Wednesday Notes
Charles Rosen,"The Best Book on Mozart," NYRB, 25 October, reviews Hermann Abert's W. A. Mozart. Hat tip.
Rory Stewart,"The Queen of the Quagmire," NYRB, 25 October, reviews Georgina Howell's Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, Janet Wallach's Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell, Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia, H.V.F. Winstone's Gertrude Bell: The Lady of Iraq, Bell's Review of the Civil Administration in Mesopotamia, and The Gertrude Bell Project.
Patricia Cohen and Scott McLemee* review David Michaelis's Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography.
*NB: I stand corrected. McLemee's essay is *not* a review.
David Brooks,"The Republican Collapse," NYT, 5 October, put it about as well as it could be framed, I thought. My friend, UCLA's Joyce Appleby, however, thought it needed correction:
David Brooks has gracefully summarized the Burkean conservative temperament, but his analysis is flawed. There is absolutely no connection between Edmund Burke, who wrote at the end of the 18th century, and contemporary American conservatives. Their historic roots go back to the beginning of the 20th century and the passage of legislation protecting children, women, workers and consumers from the dangerous excesses in business practices in the era of the robber baron.Then Republicans wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of freedom to repel interference with their aggressive profit-seeking. The religious conservatives migrated to the Republican Party much later in the 1960s, when many Americans abandoned strict sexual mores in the name of a different kind of freedom.
Hardly any American then or now would side with Burke in his famous exchange with Thomas Paine. Burke, revealing his deep respect for monarchy, lamented the treatment of Marie Antoinette by the French revolutionaries, to which Paine, in reference to the suffering of the French people, replied,"He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird."
Our colleague, Daniel Larison, replies to Brooksat The American Scene.
Kurt Anderson,"The Age of Apoplexy," New York, 9 October, suggests that we all calm down and learn to tolerate speech with which we disagree. Hat tip.