Things Noted Here and There

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik may be one of the finest book reviewers at work today. See, for example: Gopnik,"Jesus Laughed," New Yorker, 17 April, on the Gospel of Judas; and Gopnik,"Headless Horseman: The Reign of Terror Revisited," New Yorker, 6 June, on David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France and Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution. Thanks to Horizon's Ben Brumfield for the tip.

At The Grail Code, Mike Aquilina and Christopher Bailey go in search of the historical Arthur: I, II, III, IV, V, and VI. Er, thanks to Ben.

At Language Log, Bill Poser takes a first and a second look at Gavin Menzies's 1421: The Year China Discovered America as an example of bad history. Thanks, again, to Ben, whose posts invite pirating. Ahoy and arghhh, Ben!

Tom Lewis reviews Robert Bevan's The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War for The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 2006, with a meditation on war's awful toll on our cultural legacy.

Eve Fairbanks,"A Hot Paper Muzzles Harvard," LA Times, 14 May, argues that Harvard met Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer's provocative paper,"The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," not with deeply engaged academic debate, but with a nervous silence. It may have something to do with the fact that Harvard had exhausted itself in Larry Summers' ouster. The university's experts may be a little gun-shy in its aftermath. If so, it's all the more reason an academic community ought to avoid such catastrophic internal bloodlettings, if at all possible. Nonetheless, the debate has gone on elsewhere. Mersheimer met criticism from Martin Kramer, for example, at Princeton; and Mersheimer and Walt published a rejoinder to their critics in the LRB, 11 May. Frankly, I'm not among Kramer's admirers. His comment that, in"Depoliticizing the Classroom; depoliticizing the process," I made"a serious charge against [Yale] university, and one that [I] cannot possibly substantiate" only tells me that conservative critics of Juan Cole both want their sully and deny it, too.
See also: Scott Jaschik,"Blackballed at Yale," Inside Higher Ed, 5 June.