Things Noted Here & There

by Cliopatria

Michael Massing,"The News about the Internet," NYRB, 13 August, reviews Eric Boehlert's Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, Bill Wasik's And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture, and two dozen major political blogs.

Andrew Clark,"Seeking Haydn," Financial Times, 25 July, reviews David Wyn Jones's The Life of Haydn, David Vickers's Haydn, Christopher Hogwood's Haydn's Visits to England, David Wyn Jones, ed., Oxford Composer Companions: Haydn, and Richard Wigmore's The Faber Pocket Guide to Haydn.

Willis G. Regier,"The Essence of War: Clausewitz as Educator," CHE, 3 August, reviews what Clausewitz taught us.

Judith Thurman,"Wilder Women," New Yorker, 10 August, revisits William Holtz's The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane.

Malcolm Gladwell,"The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism," New Yorker, 10 August, argues that Alabama's Big Jim Folsom is a key to understanding To Kill a Mockingbird.

Steven Epstein,"A Gross Unfairness: The Workings of the Straight State," Nation, 29 July, reviews Margot Canaday's The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.

Justin Moyer,"Michael Jackson, Revisited but Not Revealed," Washington Post, 4 August, reviews J. Randy Taraborrelli's Michael Jackson: The Magic, the Madness, the Whole Story, 1958-2009.

Finally, congratulations to our colleague, KC Johnson, who will receive the American Council of Trustees and Alumni's Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education for 2009.

comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

Oscar Chamberlain - 8/5/2009

While Gladwell pushes some of his points too hard (his ending concerning Boo Radley is particularly off base), the general argument that “To Kill a Mockingbird” assumes a very white and middle class perspective rings true.

Atticus Finch is not simply Tom Robinson's defender; he is his champion in the medieval sense of a person who fights for another who cannot fight. The tragedy of Tom Robinson is that he cannot hope to be his own champion.

That tragedy is unstated in the movie and, if memory serves, in the book as well. Yet the power of scenes like the black community standing in honor of Finch is founded on that tragedy. He is their champion, and they have no hope at that time to champion their own cause.

Now an author is entitled to her setting, and the time and place of "To Kill a Mockingbird" made advocacy by African Americans for African Americans difficult in the extreme. In such a context, champions can well be praised.

However I feel reasonably certain that the popularity of the book and the movie, particularly when they first came out, rests in part on the invisibility of that tragedy. That is because, in the end, it is a white story centered on the white middle-class community. That community's uneasy coexistence with both blacks and poor whites, though essential to the plot, receives no careful examination in the movie and, if memory serves, little more in the book

That doesn't mean that the book and the movie are not great works. The wonderful evocation of place, of courage, and of family love rises above the particular circumstances to become universal. But it is not a story that even attempts a universal perspective. It is told through the eyes of a middle class girl and the memory of the woman that she became. Through those eyes, Tom Robinson, his community, and the poor whites exist more as vehicles to demonstrate Finch's heroism than they do as characters in their own right.

That is a limitation, and Gladwell is right to point it out. I do hope that when either the book or the move is used as a window on the South in that period, that the reader or viewer remembers what neighborhood the window is in.

Charles Fulton - 8/4/2009

Great round-up, as always. In re the Clausewitz article, I would note that Echevarria's earlier work After Clausewitz includes one of the few thorough discussions of the epigones: Goltz, Bernhardi, Schlichting, Scherff etc. Regier could have pushed the philosopher parallel even further noting how rival schools of interpretation fought to be recognized as the true followers of Clausewitz. If anyone inside the Prussian Army disagreed with Clausewitz, they were very careful to not say so openly.

Jeremy Young - 8/4/2009

That's an intriguing, but I think very wrongheaded, article by Gladwell. His assumption is that Atticus Finch paints Mayella Ewell and her father as incestuous white trash because it's a saleable stereotype. That might be a valid assumption...if the book didn't tell us that the stereotype was true. Atticus tells that story because it's the truth, not because of any ulterior social motives.

And the idea that he's not disturbed by the verdict against his client is, again, just wrong. I do wonder whether Gladwell actually read the book rather than just the critique of it that he cites.