Thursday's Notes
Adam Nicolson's Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History has won the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje prize for a book that most successfully evokes"the spirit of a place." Nicolson's book features his family's ancestral home from a medieval manor, to the creation by his grandparents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, of a world-famous garden, and Nicolson's own attempts to restore the estate to its glory days.
Alison Flood,"Scholar denies oral roots of fairy tales," Guardian, 19 May, reviews Ruth B. Bottigheimer's Fairy Tales: A New History.
David Denby,"The Real Rhett Butler," New Yorker, 25 May, reviews Michael Sragrow's Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master and Molly Haskell's Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone with the Wind' Revisited.
Scott McLemee,"Cartoon Conservatism," IHE, 20 May, interviews Jeet Heer, a graduate student in history at Toronto's York University. Heer is the author of introductory essays in The Complete Little Orphan Annie and co-editor, with Kent Worcester, of Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (2004) and A Comics Studies Reader (2009).
Drake Bennett,"The new romantics," Boston Globe, 17 May, reviews Thomas Maier's Masters of Sex, a dual biography of Virginia Johnson and William Masters.
Carlin Romano,"A Marriage Made in History," CHE, 22 May, reviews Eugene Genovese's Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage.
Robert Draper,"And He Shall Be Judged," GQ, June, features new criticism of former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.