Things Noted Here and There
William S. Niederkorn,"Thomas Fuller at 400," NYT, nd, is a slide show about the life and work of the English historian Thomas Fuller (1608-1661 CE).
Frances Wilson reviews Ian Kelly's Casanova: Philosopher, Gambler, Lover, Priest for the Telegraph, 22 June.
Michael Dirda,"Touring With an Eccentric Guide," WSJ, 14 June, reviews Heinrich Heine's Travel Pictures, translated by Peter Worstman.
Mindy Aloff,"‘A Route of Evanescence'," Washington Post, 22 June, reviews Christopher Benfey's A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade.
Darra Goldstein,"The Hunger Artist: Feasting and Fasting with Gogol," Words Without Borders, 2008, explores the novelist's eating disorder.
Jay Jennings,"12 Innocent Men," NYT, 22 June, reviews Robert Whitaker's On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation.
Fiona MacCarthy,"Ferdinand Mount in hobohemia," TLS, 18 June, reviews Ferdinand Mount's Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes. Hat tip.
Charles Johnson,"The End of the Black American Narrative," American Scholar, Summer, argues that"a new century calls for new stories grounded in the present, leaving behind the painful history of slavery and its consequences." Obsolete narratives, says Johnson, can lead to bad scholarship, as in Henry Louis Gates and Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins.
Finally, farewell to Henry Chadwick, a distinguished British historian of early Christianity, and to Rudolph J. Vecoli, a distinguished historian of American immigration.