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Robert V. Remini is the most distinguished historian of Jacksonian America. He could probably write a biography of John Quincy Adams in his sleep. Fortunately, he is awake and alert in the Quincy Adams entry for the Times Books American Presidents series. His John Quincy Adams is a solid introduction to an understanding of the star-crossed sixth President. read more
9 may 2008
Jane Austen has been having a good couple of years. In Becoming Jane, played by Anne Hathaway, she made the very un-Austen-like life choice not to marry a rich suitor (Laurence Fox) who turns out to be virtuous, forthright, and sensible. In The Jane Austen Book Club, her six novels helped a raft of characters steer away from the shoals of mid-life romantic crisis. And recently, all six of those novels were shown in various recent video versions on PBS in America, along with yet another para-Austen historical fiction, Miss Austen Regrets. In 2017, she'll have been dead 200 years, but unlike almost every other celebrity, Jane Austen just gets more and more famous as the decades roll by. read more
4 may 2008
Former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Gary Hart contributes a clearly-argued, forceful study of James Monroe to the Times Books American Presidents series. In Hart's analysis, Monroe was a "national security" President, seeing the role of the Executive in ways that foreshadow Presidential concerns of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Monroe's concerns were more personal than situational, according to Hart. No theorist of constitutional systems like his predecessors John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, James Monroe was a soldier in his youth and a diplomat for much of his adult life. Small wonder that he saw force and the threat of force on the international scene as the central problem of politics. read more
2 may 2008
Le hors-sujet, the title of Pierre Bayard's 1996 book on Proust, might be translated "The Beside-the-Point." Much of À la recherche du temps perdu seems beside the point, but once you've made that observation you have to ask: what is the point? And what can it mean, in a richly-textured, resonant, encyclopedic literary work, to be "beside" that point? read more