Reviews and News:
Penguin Classics has produced a three-volume collection of Primo Levi’s works: “In the mid-1950s, Primo Levi often travelled to Germany on business as an industrial chemist. It would have been bad for business if he could not, at some level, accommodate the country that had degraded him as a Jew at Auschwitz. In his memoir of his survival in the camp, If This Is a Man (1947), the Germans are addressed aggressively in the vocative: ‘You Germans, you have succeeded.’ Any German who had shown Levi a scintilla of humanity in occupied Poland – and there were a few – is pointedly omitted. In a ‘judicial enquiry pervaded by indignation’ (as Levi described his book), minor acts of German charity would have been a distraction. Yet the fact remains that there are not even half-decent Germans in If This Is a Man. Only in his later writing would Levi consider the exceptions that defied the stereotype: the good German, the charitable Kapo.”
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Is higher education just a Ponzi scheme? “If students and taxpayers are the victims, who are the victimizers? Follow the money. Who is making out like bandits from a higher education system that everyone knows (and data shows) financially, culturally, and intellectually handicaps young citizens rather than the opposite? Who goes home at night and sleeps well while young people are intellectually, morally, and physically raped under their watch? It’s the bureaucrats, of course.”
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After Orlando, a lot of important people are talking and writing about “hate.” But terrorism, says R.R. Reno, isn’t rooted in hate. It’s rooted in politics.
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Michael Dirda on ACD: “Do we need still another book about Sherlock Holmes or his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle? Yes – at least, if it’s by that highfunctioning bibliographer Mike Ashley. The dust jacket of Adventures in the Strand, his new book, describes Ashley as ‘one of the foremost historians of popular fiction,’ which verges on understatement: In fact, no one alive knows more about British magazines published between roughly 1880 and 1940, a period so rich in genre fiction that it is sometimes called ‘the age of the storytellers.'”
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The details are unclear, but the Brontë Society “seem[s] to have split into two factions, the ‘modernisers’ and the ‘conservatives,’ who are now battling for the society’s soul.”
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Skywriting as a form of high art.
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Cambridge historian T.C.W. Blanning, reviewing Pieter Judson’s book The Habsburg Empire: A New History, says the empire wasn’t the politically moribund and culturally backward thing most modern accounts assume.
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Essay of the Day:
Elizabeth Hyde Stevens considers Jorge Louis Borges’s relationship to money:
“The role of money plays a two-sided role in Borges’ artistic life. On one side of the coin’s face, Borges was blessed with the most privileged, ideal life for a burgeoning literary genius. Educated in Europe, raised by his father to become a serious writer, Borges devoted his entire life to literature. He did not take a full-time job for nearly 40 years. But on the coin’s reverse side, we see that young Georgie Borges did not actually write his great fictions until after his family lost their money. For anyone who has struggled to make writing pay, Borges’ financial story is a perplexing—yet utterly hopeful—case to consider.”
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Image of the Day: Train passing through a California desert
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Poem: William Cowper, “The Nightingale and the Glow-worm”
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