Things Noted Here & There

by Cliopatria

After serving half of his six year sentence for mail fraud and obstruction of justice, Conrad Black, newspaper magnate and biographer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, will be released on bail pending court review of his case.

When the Chronicle of Higher Education Review was prompted to look into the details of Michael Bellesiles's"Teaching Military History in a Time of War," the story fell apart. Both Bellesiles and the CHE seem content to let Bellesiles's student hold the bag for"misleading him." For the fullest discussions, see: CHE (scroll down), Edge of the American West, Venti Belli, and The Volokh Conspiracy.

Leonard Cassuto reviews Sam Kean's The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements for the Barnes & Noble Review, 13 July.

Eric Foner,"Restless Confederates," Nation, 14 July, reviews Stephanie McCurry's Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South and Victoria Bynum's The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies.

Janet Maslin,"Pen Pals: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and the Literary World They Made," NYT, 19 July, reviews Bill Morgan and David Stanford, eds., Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters and Bill Morgan's The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation.

Adam Kirsch,"Muscular Movement," The Book, 20 July, reviews Justin Vaïsse's Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement.

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Ralph E. Luker - 7/21/2010

Wouldn't an accusation of "prissy censoriousness" be the moral equivalent of "snarky comment"?

Alan Allport - 7/21/2010

What [Figes] said might have been said without penalty in a tough review in an American journal.

Quite so. I think Figes made a bigger and bigger fool of himself at every stage of that farcical affair; but as you say, what really did his original sin amount to other than making a couple of snarky comments, the sort of petty put-downs that academics have long specialized in? If his story has any moral at all, it's precisely that prissy censoriousness says as much about the offended as the offender.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/21/2010

[From my Fainting Couch]: Mercy me, Alan, I seem to have violated your universal law of the moral equivalence of power points. You'll be glad to know that I decided not to include a third here on the latest reports about Orlando Figes. By comparison with Black, Figes seems to me largely a [foolish] victim of British defamation law. What he said might have been said without penalty in a tough review in an American journal.

Alan Allport - 7/21/2010

Well, Ralph, you did pair Bellesiles up bullet-point-style with Conrad Black, whose mendacity has had a good deal more real-life consequence than anything poor MB has ever done.

Obviously MB isn't Orwell - indeed, his CHE essay is so banal and unchallenging that it's difficult to believe that anyone would have wasted this much time over it if they weren't unhealthily obsessed with the peculiar wickedness of its author.

The point of my comparison is merely this: by longstanding tradition, the personal, reflective essay has demanded less scrupulous adherence to the literal truth than a work of scholarship - which is why it doesn't really matter in the end whether Orwell shot that elephant or not, and it doesn't (or in a sane world, oughtn't) really matter exactly what happened to MB's student's brother.

There's something fishy about a group of otherwise sensible historians going all Aunt Pittypat and retiring to their fainting couches because it turns out that MB didn't fact-check this pedestrian anecdote with the bloodhound persistence of a Woodward or Bernstein. What should we expect next week: Shocker: Bellesiles was lying when he said that you look good in those pants?

Ralph E. Luker - 7/21/2010

Oh, I don't know, Alan, you should name all cases of *anyone* treating this as THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY. I want names and locations. Of course, Bellesiles isn't Orwell and, after the fact of discovery, it's a bit late to claim literary license -- especially if your prior claim of literary license included citations to faux archives, etc.

Alan Allport - 7/21/2010

So am I the only one who doesn't really understand why this is being treated as the Crime of the Century?

(By the way, folks, Orwell probably didn't shoot that elephant; and he probably wasn't at that hanging).