Posts
1) T. S. Eliot and the Demise of Literary Culture
2) Where Time and the Timeless Intersect: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets
3) Time, Tense, and Physics
4) Bass-Baritone Bryn Terfel on singing Scarpia and Wotan
5) Interview: Soprano Anna Netrebko
6) Musical Language and the Minor Third
7) Mahler at 150
8) Preparing for Mozart, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Fashions Itself After Its New Conductor, William Christie
9) Roger Scruton on the Postmodern Ear
10) Burnt Out? Try Improvisation
11) The Persistent Paradox of Human Uniqueness
12) Flouting, (Not Flaunting) the Rules of English
13) Nick Cohen on England, Class, and the new drama, Downton Abbey
14) Economics in One Lesson: The Video Series
15) Is Economics a Science?
16) Does a Shipwreck mark the site of a Punic War battle?
17) The New World of Shaming
18) Before Television, Paper Theater in the Home
19) The Science of Self-Help
20-23) On Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Laureate:
- Interview with Emily Parker of the WSJ
- Thoughts from his son, Alvaro Vargas Llosa
- Thoughts from the New Criterion
- and thanks, from Ian Vasquez of the Cato Institute
Book Reviews
- American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900, by H. W. Brands
- Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith, by D.K.R. Crosswell
- Bourbon for Breakfast, by Jeffrey Tucker
- Canti of Giacomo Leopardi, translated by Jonathan Galassi
- The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life, by Bettany Hughes
- How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, by Peter D. Schiff with Andrew J. Schiff
- How Intelligence Happens, by John Duncan
- Lion of Liberty: Patrick Henry and the Call to A New Nation, by Harlow Giles Unger
- Manthropology, by Peter McAllister & Is There Anything Good About Men? by Roy F. Baumeister
- The Music Instinct, by Philip Ball
- Washington, A Life, by Ron Chernow
- What Ever Happened to Modernism?, by Gabriel Josipovici
Some great stuff here. I never knew those details about T.S. Eliot and will definitely look at the Bedell Smith book. By the way, have you read any of Anthony Beevor's books? Stalingrad and Berlin are great. I haven't read his D-Day book yet.
ReplyDeleteYeah I'm sorry I haven't done this roundup in a while: there was a bunch of good stuff. I'd actually not heard of Beevor until seeing this review. Thanks for the recommendation; I'll take a look since it'd be a good companion to this nice book of European-theater maps I just got. (And it'll certainly be quite the contrast to this copy of Catullus I just picked up!)
ReplyDeleteI hope you enjoy Beevor, some people think he is too long on anecdote and too short on chronology, but because he is writing about events that have been so well chronicled I don't have a problem with that. He also did a book about Crete which is popular in NZ because it involves NZ and Maori troops. As an example of the things he talks about, there is a hilarious anecdote about how the British commandos were given suicide pills in case they were captured. One time they captured a German and were ordered to execute him. No one wanted to do it so they decided to ply him with wine and give him a bunch of suicide pills--they didn't work.
ReplyDeleteHa! I'm a sucker for anecdotes and asides so that sounds great to me, but as you say they are especially welcome when discussing well documented events. I also just came across something else by Beevor this week:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/nov/12/simon-schama-history-antony-beevor