Yet, if leaving is a wish at the heart of Cuban identity, it is also a source of anger and resentment for those left behind.”
Everything about Jupiter is strange, but its auroras are especially so.
Regnery removes its titles from the New York Times bestseller list.
Mary Beard reviews Emily Katz Anhalt’s Why Violent Times Need Ancient Greek Myths.
Starting at the bottom at 48: “My name is Katherine and I’m an intern at The Spectator. What does that say about me? If you had to guess, you’d probably assume I was just finishing university and that I’m perhaps the niece or goddaughter of someone important. Because that’s how the media works, isn’t it? That I’m probably unpaid, but it doesn’t matter because my parents will sort me out — that’s if they didn’t buy this internship for me in a charity auction in the first place. And to be honest, that’s exactly how I imagined interns, too. Yet here I am, a 48-year-old mother of three.”
Essay of the Day:
Nicholas Gibbs claims to have deciphered the mysterious Voynich manuscript. It’s a health manual for women:
“For medievalists or anyone with more than a passing interest, the most unusual element of the Voynich manuscript – Beinecke Ms. 408, known to many as “the most mysterious manuscript in the world” – is its handwritten text. Although several of its symbols (especially the ligatures) are recognizable, adopted for the sake of economy by the medieval scribes, the words formed by its neatly grouped characters do not appear to correspond to any known language. It was long believed that the text was a form of code – one which repeated attempts by cryptographers and linguists failed to penetrate. As someone with long experience of interpreting the Latin inscriptions on classical monuments and the tombs and brasses in English parish churches, I recognized in the Voynich script tell-tale signs of an abbreviated Latin format. But interpretation of such abbreviations depends largely on the context in which they are used. I needed to understand the copious illustrations that accompany the text.
“I first came across the Voynich manuscript some fifteen years ago when, as a professional history researcher, I was looking into some of the more bizarre claims by commentators about some of my ancestors – John Florio (1553–1625) and Jane Fromond (1555–1604/5), the wife of Dr John Dee and grand-daughter of Thomas Fromond, the great English herbalist. I am also a muralist and war artist with an understanding of the workings of picture narration, an advantage I was able to capitalize on for my research. A chance remark just over three years ago brought me a commission from a television production company to analyse the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript and examine the commentators’ theories. By this time the manuscript had been carbon-dated to the early fifteenth century. One of the more notable aspects of the manuscript were the illustrations on a bathing theme, so it seemed logical to have a look at the bathing practices of the medieval period. It became fairly obvious very early on that I had entered the realms of medieval medicine.”
Photo: Planetary nebula IC 418
Poem: Nicholas Friedman, “A Cut Path”
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