By Stuart Finkel One of the pivotal issues that western historians of the USSR have debated since its collapse more than 25 years ago is its so-called “exceptionalism.” That is, to what extent should the history of the Soviet Union be considered as but one variation of the remarkable process of state modernization in the […]
Writers/Literature
The Man Who Loved Dogs, by Leonardo Padura (2013)
By Rebecca Johnston Leonardo Padura is arguably one of Cuba’s most untouchable writers. He made his name first as an investigative journalist, and then as the author of the Havana Quartet detective series, sometimes described as “morality tales for the post-Soviet era.” The Man Who Loved Dogs is by far his most ambitious work. A […]
A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of T.E. Lawrence, by John E. Mack (1976)
Those seeking a more balanced assessment of Lawrence would do well to turn to a third source: John Mack’s psychological biography of Lawrence, A Prince of Our Disorder (1976).
Ex Cathedra: Stories by Machado de Assis: Bilingual edition (2014)
Reading Ex Cathedra, a new translation of some twenty-one short stories written by Machado, was a great opportunity not only to discover lesser-known works of the great Brazilian author, but also to recall that repeated annoying, yet joyful morning experience.
The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature, by Barbara Fuchs (2013)
For Shakespeare and contemporaries on page and stage like Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and Thomas Middleton, “the Spanish vein” ran rich and deep, “even as the political situation between the two nations deteriorated in the wake of the Reformation and imperial rivalries.”
Great Books on Siberian Voices
Four great books and three great documentaries about the history and people of Siberia.
Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, by Gauri Viswanathan (1989)
Gauri Viswanathan provides a fascinating account of the ideological motivations behind the introduction of English literary education in British India. She studies the shifts in the curriculum and relates such developments to debates over the objectives of English education both among the British administrators, as well as between missionaries and colonial officials.
Early Modern Classics
Three histories, two novels: a selection of great works on early modern Europe
The Doubtful Strait/El Estrecho Dudoso by Ernesto Cardenal (1995)
“Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory,” wrote Robert Penn Warren in a preface to a poem on Thomas Jefferson in 1953. “For if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.”