Sunday Notes
Jonathan Yardley reviews Joe Jackson's The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire for the Washington Post, 30 March. This is quite a remarkable story, with consequences for both of the 20th century's world wars.
Evan Thomas,"Death in the Pacific," NYT, 30 March, reviews Max Hastings's Retribution: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45.
Glenn Frankel,"Talking About My Generation," Washington Post, 30 March, reviews Gerard J. DeGroot's The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade and Jeff Gordinier's X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking.
Emma Brockes,"Climb Every Mountain," NYT, 30 March, reviews Julie Andrews's Home: A Memoir of My Early Years and Richard Stirling's Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography.
Thomas de Waal,"Uncivil War," Washington Post, reviews Arkady Babchenko's One Soldier's War, trans. by Nick Allen, a memoir of the Russian campaign in Chechnya.
I anticipated the substance of the correction of the historical record in Michael Dobbs's"Obama Overstates Kennedys' Role in Helping His Father," Washington Post, 30 March. Tom Mboya raised private funds in the United States to send 81 Kenyan students, including Barack Obama, Sr., to American colleges and universities in September 1959. Martin Luther King's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, for instance, supported one of the Kenyan students at Tuskegee Institute. Only in 1960 did the Kennedy Foundation become involved in supporting Mboya's program to send promising young Kenyan students to the United States for further education.
Finally, farewell to Princeton classicist Robert Fagles and to Emory's Soviet historian, Kermit McKenzie.