wahistorian's Reviews (506)

This was one of the most fun art books I’ve ever read. Januszcak’s Japanese mother-in-law provides a unique way into the 1980s cleaning and restoration of Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, funded and obsessively covered by Japanese TV company NTV. This quirky book looks at all the old debates revived by the project and many new ones: how exactly did Michelangelo create this masterpiece? Did he have a plan or did he improvise? Why are his female figures so notoriously masculine? Most importantly, did the restoration ruin the artist’s creation or return it to his original conception? Januszcak occasionally uses four satirical composite characters to debate the issues—a nun, an art critic, a self-taught Japanese enthusiast, and his own character—which sometimes gets tiresome. But otherwise the depth of his understanding of the meaning of this piece is inspiring.

Pinker believes that every generation needs to rediscover the significance of the Enlightenment and its tendency to result in a healthier, happier, more peaceful populace around the world. But his attempt to make the case for the Enlightenment is exhausting and desperately needed an editor. An editor also might have discouraged his habit of setting up straw men, only to knock them down (to the extent that he feels the need to demonstrate that he is *not* setting up a “straw Ubermensch” in Nietszche by extensively quoting from his works) (444). As Pinker himself points out, “The case for Enlightenment Now is not just a matter of debunking fallacies or disseminating data. It may be cast as a stirring narrative, and I hope that people with more artistic flair and rhetorical power than I can tell it better and spread it further” (452). Me, too.

Honestly, I gave up. I believe Christian's story is an important one, but he was right on the edge of joining the White Supremacists and I *just* couldn't go along with him. Maybe someday.

A fun summer read that starts as a police procedural-lite, then moves to trial, and ends with a twist and a confession. Francis Beeding was a pseudonym for John Leslie Palmer, biographer and co-author of the book that was the basis for Hitchcock’s ‘Spellbound.’ Not nearly as taut as that book, ‘Death Walks in Eastrepps’ still moves along.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper describes his book as a catalog of 50 years of American national intelligence, and it is encyclopedic; his memory—or his note-taking—is prodigious, so this book will undoubtedly be useful to future historians of post-Cold War American intelligence. But his last few weeks ministering to President-elect Donald Trump helped him clarify the role and purpose of intelligence as speaking truth to power, telling policy makers exactly what they have observed and letting the chips fall. The book’s title comes from a quote by Gen. George Patton, who counseled generals to assess their facts and fears before going into battle, and if the facts supported war, then they could confidently set fears aside. He is rightly offended by Trump’s insistence on playing fast and loose with facts. “I’ve seen our country become so polarized because people live in separate realities in which everyone has his or her own set of facts—some of which are lies knowingly distributed by a foreign adversary,” he writes.

The last chapter outlines the extensive evidence that media outlet Russia Today and a massive social media campaign swung enough votes to win Trump the election. Whether he colluded in the event or not, his failure to address the danger to democracy is an egregious breach of his responsibility in and of itself.

I don’t usually enjoy coming-of-age stories, but this one was so matter-of-fact, I couldn’t help but be drawn in. No earth-shattering lessons, just one eleven-year-old boy exploring an island off South Carolina, trying to make sense of loss and love and trust. A good late summer read, with the same late summer nostalgia.

Christopher Hilliard quotes Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in the epilogue to this book, to the effect that, “We’ll-behaves women seldom make history.” Hilliard’s microhistory explores Edith Swan and Rose Gooding and the libels that plagued the beach town of Littlehampton, England in the early 1920s. The mystery is who is the misbehaving woman; to unravel it we have to know about lower class literacy, the claustrophobia of women’s early 20th century lives, and how the British legal system navigated neighbors’ daily grievances. For more than three years this neighborhood was tortured by hundreds of expletive-filled letters, and Hilliard thinks he has the answer. The books is a reminder of how many rich stories have yet to be told.

This unusual history combines the events surrounding the deadly London Fog of December 1952 with the grisly murders committed by John “Reg” Christie at 10 Rillington Place. The fog—during which Londoners couldn’t breathe or see to walk or drive through the city—set the stage for numerous crimes, but Christie’s were the most shocking. Dawson’s book provides a snapshot of postwar England, with its population looking toward the future even as they still struggled to recover from war seven years on. Fuel shortages meant average Londoners burned a smoky dust-filled coal that exacerbated “smog”—a newly coined word connoting a combination of smoke and fog—but kept them warm at an affordable price. Dawson’s fastidious research and her compassion makes the reader *almost* feel sorry for the government as it grapples with an environmental perfect storm that may have resulted in early deaths for 12,000 people. An insightful read for those interesting in this period of British history.

Williams wrote this book in a very distinctive style, one that ostensibly puts the reader inside the heads of serial killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. He uses working class dialects and a sort of shorthand to convey the daily activities of the two. Two problems with that: first, you’re not always sure what’s happening and, second, being inside their heads is not necessarily a place you want to be. I definitely didn’t. Gutsy attempt, though.