Reviews and News:
Nicolas II, the last Russian tsar, was “a nervous man of simple tastes who liked to dine on beetroot soup, not stuffed peacocks and caviar. He constantly put duty first, but lacked the flexibility of mind to steer his country in a crisis, let alone the first world war.”
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The founding fathers and the Bible: “The founders ‘knew the Bible from cover to cover,’ writes Daniel Dreisbach in his superb new book, Reading the Bible With the Founding Fathers. Taking an expansive view of the term ‘founders’ by including state lawmakers and patriot preachers with the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Dreisbach asserts that the founders’ religious beliefs and biblical knowledge shaped their political thought. Most believed that ‘there was a Supreme Being who intervened in the affairs of men and nations,’ that God-given rights should not be rescinded by man, and that a government led by fallen creatures should have its power curbed by the separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. Most importantly, the founders believed that education and religion were essential to promoting the knowledge, morality, discipline, and social order necessary for self-government.”
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In defense of shyness: “Alan Turing, Moran notes, was bashful as often as he was brash. Agatha Christie, so bold on the page, was painfully shy in person. So was, when he was not performing leadership, Charles de Gaulle…Oliver Sacks’s first book went unpublished because he lent its only manuscript to a colleague who committed suicide shortly thereafter—and Sacks was too shy to ask the man’s widow for the book’s return.”
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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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Over at First Things, Timothy George argues that the history of printing in the sixteenth century “does not lend itself to a neat Protestant-versus-Catholic interpretation. In the first place, Catholics themselves soon became purveyors of the printed word. Luther’s New Testament of 1522 was answered by Hieronymus Emser of Dresden, who in a brief period of time was able to produce a counter-Bible in German shorn of Luther’s evangelical marginalia. In 1539, Jacopo Cardinal Sadoleto wrote a public letter to the magistrates and citizens of Geneva entreating them to return to the Catholic faith, to which Calvin responded later in the same year with a stout defense of the Protestant position…”
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Remembering library hand: “Influenced by Edison and honed via experimenting on patient, hand-sore librarians, library hand focused on uniformity rather than beauty. ‘The handwriting of the old-fashioned writing master is quite as illegible as that of the most illiterate boor,’ read a New York State Library School handbook. ‘Take great pains to have all writing uniform in size, blackness of lines, slant, spacing and forms of letters’…”
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Essay of the Day:
In Commentary, Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes and David Gurvitz write about the life of the Soviet spy Joseph Katz:
“The international spy Museum in Washington, D.C., features a special exhibit called ‘Exquisitely Evil: 50 Years of Bond Villains.’ The show offers a startling contrast to many of the more prosaic artifacts on display at the museum, which include equipment to encipher messages, devices to hide espionage equipment, false IDs, and pictures and descriptions of the many ordinary men and women who served as spies.
“Any professional intelligence officer would attest that the Bond movies were a highly distorted, cartoonish portrayal of the real world of espionage, with their high-speed car chases, exotic weaponry, casual executions, and impossibly sexy women. But the two worlds of espionage—the real one and the cinematic version—actually collided in the person of Joseph Katz, whose name appears nowhere in the Spy Museum.
“Katz was one of the more elusive and obscure Americans who worked as a Soviet spy in the 1940s—and he played a significant role in the production of several Bond movies. This is the story of Joseph Katz’s two lives.”
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Photo: Zermatt at night
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Poem: David Wright, “Kyrie for the Gut”
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