lection
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20 june 2009
Reviewers throw the word "magisterial" around at their peril, but I can't think of a term that better fits Annette Gordon-Reed's Pulitzer-Prize-winning Hemingses of Monticello. read more
11 june 2009
The American Civil War was such a gigantic conflict that it spawned any number of meta-conflicts: over why it was begun, over how it should be or should have been fought, over how it would be remembered. The essays in Joan Waugh & Gary Gallagher's collection Wars within a War are an eclectic and uneven bunch, but they share the loose theme of meta-conflict. At their best, they provide very thought-provoking insights into how literal contested sites can become the metaphorically contested sites of contemporary social theory. read more
2 june 2009
Reviewers who recommend books of history often say that they read like novels. I'm not sure sometimes whether that claim speaks well of histories or not. Life is not like a novel; in part, that's why we read novels, so that we can have something to contrast to life.
Jon Meacham's American Lion, however, really does read like a novel, and it is also really good (deserving its recent Pulitzer Prize). Meacham interleaves melodramatic episodes from the presidency of Andrew Jackson with domestic drama from Jackson's extended household. It's a kind of American history along the lines of Trollope's Palliser novels. read more
17 may 2009
The nether realms of the stacks in university libraries hold vast quantities of text, text that bulks like an iceberg beneath the tiny amount of visible text that circulates on-line or in print. I found one such morsel of text in my rambles through the PQs recently. It's a brittle paperback from the 1960s, strapped together with yellowed sellotape: Os Melhores contos portugueses, Terceira série. (Some other library must hold the Primeira série and the Segunda série.) Best stories or not, these tales have been mightily neglected by Texan readers: the volume has achieved the self-consuming feat of dissolving into flaky pulp while its pages remain uncut. I got out my paperknife and, with the trepidation of a paleontologist preparing a precious fragment of fossil, I began to read Melhores contos. read more