Midweek Notes

The NYT's Jennifer Schuessler, "Embattled Intellectual Historians Make a Stand," Arts Beat, 22 November, features U.S. Intellectual History, the conference it founded, and the new intellectual history it practices.

Michiko Kakutani, "An Idea as Much as a City, NYT, 21 November, reviews Robert Hughes's Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History. Mary Beard and Peter Stothard found the book badly flawed. Kakutani and Simon Schama have only praise for it.

Umberto Eco, "The Prague Cemetery," Tablet, 21 November, is an excerpt from the novel. David Samuels, "Protocols," ibid., is a conversation with Eco.

Adam Kirsch, "America's Superman," Prospect, 16 November, reviews Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas.

Tim Parks, "On Needing to Be Looked After," LRB, 1 December, reviews George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn and Lois More Overbeck, eds., The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-56.

Alonzo L. Hamby, "Uncontainable," WSJ, l9 November, David C. Engerman, "The Kennan Industry, CHE, 20 November, and Frank Costigliola, "Is This George Kennan?" NYRB, 8 December, review John Lewis Gaddis's George F. Kennan: An American Life. Connecticut's Costigliola is editing Kennan's diaries for publication.

Mattathias Schwartz, "Pre-Occupied," New Yorker, 28 November, tracks the origins of the OWS movement.

Finally, congratulations to our colleague, David Silbey, whose newly published book, The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China, gets this glowing recommendation from Publishers Weekly. He writes about it here.