Friday's Notes
Jerry Brotton,"Heavens Above," Literary Review, October, reviews J. L. Heilbron's Galileo and David Wooton's Galileo: Watcher of the Skies.
David A. Bell,"Political Columnists Think America Is In Decline. Big Surprise." TNR, 7 October, reminds Thomas Friedman that declension is a persistent theme in American rhetoric.
A Roman Catholic priest says that initial Protestant reactions to the building of his 225 year old Roman Catholic Church in New York City were like reactions to the building of the Muslim Center near Ground Zero.
Martha C. Nussbaum,"Representative Women," Nation, 6 October, reviews Christine Stansell's The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present.
Jack Shafer,"The Iconoclast," bookforum, September/November, takes another look at the six series of H. L. Mencken's Prejudices.
Finally, congratulations to Peru's Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and to China's Liu Xiaobo, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy and its Nobel Prize committees, made the announcements of the awards. Englund is a distinguished Swedish historian. His dissertation, Det hotade huset ("A House in Peril"), was a study of the mentality of the 17th century Swedish nobility. Subsequently, Englund has published about Swedish history during the Thirty Years War, the Swedish Empire and other things. He is also Sweden's most prominent history blogger, at both Peter Englund and Transmutationer.