Salon.com > Adam Kirsch

Salon.com > Adam Kirsch http://www.salon.com Wed, 22 May 2013 00:22:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 Are the French better lovers? http://www.salon.com/2012/03/20/are_the_french_better_lovers/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/20/are_the_french_better_lovers/#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12699441 "Obama Begs U.S. Not to Embarrass Him in Front of French," read the Onion headline during last year's state visit by Nicholas Sarkozy. Once again, the fake newspaper got the real story: Americans tend to feel that whatever we do, the French do it better, or at least cooler. French women, a popular weight loss guide has it, don't get fat. A recent Wall Street Journal article caused a sensation by explaining why French children are better behaved and more self-sufficient than American children. And of course, when it comes to love and sex, the French are our touchstone for sophistication: just compare the Lewinsky affair to the funeral of François Mitterand, where his wife and mistress stood side by side.

"The Paradox of Love," the latest book-length essay by the prominent French intellectual Pascal Bruckner, confirms most of these American assumptions about France. Among the many subjects of Bruckner's highly readable meditation is a section titled "Europe, the United States: Different Taboos," in which he marvels at the parade of American sex scandals -- Clarence Thomas, Bill Clinton, Eliot Spitzer. All this "strikes French people as grotesque," Bruckner writes. "On the moral level... one can only urge Americans to learn from the Old World how to be temperate."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/03/20/are_the_french_better_lovers/feed/ 15 The wise words of E.B. White http://www.salon.com/2012/01/07/the_wise_words_of_e_b_white/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/07/the_wise_words_of_e_b_white/#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=11928351 E.B. White is one of those writers you are liable to meet again and again in the course of a reading life, each time wearing a different expression. To children, he is the author of the classic animal tales "Charlotte's Web" and "Stuart Little"; to college students, he is half of Strunk and White, the authoritative guides behind "The Elements of Style." Later on, he may turn up as the urbane humorist who helped define the voice of the early New Yorker, or the Maine farmer who learned about enduring values from tending his chickens and pigs, or the earnest liberal who upheld free speech during the McCarthy period.

Now all those Whites have been brought together in the pages of "In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations From America's Most Companionable of Writers," an anthology of quotations edited by his granddaughter Martha White. Appropriately, the book is published by Cornell University Press: Cornell was White's alma mater, the place where he got his first newspaper experience and picked up his lifelong nickname, Andy (after the university's founder, Andrew Dickson White). In her introduction, Martha White offers an affectionate sketch of her grandfather's career, including her own memories of the "lifelong sense of wonder" he brought to all his endeavors.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/07/the_wise_words_of_e_b_white/feed/ 5 When did Rome really fall? http://www.salon.com/2012/01/07/when_did_rome_really_fall/ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/07/when_did_rome_really_fall/#comments Sat, 07 Jan 2012 01:00:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=11918821 The fall of the Roman Empire is traditionally dated to 476 CE, the year when the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was deposed. There is a pleasing symmetry in the fact that the last emperor's name should pay homage to the founder of Rome and the founder of the Empire; but to those who lived through it, the fall of Romulus Augustulus would not have felt like much of a milestone. By then, the transformation of the Roman Empire had been going on for at least a century, as a series of radical changes put an end to its age-old identity: the official conversion to Christianity under Constantine, the splitting of the empire into Western and Eastern halves, and the unstoppable invasions of Germanic tribes, many of which carved out new kingdoms on imperial territory. This period of transition, beginning in the fourth century CE, can be seen as "late antiquity" or the early Middle Ages, and it has been the focus of some of the most exciting classical scholarship in recent years.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2012/01/07/when_did_rome_really_fall/feed/ 16 The enduring myth of George Orwell http://www.salon.com/2011/09/17/the_unexamined_orwell_jonathan_rodden/ http://www.salon.com/2011/09/17/the_unexamined_orwell_jonathan_rodden/#comments Sat, 17 Sep 2011 19:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/09/17/the_unexamined_orwell_jonathan_rodden If you were to make a list of all the adjectives that have been used to describe George Orwell, the most popular would be ethical ones: words like honest, decent, trustworthy. These are the qualities that have guaranteed Orwell, who died in 1950 at the age of forty-six, such an extraordinary intellectual afterlife. More than a novelist or journalist or essayist or literary critic, Orwell has become an icon of intellectual integrity -- one of the few writers to live through the 1930s, Auden's "low, dishonest decade," and emerge with his political and moral instincts uncorrupted. On the left, he's admired for his genuine socialist principles and personal egalitarianism; on the right, he's admired for the instinctive patriotism and love of English tradition that made him one of the best commentators on the World War II years. And to everyone who writes and thinks about politics, Orwell is the writer who most elegantly exposed the horror of totalitarianism and the degradation of language under the pressure of ideology. No wonder that, as John Rodden writes in "The Unexamined Orwell" (University of Texas Press), " scarcely a major Anglo-American issue has gone by since his death in January 1950 that has not moved someone to muse, 'If Orwell Were Alive Today,'" -- or, more reverently still, "W.W.G.O.D.?"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/09/17/the_unexamined_orwell_jonathan_rodden/feed/ 1 The Socrates you don’t know http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/xenophon_socrates/ http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/xenophon_socrates/#comments Thu, 15 Sep 2011 00:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/09/14/xenophon_socrates This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the Loeb Classical Library, one of the most remarkable publishing projects in modern history. Yet as with everything book-related in the year 2011, the Loeb centenary carries with it a touch of wistfulness, and an uncertainty about the future. For the Loeb classics are the monument of a book culture that now seems on the wane -- a culture that prized the making and owning of physical books, not just for the pleasure of turning the pages, but from a sense that the book was the natural, predestined vessel of every expression of human thought.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/09/15/xenophon_socrates/feed/ 48 How Ray Bradbury became a literary icon http://www.salon.com/2011/08/23/becoming_ray_bradbury_jonathan_eller/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/23/becoming_ray_bradbury_jonathan_eller/#comments Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/08/22/becoming_ray_bradbury_jonathan_eller These days, when it's common to see adults engrossed in Harry Potter on the subway, and the edgiest shows on HBO are about vampires and dragons, it's hard to believe there was once a time when sci-fi and fantasy fiction were confined to a cultural ghetto. But in his new study, "Becoming Ray Bradbury" (Illinois), Jonathan R. Eller shows that being a sci-fi writer in pre-World War II America was thoroughly unglamorous -- less a career than a dubious kind of hobby. Ray Bradbury himself was an undistinguished high school senior when he joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction League in 1937, and in the years that followed he seemed likely to remain in that amateur realm: sending his stories to mimeographed fanzines, scraping together bus fare to attend annual conventions. The highest glory available was to publish in "prozines" with names like Astonishing Stories and Thrilling Wonder, which actually paid their contributors -- sometimes as much as a penny a word.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/23/becoming_ray_bradbury_jonathan_eller/feed/ 42 A firsthand account of Capone’s Mob http://www.salon.com/2011/08/09/al_capone_and_his_american_boys_william_helmer/ http://www.salon.com/2011/08/09/al_capone_and_his_american_boys_william_helmer/#comments Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/08/08/al_capone_and_his_american_boys_william_helmer If the gang-moll heroines played by Judy Holliday in "Born Yesterday" and Virginia Mayo in "White Heat" sat down to collaborate on a memoir, the result would read a lot like "Al Capone and His American Boys: Memoirs of a Mobster's Wife." Though you wouldn't necessarily know it from the confusing title and cover, this volume presents the autobiography of Georgette Winkeler, the wife of Gus Winkeler, a leading henchman in Capone's Chicago "Syndicate." In 1934, months after Gus was murdered by his erstwhile colleagues, Georgette decided to write about their life together, hoping to cash in on the public appetite for gangster lore. Her publisher, however, had second thoughts about bringing out a book so full of revelations about the Syndicate -- sensibly enough, given the number of times Georgette herself writes about indiscreet mobsters getting rubbed out. Thwarted, she decided to turn her manuscript, "A Voice From the Grave," over to the FBI, before going on to make a new life for herself as the wife of a preacher. And there it lay for decades, forgotten in the archives, until Mob historian William J. Helmer brought out this edition. (Credited as the author, Helmer really serves as Winkeler's editor.)

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/08/09/al_capone_and_his_american_boys_william_helmer/feed/ 5 Can your dog multiply large numbers? http://www.salon.com/2011/07/03/amazing_dogs_jan_bondeson/ http://www.salon.com/2011/07/03/amazing_dogs_jan_bondeson/#comments Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/07/03/amazing_dogs_jan_bondeson All dog owners tend to think their dogs are amazing, just as all parents think their children are above average. But after you've read "Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities," by Jan Bondeson, Rover's skill at fetching might look a little less impressive. Can your dog carry on a conversation in German, like Don the Talking Dog? Can he multiply large numbers, pick chosen cards out of a deck, or tell time from a watch like Munito, who was known to his Parisian fans in the 1810s as "le Newton de la race canine"?

And let's not forget the females -- like Lola, a second-generation dog prodigy, who came home to her owner one day "in a state of great depression," and tapped out a confession on the alphabet cards she used to communicate: "My honor is gone!" "Fraulein Kindermann understood that she must have enjoyed a short affair with a farmyard dog," Bondeson writes, "who had basely seduced and then left her. She tried to console poor Lola, saying that her broken heart would recover with time, but the pathetic dog responded 'Only when I die!'"

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/07/03/amazing_dogs_jan_bondeson/feed/ 19 Umberto Eco’s glimpse into the art of the novel http://www.salon.com/2011/06/07/confessions_of_a_young_novelist_umberto_eco/ http://www.salon.com/2011/06/07/confessions_of_a_young_novelist_umberto_eco/#comments Tue, 07 Jun 2011 00:25:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/06/06/confessions_of_a_young_novelist_umberto_eco The title of "Confessions of a Young Novelist," Umberto Eco's new book , is characteristically sly. Eco is not exactly wet behind the ears -- he will turn 80 next year -- but as he reminds the reader on the first page, he did not publish his first novel, "The Name of the Rose," until 1980. "Thus," he explains, "I consider myself a very young novelist, who has so far published only five novels and will publish many more in the next fifty years." That seems unlikely, but you wouldn't want to bet against Eco. After all, "The Name of the Rose" -- a debut novel by a middle-aged academic, packed with medieval history and intricate literary allusions -- wouldn't have been anyone's pick to become a bestseller. In fact, Eco writes, "the first critics who reviewed [it] said it had been written under the influence of a luminous inspiration, but that, because of its conceptual and linguistic difficulties, it was only for the happy few. When the book met with remarkable success, selling millions of copies, the same critics wrote that in order to concoct such a popular and entertaining bestseller, I had no doubt mechanically followed a secret recipe."

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/06/07/confessions_of_a_young_novelist_umberto_eco/feed/ 3 “The Hollywood Sign”: How the Hollywood sign became an American icon http://www.salon.com/2011/05/10/hollywood_sign_leo_braudy/ http://www.salon.com/2011/05/10/hollywood_sign_leo_braudy/#comments Tue, 10 May 2011 00:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/2011/05/09/hollywood_sign_leo_braudy On Sept. 18, 1932, a 24-year-old actress named Peg Entwistle jumped to her death from the "H" in the Hollywood sign. At the time, film critic and historian Leo Braudy explains in his brief, entertaining new book "The Hollywood Sign," the sign had not yet evolved into what it is today -- a universally recognized symbol for the movie industry, eminently deserving of a place in Yale University Press' "Icons of America" series. Looking at movies about the movie business from the 1930s, Braudy finds that the sign was almost never used as a signifier for Hollywood. When they wanted to evoke the glamour of movieland, filmmakers preferred to show Grauman's Chinese Theater, with its cement handprints of the stars and its world premieres lit by swaying searchlights. Even the street signs at the intersection of Hollywood and Vine said "Hollywood" more clearly than the Hollywood sign, although tourists who made their way to the actual street corner would find nothing much to look at there.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/05/10/hollywood_sign_leo_braudy/feed/ 3 “Craving Earth”: Why do some people love eating dirt? http://www.salon.com/2011/04/13/craving_earth_sera_l_young/ http://www.salon.com/2011/04/13/craving_earth_sera_l_young/#comments Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:19:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2011/04/12/craving_earth_sera_l_young If dirt, as William James put it, is matter out of place, then the dirtiest dirt of all is the kind you put where you're absolutely not supposed to: in your mouth. We teach children not to eat dirt even before they can talk; conversely, telling someone to eat dirt is a powerful expression of contempt, a way of demoting them from human to animal. Yet as Sera L. Young explains in her quirkily informative book "Craving Earth: Understanding Pica," eating dirt -- in particular, certain kinds of dry, crumbly clay, as well as other non-food substances like uncooked starch, chalk and ice -- is a very widespread human practice, and always has been. Pica, as this behavior is known -- the name comes from the Latin word for "magpie" -- is especially common among pregnant women.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2011/04/13/craving_earth_sera_l_young/feed/ 18 “Geographies of Mars”: Why are we so obsessed with Mars? http://www.salon.com/2010/12/31/geographies_of_mars/ http://www.salon.com/2010/12/31/geographies_of_mars/#comments Fri, 31 Dec 2010 14:01:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/12/31/geographies_of_mars "For all practical purposes Mars is our nearest neighbor in space. Of all the orbs about us, therefore, he holds out most promise of response to that question which man instinctively asks as he gazes up at the stars: What goes on upon all those distant globes?" So wrote Percival Lowell in his 1895 bestseller "Mars," the book that launched his career as the world's most famous and controversial astronomer. More than a century later, humankind's fascination with Mars is still going strong. Not long ago, when a couple of scientists half-seriously suggested that NASA send a one-way manned mission to Mars, the Internet was flooded with would-be volunteers. For many, even death is not too high a price to pay to gratify our curiosity about the Red Planet.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/12/31/geographies_of_mars/feed/ 43 “The Last Utopia”: How we invented “human rights” http://www.salon.com/2010/09/23/the_last_utopia_samuel_moyn/ http://www.salon.com/2010/09/23/the_last_utopia_samuel_moyn/#comments Thu, 23 Sep 2010 20:23:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/09/23/the_last_utopia_samuel_moyn It's strange to think of human rights as having a history, much less a controversial one. Could anyone but a monster deny that every person has a right to be free and equal, to be protected against torture and censorship, to have enough to eat? Our reverence for human rights is so instinctive that, in the 21st century, whenever we see a gross injustice being committed, the most powerful objection we know how to raise is that someone's human rights are being violated -- whether it is Iraqis tortured at Abu Ghraib or women sentenced to stoning in Iran. And a whole powerful infrastructure has grown up to protect these rights, from the International Criminal Court to nongovernmental organizations like Human Rights Watch, which just received a $100 million donation from George Soros.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/09/23/the_last_utopia_samuel_moyn/feed/ 26 “A Short History of Celebrity” http://www.salon.com/2010/08/27/a_short_history_of_celebrity_fred_inglis/ http://www.salon.com/2010/08/27/a_short_history_of_celebrity_fred_inglis/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:20:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/26/a_short_history_of_celebrity_fred_inglis In the first chapter of "A Short History of Celebrity," the English historian of culture Fred Inglis makes two declarations of intent. "This is a history book," he says right off the bat, and a few pages later he adds, "this book will not be a long and lofty malediction spoken over the celebrity cult." But it does not take the reader very long to realize that both of these promises will be more honored in the breach than the observance. What Inglis has written is too scatter-shot and impressionistic to be a real history of the practice, or concept, or institution of celebrity; and he is far too earnestly impassioned to refrain from passing judgment on our culture's fascination with "very small numbers of unevenly gifted and frequently unattractive individuals." "A Short History of Celebrity" is, rather, a historian's jeremiad: florid, digressive, erudite, and forceful, without ever being really revelatory or wholly convincing.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/08/27/a_short_history_of_celebrity_fred_inglis/feed/ 5 “The Breakup 2.0″: The new old dating etiquette http://www.salon.com/2010/08/05/the_breakup_ilana_gershon/ http://www.salon.com/2010/08/05/the_breakup_ilana_gershon/#comments Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:30:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/08/05/the_breakup_ilana_gershon For Jane Austen, the lives of ordinary men and women in provincial towns could be the stuff of great drama, because those lives were themselves dramatic -- they were lived largely in public, and involved a constant performance of roles. To be a woman, in particular, meant negotiating the boundaries of gentility and commonness, virtue and disgrace, with all eyes upon you. Make a mistake in the social script, and you could be damned to spinsterhood, or worse. Today, in our more liberated and anonymous society, there is only one phase of life when our romantic and sexual lives are so open to public scrutiny, when social status is totally determined by public opinion. That is in adolescence, in high school and college, where young people are packed together in an artificial society, and turn their fiercely judgmental gazes on one another. As the movie "Clueless" showed, Jane Austen in high school makes a profound dramatic sense.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/2010/08/05/the_breakup_ilana_gershon/feed/ 3 “The Unburied” by Charles Palliser http://www.salon.com/1999/11/30/palliser/ http://www.salon.com/1999/11/30/palliser/#comments Tue, 30 Nov 1999 17:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/11/30/palliser By now the stakes for murder mysteries have risen almost impossibly high. At the end of the century of the banality of evil, it takes more than a murder to make us shiver: It takes orgies, bloodbaths, refinements of sadism of the sort that Thomas Harris supplies. The quality that made Wilkie Collins' suspense novels so absorbing -- the claustrophobic feeling that a single crime poisons the universe -- is virtually impossible to achieve in an era in which we know from the newspaper that worse things happen in our own city a dozen times a day. And so it makes sense that Charles Palliser has set his new murder mystery, "The Unburied," in the late 19th century. That's the only way he could regain some of Collins' Gothic power.

Palliser is unashamedly Victorian (his very name is out of Trollope) in hauling in haunted churches, menacing fogs, gas-lit streets, ancient ghosts. But he is also contemporary: His hero triumphs not just by solving the murder but also by resolving his own psychological problems. Edward Courtine, whose "found" manuscript makes up the bulk of the novel, is a middle-aged university historian specializing in Alfred the Great. He is also a husband emotionally ruined, even 20 years on, by his wife's having abandoned him for another man.

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]]> http://www.salon.com/1999/11/30/palliser/feed/ 0 “My Father, Dancing” http://www.salon.com/1999/08/04/broyard/ http://www.salon.com/1999/08/04/broyard/#comments Wed, 04 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000 http://www.salon.com/books/review/1999/08/04/broyard In her debut collection, Bliss Broyard is sovereign over a very small terrain. The eight stories in "My Father, Dancing" shift between first- and third-person narration, between seeming autobiography and seeming invention. But they all share the same heroine, more or less -- an affluent, intelligent, insecure young woman with a glamorous father, who attends fancy schools and lives in New York or Cambridge, Mass. -- and they all trace the same arc, in which a small domestic drama leads to a small insight about that heroine's character, family or love life. No wonder the blurbs call Broyard's stories "satisfying" and "straightforward" -- they're standard, well-made tales of our time with very few false notes. But surprising insights and beautiful language are equally rare.

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