Reviews and News:
Mark Athitakis reviews Sean Penn’s novel Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff: “As a free download, Bob Honey hit the right price point. For the novel version of the story, though, Penn is relegated to being a maker of sentences. May he never quit his day job…Bob Honey is best appreciated as the fever dream of a boomer who watches the news, cannot make sense of it, but cannot contain his fury at it anyhow.”
If you see something in the sky returning to earth over the weekend, it may not be Jesus Christ coming to judge the quick and the dead but a Chinese space station. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.
The Brontë Society will publish two unpublished manuscripts by Charlotte Brontë—a 77-line poem and a 74-line story—that were found in a book belonging to her mother.
What’s the most cultured city in America? If you go by museum visits per capita, it’s not New York or Los Angeles, but Houston, Grand Rapids, and Bentonville.
David Middleton reviews two collections of religious verse.
What is Lithuania’s Day of the Book Smugglers all about? In 1795, “the Third Partition of Poland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth vanished from the map. There was an uprising in 1831 and another in 1863–4. These were brutally repressed by Tsar Alexander II; and in 1865, publications printed in the Lithuanian language were banned. ‘Of course, you could talk between yourselves, but you couldn’t print; you couldn’t write anything publicly. All the children were made to go to the Russian primary schools.’ When the Russian authorities started turning Catholic churches into Russian Orthodox ones, that ‘broke the dam’, said Sabaliauskaitė. The Bishop of Samogitia, Motiejus Valančius, ‘sent the first money transfer to Prussia asking to print some Catholic books to be brought back’ – and that is how the country’s long history of book smuggling began.”
Essay of the Day:
On February 5, 1958, a damaged B-47 dropped a nuclear bomb off the coast of Savannah. It has never been found. Roger Pinckney tells the story at Garden and Gun:
“Air force records indicate the Mark 15 bomb bore serial number 47782. It contained four hundred pounds of high explosives and an undisclosed amount of enriched uranium and other nuclear material. When armed with its nuclear capsule—a device containing plutonium, which triggers the nuclear explosion—the bomb was capable of producing a fireball with a radius of 1.2 miles and causing severe structural damage and third-degree burns for ten times that distance.
“A recovery effort began on February 6, 1958, for what became known as the Tybee bomb. On April 16, 1958, the military announced that the search efforts had proved unsuccessful, although the team had discovered several Civil War cannonballs, still full of explosives.
“Broken Arrow: military jargon for a lost nuke.
“Several weeks later, the Savannah Coast Guard allegedly received reports of a Soviet submarine just off the coast. The Soviets had already successfully tested their own hydrogen bomb in 1953, but an intact American weapon would have constituted an intelligence coup. Presumably, the Russians did not find the bomb either. Or if they did, they kept mum.”
Photos: Sandstorms
Poem: Richard Wilbur, “The Catch”
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