More Noted Things

Gwenda Blair,"Paying with the Past," Chicago Magazine, December, is a study in Iranian antiquities and the modern war on terror. Hat tip.

John Derbyshire,"When Worlds Collide," Claremont Review, Fall, reviews Hugh Kennedy's The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In and David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215.

Jessica Dawson,"Virgin Rebirth," Washington Post, 23 December, looks at the conservation of Neroccio dei Landi's"Virgin and Child with Saint Anthony Abbott and Saint Sigismund" (c. 1490/1495) at the National Gallery of Art's conservation lab.

Sander Gliboff,"Love, Death and Darwinism," American Scientist, January/February 2009, reviews Robert J. Richards's The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought.

Martin Sieff,"Chaplin lifted weary world's spirits," Washington Times, 21 December, reviews Stephen Weissman's Chaplin: A Life.

Ted Gup,"Hard Times, A Helping Hand," NYT, 22 December, tells the story of Canton, Ohio's pseudonymous good Samaritan in the 1930s.

Darryl Pinckney,"The Book of Lists," New Yorker, 22 December, reviews Susan Sontag's Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963.

Barry Gewen,"The Influential Go-Between for Two Unlikely Allies," NYT, 21 December, reviews David B. Ottaway's The King's Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America's Tangled Relationship With Saudi Arabia.