Friday's Notes
Russell Jacoby,"Real Men Find Real Utopias," Dissent, Winter, reviews Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias and, in doing so, suggests why contemporary sociology is not to be taken seriously.
Emily Parker,"Viral Avant la Lettre," The Book, 19 January, reviews Robert Darnton's Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth-Century Paris.
The new Common-Place is up! Among its goodies: Brian Connolly,"Intimate Atlantics: Toward a critical history of transnational early America," and Anne M. Little (Historiann),"Silence Dogood Rides Again: Blogging the frontiers of early American history," Common-Place, January.
"Assassins and American History," NYT, 10 January, is a symposium, featuring Kevin Baker, Robert Dallek, Steven F. Hayward, Jill Lepore, Steven Mintz, Catherine McNichol Stock, and Julian E. Zelizer.
Alan Wolfe,"The Grounds of Courage," TNR, 13 January, reviews Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy.
Eddie Dean,"The Catcher of Songs," WSJ, 15 January, reviews John Szwed's Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World.
Robert Irwin,"An upper-class history of Iraq," TLS, 19 January, and Linda Robinson,"By the Banks of the Tigris," NYT, 21 January, review Tamara Chalabi's Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The lost dreams of my Iraqi family.
Simon Head,"The Grim Threat to British Universities," NYRB, 13 January, reviews Higher Education Funding Council for England's Strategic Plan, 2006–2011, Jack Schuster's and Martin Finkelstein's The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers, and Sheila Slaughter's and Gary Rhoades's Academic Capitalism and the New Economy. See also: Jonathan Jarrett,"A request for your signatures, or, after the protests, a petition," Cliopatria, 13 January.
Finally, farewell to two members of the Duke community: Anne Layton Schroder, a curator at the Nasher Museum of Art and specialist in 18th century French art; and Reynolds Price, the distinguished novelist and literary scholar. Best wishes to Price's brother, the historian William S. Price, Jr., my friend and fellow student at Duke and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.