Blogs > Cliopatria > Things Noted Here and There

Jun 26, 2006

Things Noted Here and There




Marcus Nevitt,"A Good Kick in the Head for History," Telegraph, 18 June, reviews Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War. Thanks to Manan Ahmed for the tip.

George Will,"Gone with the Wind, Indeed," Washington Post, 25 June, notes the 70th anniversary of Margaret Mitchell's novel. Sales records suggest that Gone with the Wind, rather than Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, was the depression era's favorite desperation novel.

Eli Wiesel,"The Killing after the Killing," Washington Post, 25 June, reviews Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. Thanks to Jonathan Dresner for the tips.

Horst Möller,"Trabi, Stasi, Kinderkrippen," Rheinische Merkur, 22 June. The director of Munich's Institut für Zeitgeschichte criticizes the work of German social historians such as Kocka and Jarausch on daily life under the east German communist regime for treating it separately from the instruments of repression and surveillance of the one party state. The dictatorship informed all segments of society, Möller argues. Thanks to Nathanael Robinson for the tip.

Luc Sante,"The Nutty Professor," New York Times, 25 June, and Louis Menand,"Acid Redux," New Yorker, 26 June, review Robert Greenfield's Timothy Leary: A Biography.

Robert Alter,"Neo-Con or Not?" New York Times, 25 June reviews Steven B. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. Thanks to Richard Jensen of Conservativenet for the tip.

Finally, there's not enough for a carnival, just yet, but William J. Turkel does"A Roundup of Digital History Blogs," Digital History Hacks, 21 June. It's also a good moment to recommend Daniel J. Cohen's and Roy Rosenzweig's Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); and Manan Ahmed's"The Polyglot Manifesto," HNN, 22 May.



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Paul Noonan - 6/26/2006

Reading George Will's piece about the 70th anniversary of GONE WITH THE WIND, reminds me of another Depression era historical novel of great length and enormous popularity, but that is forgotten today. Hervey Allen's ANTHONY ADVERSE was the best selling novel of both 1933 and 1934 and was made into a film with Frederic March in the title role in 1936 (to judge from Google the film is much better remembered today than the book). Having seen the film on TV I recognized the title when I saw a decrepit 1930s copy of the novel at a sidewalk book sale about 20 years ago and bought it for 10 cents. This historical panorama of the Napoleonic Era was both a great adventure story and a fascinating historical recreation (of course, I am relying on my 20-year old memories here). Reading this 1200 plus page book took up most of my free time for about 2 or 3 weeks. Best value I ever got from a dime, that's for sure.

There is precious little on Hervey Allen on the web, but there is a brief chronology here:

http://www.geocities.com/brine_ig/WHA-bio.com