Reviews and News:
The source of Stephen Bannon’s view of history: “The headlines this month have been alarming. ‘Steve Bannon’s obsession with a dark theory of history should be worrisome’ (Business Insider). ‘Steve Bannon Believes The Apocalypse Is Coming And War Is Inevitable’ (the Huffington Post). ‘Steve Bannon Wants To Start World War III’ (the Nation). A common thread in these media reports is that President Trump’s chief strategist is an avid reader and that the book that most inspires his worldview is The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy. I wrote that book with William Strauss back in 1997. It is true that Bannon is enthralled by it. In 2010, he released a documentary, Generation Zero, that is structured around our theory that history in America (and by extension, most other modern societies) unfolds in a recurring cycle of four-generation-long eras. While this cycle does include a time of civic and political crisis — a Fourth Turning, in our parlance — the reporting on the book has been absurdly apocalyptic.”
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The beginnings of the Russian Revolution as told by foreign visitors: “That outsider’s long view is the book’s strength. After all, these foreigners often have more privileged access to great men and events than the vast majority of Russian witnesses. Ambassadors Paléologue and Buchanan have regular private audiences with the czar, and their diaries offer independent testimony to the autocrat’s weakness. The journalists Florence Harper and Donald Thompson, a Canadian and an American, see more clearly than any of the Russians that revolution is inevitable. ‘In fact, I was so sure of it,’ Harper later wrote, ‘that I wandered around the town, up and down the Nevsky, watching and waiting for it as I would for a circus parade.'”
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Oxford Dictionaries’ ugly new words.
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Kate Havard reviews Kea Wilson’s We Eat Our Own: “There must be a word—it’s probably German—for the sensation when you read something written in a voice so distinctive that it seeps into your brain, and you find yourself thinking in that voice after you put the book down. It is as if the prose is contagious. You read Hemingway and think in short sentences, Nabokov in tumbling long ones. When you catch the voice in Kea Wilson’s We Eat Our Own it feels like catching a fever—you are disoriented, nauseated, even delirious.”
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In Case You Missed It:
What was medieval Jerusalem really like? “An exhibition on the diverse multiculturalism of medieval Jerusalem has been ecstatically received. There’s just one problem: the vision of history it promotes is a myth.”
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Walt Whitman’s lost novel: “The 36,000-word Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, which was discovered last summer by a graduate student, is being republished online on Monday by The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review and in book form by the University of Iowa Press. A quasi-Dickensian tale of an orphan’s adventures, it features a villainous lawyer, virtuous Quakers, glad-handing politicians, a sultry Spanish dancer and more than a few unlikely plot twists and jarring narrative shifts.”
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The Brueghel business: “Pieter the Younger set out to milk the market and painted large quantities of copies of his father’s most popular works by using the original preparatory cartoons – scale drawings with holes pricked around the figures, which, when dusted with charcoal, would transfer the outlines to a panel beneath. The resulting pictures were very saleable Bruegels by Brueghel: he painted 45 versions of his father’s Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap, 25 of The Peasant Lawyer, and 31 of the 100 existing versions of the riotous Wedding Dance in the Open Air. There’s a lot of Pieter the Younger about. For all his business acumen, Pieter the Younger was no original and his skill was weedy compared to the robustness of his father’s. It was the second son, Jan ‘Velvet’ Brueghel, who was an artistic pioneer.”
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Turner’s port paintings: “The three ‘contemporary’ ports of the 1820s were painted at a time of mass industrialization, when European seasides were bustling with new steamships and manufacturing hubs. However, Turner’s people and sleepy sail-powered ships seem to come from a pre-steam past. ‘He represented them at a point just before disappearing’…”
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Interview: John J. Miller talks to Anthony Esolen about his new book, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture.
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Classic Essay: Stephen A. McKnight, “Francis Bacon’s God”
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