Thursday's Notes

"President Obama Revokes Bush Presidential Records Executive Order," National Coalition for History, 21 January, notes that, on his first full day in office, Barack Obama revoked George Bush's Executive Order 13233, which severely restricted public access to presidential records. Here is Obama's new executive order. Hat tip.

Geert Jan van Gelder,"Grand Arabian Nights," TLS, 21 January, reviews Malcolm C. Lyons, with Ursula Lyons, trans., with an introduction and notes by Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 nights.

Brian Dillon reviews Lennard J. Davis's Obsession: a History for the Telegraph, 12 January.

David Greenberg,"The Riddle of Herbert Hoover," Slate, 19 January, reviews William E. Leuchtenburg's Herbert Hoover.

Russell Baker,"A Revolutionary President," NYRB, 12 February, reviews Anthony J. Badger's FDR: The First Hundred Days, Jonathan Alter's The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, Adam Cohen's Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America, and H. W. Brand's Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Alter, Badger, Cohen, Alonzo Hamby, Allen Lichtman, Julian Zelizer, and others discuss Badger's FDR at Josh Marshall's TPMCafé Book Club, 19- January. John Steele Gordon,"Getting America Back on Its Feet, the 1933 Version," NYT, 21 January, reviews Cohen's Nothing to Fear.

Brendon Boyle,"Middlebrow Messiahs," City Journal, 16 January, reviews Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books.

George Bornstein,"Obama's King," TLS, 14 January, reviews Eric Sundquist's King's Dream.

Ross Douthat,"When Buckley Met Reagan," NYT, 16 January, recalls two icons of America's conservative renaissance.

William Dalrymple,"Pakistan in Peril," NYRB, 12 February, reviews Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia.