Midweek Notes
Janet Maslin,"Hard Science, Softened With Stories," NYT, 4 August, and Neil Gussman for Books & Culture, 26 August, review 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.
Brenda Wineapple,"Voices of a Nation," American Scholar, Summer, studies 19th century American writers' effort to understand who they and who Americans were. It anticipates the publication of her new anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing, in November.
Peter Asden reviews Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism? for the Financial Times, 13 August.
Roger Scruton,"The Post-Modern Ear," Axess, 31 August, looks at the evolution of modern classical music from the late-19th Century crisis in the musical language that had been the" common property of Western composers since the Renaissance."
Adam Kirsch,"Founding Document," Tablet, 31 August, reviews Jonathan Schneer's The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.
Janet Maslin,"The Lives Gained by Fleeing Jim Crow," NYT, 30 August, reviews Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration.
Dwight Garner,"Young Man Seeks Poetry in World War II's Ruins," NYT, 31 August, reviews Daniel Swift's Bomber Country: The Poetry of a Lost Pilot's War.
Mo,"The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry," Neurophilosophy, 30 August, tracks the history of psychedelic psychiatry since the early 1950s.
Timothy Snyder,"Tony Judt: An Intellectual Journey," NYR Blog, 31 August, previews a longer piece by Snyder that will appear in the New York Review of Books.