Review blurbs
Historians of the World, Adapt?
Professors Jo Guldi and David Armitage threw down the scholarly gauntlet six months ago when they published their bold appeal to rescue History from the “bonfire of the humanities.” The History Manifesto claims that the discipline’s descent into public irrelevance has resulted from current historical scholarship’s lack of long-term thinking. Citing statistics that show a precipitous decline (then slow rise) in the average time span of History dissertations over the 20th Read More
“Inside Job,” or, Our Financial Institutions and the Immoral People Who Run Them
Charles Ferguson’s documentary film Inside Job (2010) tells the story of the 2007/08 financial collapse, its causes, and its consequences. Through a series of interviews with key players and commentators (including Nouriel Roubini, George Soros, Barney Frank, Christine Lagarde, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Paul Volcker, and Eliot Spitzer) and a careful analysis of publicly available records, Ferguson diagnoses the American and global financial system with chronic greed, corruption, immorality, and even cocaine Read More
Soviet Russia’s “New Generation”
The American Scholar has published an English translation of “The New Generation,” a short story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that is part of a new collection of the author’s works, Apricot Jam, and Other Stories (Counterpoint, 2011). Set in the 1920s and early 30s, the story recounts the parallel experiences of Anatoly Pavlovich Vozdvizhensky, an engineer and professor at Rostov State University, and Lyoshka Konoplyov, his working-class student who can’t make Read More
Rediscovered Photos of the Berlin Wall, 1961
TIME has published photographer Don McCullin’s lost negatives that he shot of the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. These images of Berliners in the Western zone peeking through to their friends in the East serve as a striking complement to the more familiar images of reunification and the fall of the wall almost thirty years later. It’s difficult to imagine the cultural and psychological effects of physically Read More