Europe & America

Eric Ormsby,"The Country of Quixote," NY Sun, 23 July, reviews Henry Kamen's Imagining Spain: Historical Myth & National Identity.

Adam Kirsch reviews Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History for the NY Sun, 23 July.

Daniel Walker Howe,"Frontier Exegesis," NY Sun, 23 July, reviews Walter Nugent's Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion.

Hugh Brogan's"The Special Relationship," NY Sun, 23 July, rips into the prose of Elisa Tamarkin's Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America:

She shows herself to be a learned and intelligent scholar.
But she is an appalling writer, in fact hardly a writer at all.

"Anglophilia" reads as if it had been cobbled together from a string of conference papers. The author gives herself away by repeatedly using phrases such as"I want to suggest ... ,""I want to argue ... ," and"I would like to say ..." (Who's stopping you?) and by frantic name-dropping:"Adorno, for one ...";"We need not turn to Clifford Geertz ...";"Following Walter Benjamin ...";"to follow Srinivas Aravamudan."
The atmosphere is unmistakable: the stuffy seminar room, the overanxious presenter, the tiny coterie that forms the audience. No one has taken the trouble to show Ms. Tamarkin how to turn working papers into a book. She is so comfortable in her coterie, and is so fatigued from her research, that she cannot be bothered, or has not the energy, to write freshly.
* * * * * It is depressing to think how many ... insights are lost in this waste of verbiage. It is even more depressing to reflect that until academics, would-be historians, mend their ways, American citizens will be denied access to their own history and the best discoveries of modern historians by the very people who should be helping them. By what right do academics presume to write only for each other while drawing salaries from public institutions?
In every generation, Americans (and the people of all other nations, too, of course) need to think about themselves and their destiny as seriously and intelligently as possible. The chief duty of American historians is to assist them. They will never fulfill this duty while they treat the history of the national character as no more than a topic for professorial pirouettes.