Sep 23, 2005

Additionally Noted

by Cliopatria

Holland Cotter,"At the Gothic Crossroads of Prague," New York Times, 23 September, reviews a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Michael Vorenberg,"A Debt Unpaid," Washington Post, 18 September, reviews Mary Francis Berry's new book, My Face is Black is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations, which fleshes out the history of the call for slave reparations in the United States.

Between 1967 and 2003, Cardinal Archbishops John Krol and Anthony Bevilacqua protected at least 63 priests who sexually abused hundreds of children in the archdiocese of Philadelphia. Here is the Grand Jury Report on the Sexual Abuse of Minors by Clergy, which has just been released. Thanks to Mr. Sun! for the tip. [ ... ]

Manohla Dargis,"Once Disaster Hits, It Seems Never To End," New York Times, 23 September, reviews David Cronenberg's new film"A History of Violence."

David Herman at the UK's Prospect invites you to vote for five from this list of the leading public intellectuals in the world. Jared Diamond, Niall Ferguson, Timothy Garton Ash, Eric Hobsbawm, Paul Kennedy, Enrique Krauze, and Bernard Lewis are the historians on the list of nominees, but none of them made my list of five. In"Any Sufficiently Advanced Punditry is Indistinguishable from Bullocks," Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber mocks the exercise.

More Comments:

Jonathan Dresner - 9/23/2005

I was a bit shocked to see that one of the "public intellectuals" listed was Tokyo Governor Ishihara, a man whose contribution to public discourse is roughly equivalent to that of Orrin Hatch in the US. The only other Japanese they could come up with as a "Management Theorist," as if there wasn't too much of that stuff around already.

I still like Paul Kennedy, though I don't agree with him all that often. I do wish that polls like that would allow you to cast a negative vote along with your positive votes: "I like these guys, but this one belongs on the dustheap of history"... and those votes would be subtracted from the positive totals. I think it would cut down on the likelihood that partisan figures -- and know-nothings -- would win.