Things Noted Here & There

If Tiger Woods only had tenure at Harvard, he wouldn't have to go through all this public sturm und drang. Richard Kay and Geoffrey Levy,"Naughty Niall Ferguson: The dashing TV historian and the string of affairs that could cost him millions," Daily Mail, 20 February, finds the Harvard historian invited his wife to cross the Atlantic to attend the £30,000 40th birthday party he gave his latest mistress.

Robin McKie,"How a hobbit is rewriting the history of the human race," The Guardian, 21 February, claims the dispersion out of Africa began before homo sapiens.

Carnivalesque LIX, an ancient/medieval edition of the festival, is up at Burgundians in the Mist.

The finalists for the George Washington Book Prize for 2010 are: Richard Beeman's Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, R.B. Bernstein's The Founding Fathers Reconsidered, and Edith B Gelles' Abigail & John: Portrait of A Marriage."The $50,000 award—co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount Vernon—is the largest prize nationwide for a book on early American history, and one of the largest literary prizes of any kind."

Myron Magnet,"The Education of John Jay," City Journal, Winter, looks at the career of the early American republic's diplomat.

In case you missed it on Valentine's Day, Pam Epstein of Rutgers had an op-ed in the NYT,"F, 18, Seeks Victorian Gentleman". The op-ed featured some of the best of her blog, Advertising for Love.

William J. Broad,"Doubts Raised on Book's Tale of Atom Bomb," NYT, 20 February, features serious challenges to Charles Pellegrino's The Last Train from Hiroshima.

William T. Vollman,"Ted Conover's Roadside Attractions," NYT, 16 February, Thomas Rogers for Salon, 17 February, and Jonathan Yardley for the Washington Post, 14 February, review Ted Conover's The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World and the Way We Live Today.

Finally, farewell to Washington & Lee's H. Marshall Jarrett.