Things Noted Here & There

November's Biblical Studies Carnival, "the Undead Edition," is up at The Musings of Thomas Verenna.

For the Washington Post, 4 November, Kris Coronado reviews "Eureka! Rare Books in the History of Scientific Discovery," an exhibit at Johns Hopkins's George Peabody Library.

D. J. Taylor, "Snapshots of 'Boz'," WSJ, 29 October, David Gates, "Being Charles Dickens," NYT, 3 November, and Michael Levenson, "Read Dickens Now!" Slate, 7 November, review Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens, John Forster's The Life of Charles Dickens, and Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life.

Jessa Crispin, "Made to Disorder: when mental disorders are a cultural product," Smart Set, 28 October, reviews Asti Hustvedt's Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris and Debbie Nathan's Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case.

Robert McCrum, "No sign of a ceasefire in the endless war of words," Guardian, 5 November, reviews Taylor Downing's Spies In The Sky: The Secret Battle for Aerial Intelligence during World War II.

Alan Brinkley, "Memories of the Bush Administration," NYT, 3 November, reviews Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir and Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir.

Finally, there's the strange case of the Russian historian, Anatoly Moskvina. When his parents visited Moskvina's small apartment in Nizhny Novgorod, they found him living with the dried bodies of 26 young women. It reminds me of reports that a prominent 20th century American academic propped his embalmed mom in a living room chair and took tea with her every afternoon.