Gleanings

Here are some gleanings from a Sunday evening of periodical catching-up:

1) Christopher Hitchens offers a blistering assessment of JFK in his TLS review of Robert Dallek’s biography, An Unfinished Life . Hitchens focuses especially on JFK’s medical history, summarizing this way:

anyone scanning this or several other similar accounts would have to be astonished, not that the man’s career was cut short, but rather that it lasted so long. In addition to being a moral defective and a political disaster, John Kennedy was a physical and probably a mental also-ran for most of his Presidency.

Unfortunately, Dallek’s biography is another in a long line of hagiographic works, but Hitchens deftly shows that it undermines itself and reveals a pitiful and irresponsible JFK.

2) Also in the TLS , Jonathan Mirsky offers a review of a large book on James Legge, Victorian missionary to Malacca and Hong Kong, translator of Confucius, and the first Professor of Chinese at Oxford.

3) What is it about archeology that produces such violent debate? Maybe it’s just Hershel Shanks, editor of the Biblical Archeology Review , who seems to be a man who can’t stay out of a fight. The most recent issue of BAR includes several pieces on the James ossuary, which has been identified as the earliest archeological reference to Jesus (the box contains an inscription concerning “James, the brother of Jesus”). It seems that the Israeli government has had some interest in the item, though the reasons for their involvement are far from clear. In any case, I’m pretty sure that it’s not just Shanks, since the Atlantic has a piece this month on the rather heated debates earlier in the century concerning archeological work done at St Peter’s in the Vatican, which focused on the question of whether there was evidence that Peter himself was buried there. Maybe archeology attracts strong characters, or maybe it’s the supreme ambiguity of the evidence that makes the discipline a highly contentious one.

4) Tom Carson reviews Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style in the current Atlantic . Postrel’s book reviews the rise of “mass aestheticism” in concemporary American culture. Postrel’s book focuses on two related trends: “first, consumer items from tchotchkes to whole environments, now cater to pretty much every conceivable taste; and, second, all sorts of items formerly peddled (and purchased) on strictly utilitarian grounds now emphasize design and sensual appeal.” In the latter category, Postrel cites the example of the toilet bowl brush, which can now be purchased in designer models costing $30 or more.

Postrel, and Carson, defend these trends: “she’s trying to bring her readers around to recognizing the absurdity of thinking we’re more virtuous if our brush stays spartan, ugly, and generally unlovable.” Interesting thought, but it’s hard to avoid a sense that these consumer habits are signs of a kind of fin de siecle exhaustion and decadence, even if we are at the beginning of a siecle.