Jan 26, 2009

Things Noted Here and There

by Cliopatria

#46, an early modern edition of the festival, is up at Chronologi Cogitationes.

There will be a mini-carnival at Mercurius Politicus on the 360th anniversary of the death of Charles I on 30 January. Send nominations to mercuriuspoliticus*at*googlemail*dot*com.

History Carnival LXXIII will go up at diapsalmata on 1 February. Send nominations of the best in January's history blogging to Whitney Trettien at trettien*at*mit*dot*edu.

The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its 2008 awards on Saturday.

In biography, they are: Paula J. Giddings, Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching, Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in an American Century, Patrick French, The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul, Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, and Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

In nonfiction, the nominees are: Dexter Filkins, The Forever War, Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the Civil War, Jane Mayer, The Dark Side, Allan Lichtman, White Protestant Nation, and George C. Herring, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776.

The Andrew Jackson Papers Project at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, finds that a letter of 4 July 1835 from Junius Brutus Booth, the father of John Wilkes Booth, to"You damn'd old Scoundrel," President Andrew Jackson, is authentic. In it, the father of Abraham Lincoln's assassin threatens to" cut your throat whilst you are sleeping."

Philip Ball,"On the Evolution of Darwin," Guardian, 25 January, reviews Adrian Desmond's and James Moore's Darwin's Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery and the Quest for Human Origins.

Anthony Julius,"Judaism's Redefiner," NYT, 23 January, reviews Adam Kirsch's Benjamin Disraeli.

Toni Bentley,"Appraising Grace," NYT, 23 January, reviews Akim Volynsky, Ballet's Magic Kingdom: Selected Writings on Dance in Russia, 1911-1925. Edited and translated by Stanley J. Rabinowitz.

Alexander Theroux,"On the Cape, vows rewritten," Boston Globe, 25 January, reviews Reuel K. Wilson's To the Life of the Silver Harbor: Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy on Cape Cod.

Mimi Swartz,"Oil Portraits," NYT, 23 January, reviews Bryan Burrough's The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes.

Martin Walker,"Paper Trail," NYT, 23 January, reviews Jonathan Brent's Inside the Stalin Archives: Discovering the New Russia.