Reviews and News:
A new history of the Donner party: “Certain stories in American history carry archetypal power, and the dark majesty of the Donner catastrophe is one of them. In the winter of 1847, when the first skeletonized survivors stumbled out of the Sierra Nevada, the Donner story seized the American imagination and has never let go, generating a vast but unreliable historical record burdened with exaggeration, lies, melodrama and prurient disgust. Cannibalism was the prime reason the story lodged itself in our national psyche...Here were a group of westward pioneers, the very picture of courage, resourcefulness and pluck, who ended up reduced to a level of squalor and barbarism almost beyond words.”
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In the 1920s, hundreds of Americans, many of them women, moved to Siberia to help build a “new Russia.” What was thought to be a “Soviet dream” quickly became a nightmare: “[S]ome wound up in the gulag or died, and nearly all who stayed lost the idealism that initially drew them there. For the many who stayed for several years or months – that is, long enough to feel like they were more than just tourists, but short enough to feel like their own fate was not tied up with the Soviet Union’s – it was in many cases possible, at least for a time, to rationalise violence, repression and paranoia as temporary and necessary steps on the road to building true socialism. By the late 1930s, it had become hard to argue this; with the coming of the Cold War it became almost impossible.”
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Jonathan Meades reviews an anthology of Hipgnosis’s vinyl cover art: “Peter Blake’s endlessly imitated design for the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Andy Warhol’s banana for The Velvet Underground & Nico were as inspired as the music itself, and inseparable from it. These were, however, exceptions to the general rule that the cover should be little more than a flattering publicity shot, even if those depicted were dressed in Alphonse Mucha’s clothes. During the bad-hair decade and a half of its existence, from 1967 to 1982, the prolific design studio Hipgnosis seldom succumbed to flattery. Instead it relentlessly exploited the freedom and limits of the format in multitudinous ways.”
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Anti-Israel group protests play at Lincoln Center.
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A history of Nigerian organized crime: “Nigerian criminal organizations and syndicates unquestionably...operate on a vast scale, and are thoroughly globalized. What are the roots of this criminality, and—more intriguingly—how does that relate to the vigorous religious traditions? Those questions drive This Present Darkness, which is tragically the last book by the deeply respected Africanist Stephen Ellis, who died before its publication.”
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For years, Algis Valiunas refused to read Jane Austen. When he finally does, he is struck by her “intelligence, wit, emotional discernment, and perfect prose.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The Times Literary Supplement, Jay Parini revisits the life of Henry David Thoreau. He was in some ways more of an engineer than ecologist:
“Despite Thoreau’s achievements as a writer, environmentalist and social activist (he was, among other things, a passionate abolitionist and supporter of John Brown), many of his contemporaries considered him little more than a crank, a self-involved Pied Piper for the children of Concord, MA, whom he led in search of huckleberries on hot summer days. As Lauren Dassow Walls makes clear in her excellent Henry David Thoreau: A Life, he was a man of obsessively high principles, self-contained, a stickler for details who insisted on his own way of seeing the world, however quirky. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who would become a good friend, referred to him as ‘a singular character . . . ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners’. Walls quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson to good effect in a letter introducing him to Henry James, Sr, assuring James that once he got past the younger man’s ‘village pedantry and tediousness of facts’, he would discover a ‘profound mind and a person of true magnanimity’.
“Walls is following in the footsteps of Thoreau biographies from Henry Seidel Canby (1939), Walter Harding (1965), Robert D. Richardson (1988) and Michael Sims (2014). And these books represent only the cream of a rich crop about this beloved author, whose many sides will never be contained in a single volume. But Walls earns her keep, digging into Thoreau’s aphoristic letters and journals, finding acute reflections by his contemporaries, and drawing a wonderfully brisk and satisfying portrait while paying special attention to his passion for science and engineering, a vein of inquiry that Robert M. Thorson goes on to deepen in The Boatman.
“Thoreau’s contact with nature was always more observational than Emerson’s, even though the latter’s Nature (1836) remained for him a fundamental text, a primer of Transcendentalist thought. As Walls puts it: ‘Thoreau knew a truth few others fully understand: human beings are not separate from nature but fully involved in natural cycles, agents who trigger change and are vulnerable to the changes they trigger’. This awareness of human activity within nature (which would influence the ‘deep ecology’ movement in our time) followed from Thoreau’s work as a surveyor; indeed, he made a significant part of his income from this profession, which he regarded as self-defining. As Walls notes, he paraded around the village with ‘a surveyor’s chain and a set of ten chaining pines, a measuring tape, drafting paper, tools . . . and, most glorious of all, a top-of-the-line fifteen-inch compass made of lacquered brass with a silvered five-inch dial’.”
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Photo: Kansas supercell
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Poem: Joan Houlihan, “A Still-Living Head”
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