More Notes Still

For 40 years, there is no historian whose work I've admired more than that of David Brion Davis. Oxford has just published his most recent book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World.

In Edward Ball's Slaves in the Family (1998), Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, The Climatic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution (2001), and Cynthia Carr's Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, A Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America (2006), Jonathan Yardley sees a pattern:

In certain precincts occupied by certain members of the American intelligentsia, it has for some time been quite the fashion to ferret out racists in one's familial woodpile and then to write books about them. The ostensible purpose of these books is to provide intimate, confessional evidence of the degree to which racial prejudice has infiltrated every conceivable corner of American life. Their obvious if unstated purpose is to show how the (white) author has triumphed over his or her sordid ancestral inheritance to become a person of impeccable credentials on matters racial. Though all due modesty and claims of imperfection are expressed, the reader is expected to stand and cheer as, at book's end, the author's heroic achievement is revealed in full.

Victor Davis Hanson,"Fighting Words," Opinion Journal, 25 March, nominates the five most important books on 20th century battlefields.

Mix: one part Dorothy Parker, one part Lillian Hellman, and one part NAACP. Deliciously scandalous: Marion Meade,"Estate of Mind," BookForum, April/May 2006. Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the tip.

Russell Jacoby,"Brother from Another Planet," The Nation, 10 April, reviews (and rather decimates) Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual:"an almost flawless exemplar of tenured vacuity and mock radicalism."

Janine R. Wedel,"Harvard's Role in US Aid to Russia," Boston Globe, 25 March, argues that the Andrei Schleifer scandal is exemplary of the failure of accountability in the United States. Says Margaret Soltan:

Notice that Harvard's gigantic endowment fund made out like a bandit because of Shleifer's corruption. It's bad enough that a university just sits there with $26 billion and growing. It's far worse that it gained significant elements of it through self-serving that makes Czar Nicholas look benign by comparison.

And Brother Summers rewarded his friend, Schleifer, with an endowed chair, to boot. Make that: Andrei Schleifer, Czar Nicholas Professor of Economics.

Niall Ferguson,"Hey, Numskulls, better watch out," LA Times, 20 March, argues, rightly, I think, that recent congressional action to kill the Dubai/ports deal and near failure to raise the debt limit threaten to derail economic globalization. Thanks to Nathanael Robinson for the tip.