Reviews and News:
Terry Teachout on the stark difference between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The ancient Babylonians may have invented trigonometry over a thousand years before the Greeks.
The alt-right may not be who you think they are, according to George Hawley: “The notion that youthful rebellion necessarily leads young people to the left is an additional blind spot in mainstream thinking. To begin with, it is ahistorical. In the early 20th century we saw multiple transgressive movements on the right. Furthermore, as radical leftists of the baby boom generation assumed important positions in politics, academia, and the media, it should not have been shocking to see millennials with a contrarian streak respond by taking embracing right-wing radicalism. Not all such young people, of course, but enough to make waves. Another misconception about racism is that education is a panacea. Overall, higher education does apparently lead to lower levels of racial hostility. Yet again, the alt-right complicates this picture. The typical alt-right supporter does not lack education. The movement’s skillful use of the internet alone suggests otherwise. In interviews with people in the alt-right —including the movement’s leading voices and anonymous Twitter trolls—I found at least some degree of college education was a common denominator. To complicate matters further, many people in the alt-right were radicalized while in college. Not only that, but the efforts to inoculate the next generation of America’s social and economic leaders against racism were, in some cases, a catalyst for racist radicalization.”
8-year-old girl discovers a 2,000-year-old half-shekel.
In Case You Missed It:
Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s timely City Folk and Country Folk.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Russian Revolution novels may soon be available in English for the first time: “With the first volume translated by Marian Schwartz, the six upcoming books are part of the Nobel laureate’s multi-volume magnum opus about the Russian Revolution, called The Red Wheel (Krasnoe Koleso). While Solzhenitsyn came up with the idea of The Red Wheel in the 1930s, he did not begin the first part, August 1914, until 1969. While the first and second – November 1916 – have previously been translated into English, the following six volumes have never been released in English before.”
In praise of Donald E. Westlake: “Those first Westlake books zipped by so quickly that I wasn’t even aware I was reading them until they were over. And unlike all the ‘serious’ and ‘noteworthy’ books I usually tried to read, they never had me anxiously checking how many pages there were left until the next chapter, or looking up words in the dictionary, or skimming back over the previous pages to find something I had missed. Every image leapt off the page; every scene quickly set me in a location so vivid and immediate that it felt like I wasn’t entering some fictional space but simply remembering an actual location where I had already been. And every line of dialogue opened up the voice and personality of the character who spoke it.”
The lost pleasure of reading aloud: “Sharing of books and communal reading staved off the boredom of long, dark winter nights while at the same time providing opportunities for self-improvement. (The Margate circulating library, we discover, had 600 sermons in its collection.) Reading out loud was also encouraged as a defence against the ‘seductive, enervating dangers’ of sentimental novels, and the ‘indelicacy’ of certain plays.”
Interview: Sam Leith talks to Clive James
Classic Essay: Joseph Epstein, “The Beerbohm Cult”
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