Reviews and News:
The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae was started in 1894. It’s still not done: “Through two World Wars and German reunification, generations of Latin scholars have been chipping away at the same goal: documenting every use of every Latin word from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the 6th century BC up until around 200 AD, when it was in decline as a spoken language. Befitting the comprehensive nature of the project, the scholars will also include some words up to the 6th century AD. That means poetry and history and speeches. But it also means every gravestone and street sign. It means architectural works, medical and legal texts, books about animals or cooking. ‘If a word is just on a toilet in Pompeii in graffiti, you’ll find it with us,’ says Marijke Ottink, who is Dutch. She’s been working on the Thesaurus for 19 years as a researcher and an editor, ever since she came to Munich.” (HT: Don Share)
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The beauty of American topographical maps: “At the close of the Second World War, the United States government embarked on an enormous artistic enterprise. It is estimated to have cost nearly $3 billion and, at its height, employed more than 2,000 people. I am talking about the topographic mapping program of the United States Geological Survey. It was an opus of Whitmanesque proportion, a heroic rendering of the American landscape; every last whorl and hachure and dotted line of actual topography — not to mention the name of every last desert wash, old mine or glorified goat track — was exhaustively cataloged. This 54,000-tile mosaic was not, of course, done in the cause of aesthetics, but it nevertheless represents as gorgeous and complete a depiction of the country as any ever made.”
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Germany’s Cold War nostalgia: “Deutschland 83, a hit German television show, available on Sundance Channel, has been lauded for its authentic evocation of early-1980s Cold War-gripped Europe. That much is true, but as far as the nonaesthetic elements of the series go, it is derivative, hackneyed, and predictable.”
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The story of the Romanov dynasty: It “began in 1613 with Michael Romanov, chosen as Russia’s czar in the Time of Troubles, and ended in 1918 with Alexei Romanov, shot alongside his parents and sisters in the basement of a house in the Urals. During the three turbulent centuries that separated these two ‘fragile, innocent and ailing’ boys, the dynasty produced 20 monarchs and several regents, including two rulers of genius — Peter and Catherine, the ‘Greats.'”
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Eugene Schlanger reviews Maureen Sherry’s Opening Belle: “Books, especially first novels by new novelists in search of an audience, are marketed with a singular purpose. In order to attract sales and readership, they are classified into easily recognizable categories, quick reference points for both readers and reviewers who can quickly judge these newest books against their as easily recognized peers, and then commend, condemn, or ignore them. Opening Belle was the subject of one such marketing ploy, aided and advanced in a Sunday op-ed piece by the novelist published by the accommodating New York Times. But instead of promoting this first novel by Maureen Sherry, a former salesperson writing as an insider about Wall Street, the ploy may have backfired by relegating the real merits of this book to second—or third—place. Few readers will see past the advertised purpose—an expose of the apparent and rampant sexual discrimination on Wall Street—to appreciate the novel’s realism: an all-too-rare description in the rarified realm of contemporary American fiction of a real workaday world that so many (including one Democratic presidential candidate) roundly condemn as demonic and immoral.”
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How Lewis and Tolkien fell out.
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Essay of the Day:
In The Daily Beast, Andrew Nagorski explains how Adolf Eichmann was caught:
“One of the great myths of the postwar era was that Israeli agents were constantly scouring hideouts all over the world, relentlessly tracking down Nazi war criminals. Nothing could be further from the truth, he explained. When he showed up in Frankfurt, his mission was to meet with the Mossad agents charged with monitoring the Jews arriving from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and then proceeding to the new Israeli state.
“The influx of immigrants from that region during the early days of the Cold War proved to be a major challenge to the Mossad. ‘The intelligence services of the East—Poland, Romania, Russia of course—recruited many of the immigrants,’ Eitan explained. The Kremlin had firmly aligned itself with the Arabs against Israel. When the KGB or their affiliates behind the Iron Curtain received reports from their planted agents in Israel, they would promptly share that information with Israel’s Arab neighbors. The new state desperately needed more settlers (Israel’s population was about 1.6 million in 1953), but it also needed to identify those who were serving different masters. ‘We had to check everyone to understand if he was a spy or not,’ Eitan pointed out. ‘This was the first priority—not capturing Nazis.’
“Avraham Shalom—an Austrian-born Mossad agent who later became the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service—served as Eitan’s deputy for the Eichmann operation. In an interview at his home in Tel Aviv three months before he died in June 2014, he echoed Eitan’s sentiments—and took them one step further. ‘I was never interested in Nazi hunting as such,’ he admitted. His attitude had been that the best solution for Jews who were upset by the thought that so many Nazi criminals were still at large ‘was to come and live here,’ he added.
“In the early days of Israel’s existence, there was simply not enough time, energy, or desire to hunt Nazis. That led Eitan to shrug off the controversy that surfaced later about the value of Wiesenthal’s 1953 tip from the Austrian baron about the Eichmann sighting in Argentina. Even if Wiesenthal had provided more precise information about Eichmann’s whereabouts, Eitan asserted, Israel was in no position to dedicate the necessary manpower and resources to track him down that early. The struggle for Israel’s survival in a region filled with enemies trumped everything else.”
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“By the late ’50s, however, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and other top Israeli leaders were feeling more confident about their fledgling country’s prospects. The notion that they might authorize a major operation to seize a notorious Nazi war criminal no longer seemed far-fetched. That is, if such an opportunity presented itself—if, in effect, the opportunity fell into the lap of the Mossad.
“Which is exactly what happened.”
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Image of the Day: Uçhisar
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Poem: Sally Cook, “The Philanderer’s Plant”
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