Things Noted Here and There
Garret FitzGerald,"Affair of State," Guardian, 14 June, reviews Elisabeth Kehoe's Ireland's Misfortune: The Turbulent Life of Kitty O'Shea.
Kathryn Hughes,"Genghis Khan would have been proud," Guardian, 14 June, reviews James Palmer's The Bloody White Baron, a biography of Roman Ungern von Sternberg, who sought to take advantage of post-revolutionary chaos in the far east to create an independent kingdom of Mongolia under his rule.
Ed Park,"Master of metaphors and metaphysics," LA Times, 15 June, reviews The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort and Jim Steinmeyer's Charles Fort: The Man Who Invented the Supernatural.
Peter Richardson reviews Ernest Freeberg's Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent for the LA Times, 15 June.
Andrew Sarris,"DeMille's Close-Up," NYT, 15 June, reviews Simon Louvish's Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art.
Johann Hari,"If you really want to understand what this race is about, look at the two candidates' fathers," Independent, 6 June, looks at the hard-drinking fathers of John McCain and Barack Obama.
Matthew Knight,"Do we want to be citizens or customers?" CNN.com, 12 June, interviews Penn's distinguished historian of architecture, Joseph Rykwert,"about how buildings and spaces act as a metaphor for society, our transition from citizens to customers and the challenges facing the built environment in the 21st century."