Things Noted Here & There

The genius behind Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog unveiled himself at Kalamazoo Thursday night. He is Sonoma State's Brantley Bryant, who was a graduate student in English at Columbia when he launched the blog. The medievalists at K-zoo reportedly lifted many glasses of bubbly to float his new book.

Rochelle Gurstein's"Disputations: Lasching Out," TNR, 17 May, replies to Alan Wolfe's"Jeremiah, American-Style," TNR, 30 April, a review of Eric Miller's Hope in a Scattering Time: A Life of Christopher Lasch.

Holland Cotter,"My Hero, the Outlaw of Amherst," NYT, 11 May, revisits the home of Emily Dickinson.

Bruce Watson reviews Alex Heard's The Eyes of Willie McGee: A Tragedy of Race, Sex, and Secrets in the Jim Crow South for the LA Times, 16 May. Hat tip.

Claudia Roth Pierpont,"Black, Brown, and Beige," New Yorker, 17 May, reviews Harvey G. Cohen's Duke Ellington's America.

Nicholas Lemann,"Terrorism Studies," New Yorker, 26 April, reviews Eli Berman's Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism, Audrey Kurth Cronin's How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns, Mark Moyar's A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq, Mark Perry's Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with Its Enemies, and David Petraeus's Counterinsurgency.