Sunday's Notes

Leigh van der Stoep,"Witi's publisher in fresh plagiarism dispute," Wellington, New Zealand's Sunday Star Times, 27 December, headlines charges that New Zealand historian Danny Keenan's recent book on the Moari land wars plagiarized material from an earlier book by New Zealand historian Nigel Prickett. Hat tip.

S. Frederick Starr,"Rediscovering Central Asia," Wilson Quarterly, Summer, takes us back to a time when central Asia was the heart of civilization.

Danny Hakim,"His Specialty? Old New York, in Vivid Dutch," NYT, 26 December, features the work of Charles Gehring in translating New York's Dutch colonial records.

Kevin Levin's"Best of 2009," Civil War Memory, 25 December, hands out his blog and book awards for the year. CWM's choice of"best history blog" of the year? Jim Cullen's American History Now.

John Simon,"Beauty, Utility, Eccentricity, Adultery," NYT, 24 December, reviews Nicholas Fox Weber's The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism.

Christopher Caldwell,"Arthur Koestler, Man of Darkness," NYT, 24 December, reviews Michael Scammell's Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic.

Nick Owchar for the LA Times, 22 December, and Rick Moody for the NYT, 24 December, review Mick Walls's When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin.

Finally, farewell to John Henry Fischer, the father of the distinguished historian, David Hackett Fischer. The elder Fischer directed the desegregation of Baltimore's public schools in the mid-1950s and was subsequently dean and president of Teachers College, Columbia University.