Friday's Notes
Art History Carnival II is up at Margaret's The Earthly Paradise!
Edward Glaeser,"Is Geography Destiny?" NY Sun, 30 July, reviews Harm de Blij's The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization's Rough Landscape.
Tim Burke's"One-A-Day: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration, Easily Distracted, 31 July, takes up an Africanist's grievance with those who do global history.
Adam Kirsch,"Tilting at Spanish History," NY Sun, 30 July, reviews Antonio Muñoz Molina's A Manuscript of Ashes.
Richard Pipes,"Banished," NY Sun, 30 July, reviews Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia.
Finally, this week's indictment of the Senate's senior Republican, Alaska's Ted Stevens, puts his challengers for re-election at an advantage. The most likely beneficiary is the probable Democratic nominee, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. But it also benefits Stevens's Republican primary challenger, Raymond B."Vic" Vickers. An economic historian, Vickers is the author of Panic in Paradise: Florida's Banking Crash of 1926. For a Republican Senate candidate, he says the unexpected. From Eve Fairbanks's"Hope of the GOP," The Stump, 30 July:"As an American historian, I've studied every president," Vickers told her,"and I can say with authority that George Bush is the worst president in American history."