Reviews and News:
The lives of Chaucer’s pilgrims: “Liza Picard…weaves an infinity of small details into an arresting tapestry of life in 14th-century England.”
What we can learn from WWII: “We often think of deterrence in quantitative terms, as a function of how many missiles we have, how many troops in uniform, how many carriers or submarines or Global Hawks, how many artillery batteries are deployed across the DMZ. But note that Hanson places equal weight on the invisible aspects of deterrence, on a nation’s fighting spirit. ‘By any fair measure,’ he says, ‘Germany in 1939—in terms of the number and quality of planes, armor, manpower reserves, and industrial output—was not stronger than the combined French and British militaries—or at least not so strong as to be able to defeat and occupy both powers.’ Yet the British government allowed Hitler to maximize his position and France surrendered to the invading Nazis in a matter of weeks because they were too tired of war to risk standing in the right.”
Unusual trivia about Paradise Lost: Malcolm X read it. So did Frankenstein’s monster.
The futuristic architecture of Astana: “At one end of a monumental axis stands the biggest tent in the world, the Khan Shatyr shopping mall designed by British architect Norman Foster in the form of an inflated plastic yurt that glows pink and green by night. Housing dodgems, a rollercoaster and an artificial beach (with sand imported from the Maldives), it is a tacky pleasure dome that Kublai Khan could only dream of. At the other end of the boulevard rises an enigmatic silver pyramid, also by Foster, the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, conceived as a meeting place for world religions, crowned with a stained-glass lantern of doves. It stands on a grassy mound like a venerable tomb, on axis with a lake in the shape of a bird in flight.”
Paul Cantor considers a revelatory exhibit of Vermeer and his contemporaries: “We see how a cohort of talented painters, focusing on the same subjects, learned from each other, and especially how their rivalry raised the level of their game as artists… Nineteenth-century Romantics came up with the myth of the lonely, misunderstood genius, oblivious to the marketplace and wrapped up in his own private vision of the world. Going into the 19th century, artists were still thought of as craftsmen, delivering a product to please paying customers and integrated into a guild of fellow artists. By contrast, the Romantics, as a revolutionary generation themselves, celebrated the painter as rebel, breaking with tradition and setting out in uncharted waters to create an artistic world of his own.”
Subsidizing suburbia: “What image springs to mind when you picture ‘federally subsidized housing’? Most people imagine a low-income public housing tower, a homeless shelter, or a shoddy apartment building. Nope—suburban homeowners are the single biggest recipient of housing subsidies. As a result, suburbs dominate housing in the United States.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Claremont Review of Books, Robert Curry examines how Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility captures a shift in the attitude towards common sense:
“In Austen’s time, common sense and sensibility were considered fundamental human faculties. As components of human nature, they were capable of being cultivated or neglected, developed or stunted. Differences in cultivation and capacity explained the human truth that some have abundant common sense and others little, and that human beings differ widely in how emotionally responsive they are to impressions and experiences.
“Appreciating the novel on a deeper level requires understanding that Elinor and Marianne personify these two human faculties. But they do more than just that: they personify a great philosophical change in the world.”
Photos: Flight to St. Helena
Poem: J. Allyn Rosser, “Design”
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