Thursday's Notes
Eric Ormsby,"Roots of Civilization," NY Sun, 11 June, reviews Robert Pogue Harrison's Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.
James Davidson,"Plato Made It Up," LRB, 19 June, reviews Pierre Vidal-Naquet's The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato's Myth. Hat tip.
William Dalrymple,"India: The Place of Sex," NYRB, 26 June, reviews Vidya Dehejia, ed., Chola: Sacred Bronzes of Southern India, James McConnachie's The Book of Love: The Story of the Kamasutra, Wendy Doniger's and Sudhir Kakar's Kamasutra: A New, Complete English Translation of the Sanskrit Text, and David Gordon White's Kiss of the Yogini:"Tantric Sex" in Its South Asian Contexts.
Clifford S. L. Davies,"The Tudor Delusion," TLS, 11 June, argues that"Tudor" was nearly unknown to the people who lived in"Tudor England."
Alfred W. Crosby,"Christopher Columbus and the Shape of Things to Come," NY Sun, 11 June, reviews Nicolás Wey Gómez's The Tropics of Empire.
Things Nearby (under the fold)
Jeremy Axelrod,"Milking History," NY Sun, 5 June, reviews David I. Kertzer's "Amalia's Tale", a story of syphilis and the law in late 19th century France and Italy.
Daniel Pick,"Analyzing Adolf," TLS, 21 May, reviews Mark Edmundson's The Death of Sigmund Freud: Fascism, psychoanalysis and the rise of fundamentalism.
Adam Kirsch sees in the publication of Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke and Patrick Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War in the same season"a clear demonstration of the way ideological extremes tend to converge." See also: John Lukacs,"Necessary Evil," American Conservative, 2 June, and Scott McConnell,"Buchanan, Lukacs, and TAC," ibid., 9 June.
James Campbell,"Richard Wright: black first," TLS, 11 June, reviews Hazel Rowley's Richard Wright: The Life and Times and Wright's Black Power and A Father's Law.
Finally, our colleague, Scott McLemee, returns with"Was Archie Bunker a middle-class fantasy?" Socialist Worker, 11 June; and"Two Hundred and Counting," IHE, 11 June.