Reviews and News:
Three baseball books fans shouldn’t miss.
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The lesson of Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”: “So transitory is the glory of the world that the ploughman in the foreground of the painting and the ‘expensive delicate ship that must have seen / Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,’ take no notice. They have ‘somewhere to get to,’ and life goes on.”
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Sequencing Leonardo da Vinci’s 500-year-old genome: “A first phase of the project began in November 2014 to definitively identify da Vinci’s remains and get DNA samples from the bones. Ausubel describes such a specimen as ‘yet to be found,’ though. The methodologies the project develops should be valuable, but it remains to be seen whether it can produce a full da Vinci genome by 2019.”
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Physical book sales are up; e-book sales, down.
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In Case You Missed It:
Camille Paglia blames faculty for the crisis of free speech at American universities: “As a veteran of more than four decades of college teaching, almost entirely at art schools, my primary disappointment is with American faculty, the overwhelming majority of whom failed from the start to acknowledge the seriousness of political correctness as an academic issue and who passively permitted a swollen campus bureaucracy, empowered by intrusive federal regulation, to usurp the faculty’s historic responsibility and prerogative to shape the educational mission and to protect the free flow of ideas.”
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Growing up alone in China: “I was born in 1980, the year China implemented the one-child policy: I don’t have siblings, and neither do my peers. Whenever a Westerner learns that I’m an only child, the facial expression is a give-away: ‘You must have been terribly spoiled’ or ‘You must have been terribly lonely.’ Stanley Hall, the pioneering child psychologist, referred to the condition as ‘a disease in itself’. Our generation were known as ‘little emperors’ here in China. We are the chubby (pampered) babies surrounded by parents and grandparents in posters and cartoons. Being spoiled was the least of it. The attention a couple pay to their only hope can be overwhelming.”
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Prussia’s enlightened despot: “In 1717, Frederick William, the king of Prussia, gave his 5-year-old son a full company of lead soldiers for Christmas. This was in keeping with the monarch’s insistence that the boy’s education should be guided by the principle ‘that there is nothing in the world that bestows on a prince more fame and honor than the sword.’ But his son, who later would be called Frederick the Great, barely glanced at his father’s gift. Instead, as Tim Blanning writes in this fascinating new biography of the Prussian ruler, ‘the little boy . . . turned away to a magnificently bound volume of French melodies and was soon entrancing his female audience with his lute.'”
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Charles Dickens’s character names: “Even for minor characters who are but briefly mentioned, in the Dickensian world, knowing just their names is sometimes enough to know the most important features about them. What might you think of a Mr. Murdstone or a Mr. Pecksniff if you knew nothing else about them? Dickens was adept at linguistically manipulating a name in different memorable ways to persuade readers in one direction or another and many scholars have attempted to study the whys and wherefores of how he manages this. Elizabeth Hope Gordon, in a study of naming practices in the works of Dickens, notes ‘it is not an easy matter to say just why these names should seem to be so appropriate, but in some instances the sound of the word produces an impression similar to that caused by the character itself, and in others there is an inexplicable “eternal fitness” that baffles investigation.'”
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Classic Essay: Ernest Fortin, “On the Presumed Medieval Origin of Individual Rights.” Read an introduction to Fortin’s life and work at Contemporary Thinkers.
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Interview: Bill Kristol talks with Harvey Mansfield about manliness and the attempt to create a gender-neutral society
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