Reviews and News:
New evidence disproves Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar: “The idea that we have brains hardwired with a mental template for learning grammar—famously espoused by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—has dominated linguistics for almost half a century. Recently, though, cognitive scientists and linguists have abandoned Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’ theory in droves because of new research examining many different languages—and the way young children learn to understand and speak the tongues of their communities. That work fails to support Chomsky’s assertions.”
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Mark G. Malvasi reviews Andrew Black’s John Pendleton Kennedy: Early American Novelist, Whig Statesman, and Ardent Nationalist: “Lawyer, professor, statesman, and cabinet official, John Pendleton Kennedy is best remembered today as a writer. The author of the satire Quodlibet, in which he decried the excesses of Jacksonian political culture, Kennedy was a faithful member of the Whig opposition to ‘King Andrew.’ More important to his literary reputation, to say nothing of the development of early American letters, are his three novels: Rob of the Bowl, a romance set in colonial Maryland; Horse-Shoe Robinson, a tale of the American War for Independence; and his first and most celebrated work, Swallow Barn, a portrait of life on a Virginia plantation. In this masterful biography, Andrew Black has set himself no easy task. He seeks not only to place Kennedy’s writing in its historical context, but also to unite his literary concerns with his political commitments.”
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Remember Janet Malcolm’s take down of the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of Anna Karenina? Pevear and others respond.
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Nicholson Baker spent a month working as a substitute teacher and wrote a book about it: “Many of his substitute assignments entailed working as an ‘ed tech,’ essentially an assistant in another teacher’s classroom, tasked with helping struggling students. He thus had the chance to witness full-time teachers doing their jobs. They relied heavily on worksheets, flashcards, and playing movies and TV shows. The students had iPads issued (and paid for) by their schools, but seemed to use them more for procrastination and distraction than for learning. In one elementary-school music class, children were told to color in pictures of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, instead of singing or learning an instrument. Few of the teachers demonstrated impressive intellectual capacity. One could not pronounce the word ‘coterie. Another asked ninth-graders to reflect on how ‘Plutonic’ love is depicted in Romeo and Juliet.”
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A different view of Jack London: “In 2010, a coffee-table collection (Jack London: Photographer) coincided with an exhibition of the author’s visual work. Now, The Paths Men Take, being published this week by Contrasto, offers select photos alongside excerpts from the essays and reportage that originally accompanied them.”
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Revisiting the Somme. “A key British weakness was leadership. One problem was that the commander in chief, Sir Douglas Haig ‘had established a hold over’ the 4th Army’s operational commander, Sir Henry Rawlinson. This domination was ‘way in excess of what should have been the case given their relative status. It meant the 4th Army’s commander was constrained when it came to challenging Haig’s tactics.’ Rawlinson’s desire to methodically seize each German trench line and then advance under artillery cover was abandoned. Rather, Haig forced the 4th Army into an overly ambitious and impractical assault plan. This failure of the command culture is a major theme of Somme. We see how upper-class ego, poor intelligence exploitation, and lethargic communications sent too many young men to oblivion.”
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Essay of the Day:
Michael J. Lewis considers Frederick Law Olmsted’s accomplishment in First Things:
“The achievement of Frederick Law Olmsted is so stupendous that one cannot stand far enough back to take it all in. First there are the parks—Manhattan’s Central Park, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, Boston’s ‘Emerald Necklace,’ Chicago’s Jackson Park, Montreal’s Mount Royal, to name only the most prominent. These have indelibly shaped our notion of what a city park is—an ensemble of meadows, trees, and water arranged for the purposes of recreation, aesthetic pleasure, and public health.
“But Olmsted also gave us Riverside, Illinois, the prototype for that other familiar object of the American landscape, the planned community. As the writer of the study that created Yosemite National Park, he can be regarded as the spiritual founder for the national park system. In the end, Olmsted defies criticism. How can one evaluate a landscape architect whose greatest achievement was to create the profession of landscape architecture itself?
“The material for a comprehensive evaluation is now at hand. Beginning in 1977, the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers Project has published eleven volumes of his copious writings; the final two volumes are to present the visual material. The first of these has now appeared, Frederick Law Olmsted: Plans and Views of Public Parks, which reproduces the plans, sketches, and photographs of thirty-one of his most important projects. Here is as attractive a graphic record of his achievement as we are likely to get.
“Olmsted was thirty-six when his plan for Central Park was accepted, and he had no formal training in landscape architecture. Nor had anyone else, for at that time, parks were laid out by architects, gardeners, or surveyors. Up to that point, he had led a highly erratic life, filled with false starts and brave experiments that make for fascinating biography. Fortunately, there are two very good ones, one by Laura Wood Roper (1973) and another by Witold Rybczynski (1999), and they demonstrate that one cannot make sense of the second half of Olmsted’s life without understanding the first.”
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Image of the Day: Thun
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Poem: Fred Chappell, “The Cat and the Two Sparrows”
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