Mostly Modern Notes
In C. S. Manegold,"New England's scarlet ‘S' for slavery," Boston Globe, 18 January, the author of Ten Hills Farm: The Forgotten History of Slavery in the North recalls New England's history of slavery.
Sam Roberts,"Of Mutual Influence: The City and the 16th President," NYT, 15 January, reviews"Lincoln and New York," an exhibit at the New York Historical Society, and Harold Holzer, ed., Lincoln and New York.
Christopher Benfey,"The Hunger Artists," TNR, 18 January, reviews Gavin Jones's American Hungers: The Problem of Poverty In U.S. Literature, 1840-1945, Morris Dickstein's Dancing In the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, and Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits.
Blake Morrison reviews Antonia Frasier's Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter for the Guardian, 16 January.
Janet Maslin,"Bohemian Soul Mates in Obscurity," NYT, 17 January, and Kevin Berger,"When Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were 'Just Kids'," LA Times, 17 January, review Patti Smith's Just Kids. Rolling Stone, 7 January, has an excerpt from the book; and NPR's"Morning Edition" has an interview with Smith.
Henrik Hertzberg,"Louche Change," New Yorker, 18 January, reviews John Heilemann's and Mark Halperin's Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.
Finally, farewell to Simon Digby,"the last great Orientalist".