Thursday's Notes
David Wooton,"Happiness and the Historian," TLS, 25 February, reviews Keith Thomas's Ends of Life: Roads to fulfilment in early modern England.
Edward Rothstein,"Darwin's Wake Splashed Artists, Too," NYT, 2 March, reviews"Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts," an exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven.
Adam Kirsch,"American as Apple Pie," nextbook, 2 March, reviews Lila Corwin Berman's Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity.
Stefan Beck,"Cheever v. Cheever," New Criterion, March, and John Updike,"Basically Decent," New Yorker, 9 March, reviews Blake Bailey's Cheever: A Life.
Dawn Turner Trice,"New faces among black studies scholars," LA Times, 5 March, an article about white teachers of African American Studies, features Northwestern's Martha Biondi and Thomas Edge, Fordham's Mark Naison, and Shawn Alexander of the University of Kansas. Hat tip.
Finally, Mills Kelly calls attention, belatedly, to the passing the University of Virginia's Hapsburg scholar, Enno Kraehe. Mills has fond memories of his"first mentor" and I do, as well. I took Kraehe's Modern European Intellectual History course at UNC, Chapel Hill, before he moved to Virginia. A younger man, then, he already had painfully weak eyesight and routinely lectured with his very thick glasses tipped forward to increase their magnification. Kraehe had a scholar's sense of humor, telling us once of the hazards of scholarship. He recalled laboring over a manuscript one day in a library carrel, when a bound volume of the London Times fell on his head.