Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:21:50 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Adam Kirsch :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Adam+Kirsch istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-empire-of-blood-how-the-nazis-ruled-europe/85051/ Wed, 3 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In the summer of 1942, Albert Speer visited Adolf Hitler at the Führer's field headquarters in the Ukraine. "One quiet evening," Mark Mazower writes in "Hitler's Empire" (Penguin Press, 726 pages, $39.95), Hitler dilated to Speer on his favorite subject: what the world would look like after the German victory, which he still believed was inevitable. By the end of the year, he predicted, the Wehrmacht would have taken the Soviet Caucasus. "If in the course of the next year we manage to cover... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-magic-mountain-adalbert-stifters-rock-crystal/84867/ Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Last year, Stanford University Press published a selection of Hannah Arendt's essays on the arts under the title "Reflections on Literature and Culture." One of the pieces in the volume was Arendt's review of a 1945 translation of the novella "Rock Crystal," by the 19th-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter. To Arendt, Stifter (1805-68) was "one of the very few great novelists in German literature," whose work stood out for its "pure happiness, wisdom, and beauty." Above all, Arendt stressed... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-peculiar-association-thomas-jefferson-and-sally/86445/ Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST In 1795 Thomas Jefferson was in the middle of a four-year vacation from public office. Having stepped down as secretary of state at the end of George Washington's first term, and not yet elected as John Adams's vice president, Jefferson was free to spend his time doing what he always claimed to love best: building and running his estate at Monticello. At the beginning of that year he wrote to his daughter Martha to discuss some business that her husband, Thomas Randolph, was attending to: the... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/against-oblivion-the-terezin-album-of-marianka/86004/ Wed, 17 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST When Hannah Arendt wrote "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in the years just after the Holocaust, she struggled to explain what made the Nazi genocide so unprecedentedly evil. What separated this atrocity from all previous atrocities, she decided, was not the number of victims. It was, rather, the new institution of the concentration camp, which Arendt described as the supreme expression of the monstrous ambition of totalitarianism: to eradicate the individual human being. "The murder of the... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-god-that-failed-left-in-dark-times-by-bernard/85499/ Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST It is now approaching 20 years since the left — the classic, revolutionary, Marx- and Lenin-inspired left — received its death blow. Since 1989, not even those who look back lovingly at 1917, the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, and 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, have really believed that they would see such utopian experiments repeated. This was an especially debilitating blow to the Marxist tradition, whose major premise was that revolution is not simply desirable, but inevitable: that... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/opinion/taking-on-fukuyama/85325/ Mon, 8 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST If ever a writer was the victim of his own success, it is Francis Fukuyama. In 1989, with Soviet power on the retreat in Eastern Europe and democratic activists filling Tiananmen Square, Mr. Fukuyama published an essay in The National Interest titled "The End of History?" In it, he proposed that the collapse of communism had left liberal democracy as the only viable form of government in the world. If History, with a philosophical capital H, was the story of mankind's progress towards a final... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/how-jacob-riis-lived-tom-buk-swientys-the-other/84669/ Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST If you stand at the corner of Bayard and Mulberry streets in lower Manhattan and look south, you will be greeted with a vibrant street scene you could find nowhere but in New York. The streets are lined with the thriving businesses of Chinatown — bakeries and fish markets, souvenir shops, a funeral home. To the west is Columbus Park, where on a recent weekend a large crowd of older people were listening to two competing performances of Chinese opera, while the young played soccer and basketball... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/opinion/freedoms-gift-to-religion/84637/ Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Eleven years ago, a little-known writer named Anita Diamant published her first novel, "The Red Tent." For inspiration, she turned to one of the most disturbing episodes in the Bible: the rape of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, which is recounted in chapter 34 of Genesis. According to the Bible, Dinah was attacked by Shechem, a Canaanite prince, who "saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her." Afterward, Shechem fell in love with Dinah and wanted to marry her. But Jacob's sons were... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/adjusting-the-theory-of-just-war-gary-basss/84208/ Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST From the Vietnam War until the end of the Cold War, it was almost axiomatic that liberals would oppose every use of American military power. Defecting from that position was what qualified a former liberal as a neoconservative. But in the last 20 years, as the post-Holocaust promise "never again" was betrayed in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur, parts of the left began to reconsider the virtues of force. In certain desperate crises, it now seemed, war might be the most humane response, the only way... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/lifting-the-veil-jmw-turner-and-john-ruskin/84115/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST If the spirit of Joseph Mallord William Turner is looking down on New York these days — possibly from somewhere in the vicinity of the sun, which in his dying days he declared to be God — he must have very mixed feelings. He would be satisfied to see that the show of the season is the Metropolitan Museum's giant exhibition of his work — satisfied, but not surprised. During his immensely productive lifetime (1775-1851), Turner was confident that he would be remembered as one of the greatest... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/foreign/in-georgia-shades-of-earlier-history/83987/ Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST The crisis in Georgia proves once again that the world's future depends on the lessons it learns from the past. The problem is that there are always too many lessons, and they never exactly fit the current case. As the world's statesmen try to figure out a way to curb Russian aggression and restore Georgia's security, a large part of the challenge will be to decide whether 2008 is most like 1938, 1968, or 1878. 1938, of course, was the year of the Munich Agreement, when Britain and France... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/harvesting-the-waste-land-an-anthology-of-new/83727/ Wed, 13 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Looking back on the 1930s from the perspective of middle age, Robert Lowell described it as a time "when criticism looked like winning." The years of Lowell's apprenticeship were the golden age of the New Criticism, the intellectually rigorous, closely analytical style of reading that grew up alongside modernism in poetry. The New Critics — John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R.P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, and their cohorts and disciples — were mostly poets themselves, and they came to maturity just... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/opinion/a-different-canon/83591/ Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST This summer, the American Foreign Service Association put out a recommended reading list for its members. Because AFSA is the professional association for all American diplomats and because the reading list was cosponsored by the Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, the list has more than just curiosity value. It is the closest thing we are likely to get to an official curriculum for America's diplomats: its stated purpose is to guide the "career-long, self-directed professional... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/opinion/neocon-resurgence/83369/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST History books, as the saying goes, are written by the winners. But when it comes to American history, it is often the losers of old debates whose interpretations are enshrined in the textbooks. The Spanish-American war, for instance, was hugely popular at the time, and featured dramatic American victories. But the critics who were not able to stop the war have still taught us to remember it as a travesty whipped up by the Hearst papers. Today, the debate over the Iraq War is giving way to the... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/demons-inner-and-outer/83262/ Wed, 6 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Almost seven years after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, readers still display a surprising hunger for the definitive "9/11 novel." The acclaim that greeted Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland" earlier this year was a sign of this appetite: Critics outbid one another to welcome a book that might make sense of the always receding, ever-present horror. Clearly, the more deeply committed one is to the moral possibilities of literature — the more one believes that, even in a mediatized age, the... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/tilting-at-spanish-history-a-manuscript-of-ashes/82838/ Wed, 30 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Five years ago, Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel "Sepharad" was published in English to rapturous reviews. Not since W.G. Sebald's "The Emigrants" had a new European writer so powerfully seized the imagination of American readers. "Sepharad" was, in fact, a kind of transposition, into Spanish history and language, of Sebald's masterpiece — with its blending of fact and fiction, its obsession with the horrors of the 20th century, and its deeply ethical insistence on retrieving individual stories... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/hugh-trevor-ropers-the-invention-of-scotland/82417/ Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Every April, New York's proud Scottish-Americans celebrate their heritage with the Tartan Day Parade, processing up Sixth Avenue in a sea of kilts, to the noble blare of the bagpipes. If you are thinking of attending the festivities next year, however, you might want to keep quiet about having read "The Invention of Scotland" (Yale University Press, 304 pages, $30), a punchy new book by the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. For as Trevor-Roper points out with ill-concealed glee, tartan and... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/kay-ryan-a-laureate-worth-lauding/82147/ Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Yesterday's announcement from the Library of Congress that Kay Ryan will be the country's next poet laureate is a cause for celebration. In part, this is because Ms. Ryan is an excellent poet, and in poetry it is rarer than it should be for merit and recognition to find one another. But it is also because Ms. Ryan has advanced to the top rank of American poets while keeping a principled distance from the institutions of the poetry world. In 2005, she filed a hilariously skeptical report, for... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-ruined-city-of-smyrna-giles-miltons-paradise/81963/ Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST It is a measure of the sheer darkness of history in the last century that one of its darkest episodes — the 1922 destruction of the Ottoman city of Smyrna, in present-day Turkey — is practically forgotten. Forgotten by American readers, that is, even though American missionaries and sailors played a heroic role in the catastrophe. But to the Greeks and Armenians who were driven from the city, and to the Turks who conquered it with fire and sword, the name of Smyrna still raises fierce passions... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-man-for-all-seasons-john-stuart-mill-victorian/81475/ Wed, 9 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST If history, as Edward Gibbon said, is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind," it makes sense that the greatest criminals tend to receive the most attention from historians. Napoleon, a tyrant who was responsible for millions of deaths, is the most biographized figure in modern history, and it seems that new biographies of Stalin and Hitler crowd the bookstores every year. It is pleasant to be reminded, then, that good men can also make history from... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/thomas-jefferson-gentleman-scholar/81086/ Wed, 2 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The title of Kevin Hayes's new study of Thomas Jefferson, "The Road to Monticello" (Oxford University Press, 752 pages, $34.95), holds out several possibilities. Is it a book about Jefferson's famous house, which he spent much of his life building and rebuilding, and which still stands as a monument to his multifaceted genius? Or could it be a biography covering the first decades of Jefferson's life, leading up to the ground-breaking on his mountaintop home? In fact, the name Monticello in the... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-tale-of-two-lovers-de-stael-and-constant/80601/ Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Only those who lived before the French Revolution, said Talleyrand, could know the true sweetness of life. Reading "Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant" (Yale University Press, 343 pages, $35), the new "dual biography" by Renee Winegarten, suggests that the notoriously wily and corrupt diplomat was at best half-right. Constant, the liberal philosopher and politician, and de Staël, whose fame as a writer, wit, and opponent of Napoleon extended from London to Petersburg, were old enough to... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-origins-of-power-jean-bethke-elshtains/80181/ Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST As Prime Minister Putin consolidates his authoritarian rule in Russia, he has introduced a new term in the language of propaganda: "sovereign democracy." Anyone who follows the news from Russia can see that sovereign democracy is about as close to actual democracy as the old "people's democracy" of the Soviet period. A sovereign democracy is one that puts political dissidents in jail, murders journalists, expropriates private industry, and makes threatening nationalist pronouncements. The word... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/reconsiderations-life-studies-by-robert-lowell/80182/ Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Even before Robert Lowell published "Life Studies," his masterpiece, in 1959, he was widely regarded as the best American poet of his generation. But for most of the 1950s he was also completely blocked, managing to write, as he later recalled, just "five messy poems in five years." The problem was not that Lowell had failed to master his chosen style — the symbol-studded, ambiguity-laden, highly artificial style of American modernism, as he had learned it from poets such as Allen Tate, his... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/patrick-j-buchanans-know-nothing-history/79722/ Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST It is a delicious irony, but also a significant one, that "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War" (Crown, 518 pages, $29.95), Patrick J. Buchanan's new contribution to the flourishing genre of World War II revisionism, should appear in the same season as Nicholson Baker's "Human Smoke." Never has there been such a clear demonstration of the way ideological extremes tend to converge. Messrs. Baker and Buchanan probably could not stand to be in the same room for five minutes. The former is... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/battle-cry-of-freedom-andrew-wards-the-slaves-war/79229/ Wed, 4 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST 'It was God's blessing to the black peoples to come out from bondage, to belong only to theirselves and God, to read about what's going on in the world and write and figure for theirselves." So said Louis Meadows, a former slave from Georgia who is the last of many hundreds of African-Americans quoted in "The Slaves' War" (Houghton Mifflin, 400 pages, $28), Andrew Ward's innovative and powerful new study of the Civil War. By granting Meadows the final word in his dense mosaic of quotations, Mr... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-slight-trick-of-the-mind-rivka-galchens/78695/ Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 EST If you were inclined to paranoia — if, like Dr. Leo Lieberstein, the narrator of "Atmospheric Disturbances" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $24), you detected portents in the most apparently banal details — your imagination might well seize on the large number 49 that appears on the cover of Rivka Galchen's debut novel. Isn't this an obvious allusion to Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49," which, like Ms. Galchen's book, concerns the discovery of a secret conspiracy that may not... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-view-from-parnassus/76848/ Thu, 22 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In choosing the title "Jews and Power" for its second annual New York Festival of Ideas, the Jewish cultural organization Nextbook extended its tradition of provocative juxtapositions. The theme of last year's festival was "Jesus in Jewish Culture," historically an extremely touchy subject. But in today's world, "Jews and Power" may be an even more explosive combination. The Vatican has renounced the old accusation of deicide, and it would take some looking to find a mainstream Christian who... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/doing-battle-with-the-bard/76756/ Wed, 21 May 2008 00:00:00 EST "Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare?" asks Nigel Smith in the title of his new book (Harvard University Press, 240 pages, $22.95). The obvious answer is no: It would be hard to dispute that Shakespeare's plays are more powerful, and more central to our culture, than Milton's biblical epics or his artfully classical lyrics. Around the world, when people dream about true love, they think of Romeo and Juliet; when they thrill with ambition, they think of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and so on down the... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/crash-and-burn/76405/ Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Saul Bellow came up with the term "reality instructor" for the kind of self-important, tough-talking, wised-up guy who devotes his life to wising up other people. The ineffectual intellectual heroes of Bellow's fiction are constantly having their lapels grabbed, figuratively and literally, by such tutors in toughness — gangsters, operators, money men — who can't stand the sight of a dreamer, an idealist, someone who just doesn't get it. In "Humboldt's Gift," for instance, the narrator, Charlie... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/pulling-back-the-curtain-on-herg/75942/ Wed, 7 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Near the end of "Tintin and the Secret of Literature" (Counterpoint, 212 pages, $15.95), Tom McCarthy invokes the French radical theorist Guy Debord's notion of "detournement," "the taking over of a sign, image, text, or body of work and the redirecting of it to one's own ends." As Mr. McCarthy shows, the images and words created by Hergé — as the Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi signed himself — have been repeatedly subjected to this kind of repurposing. Hergé created 23 volumes of Tintin's... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/susan-neimans-metaphysics-of-morals/75583/ Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST One thing I feel I should be clear about up front: I have always liked "Beavis and Butt-Head." You might not expect that a fondness for the 1990s MTV cartoon series, with its grunting, cretinous heroes, would be germane, one way or the other, to appreciating the arguments offered by the moral philosopher, Susan Neiman, in her high-minded "Moral Clarity" (Harcourt, 467 pages, $27). But look in the index to the book and you will find Beavis and Butt-Head, right after Pierre Bayle, the great... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/david-yezzi-and-adam-zagajewski-songs/75160/ Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST April is National Poetry Month, the poetry world's annual effort to soothe its bad conscience about practicing a minority art in a democratic culture. Institutional attempts to make more people read poetry always have something forlorn about them, because they are based on a basic error in economics: They try to address a shortage in demand by creating a glut in supply. But if no one likes to read poetry — or so it can often seem to the discouraged poet — then putting poems in hotel nightstands... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/natures-keepers/74761/ Wed, 16 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST There are many alarming documents in "American Earth" (1,048 pages, $40), the Library of America's new anthology of "environmental writing since Thoreau." The main purpose of environmental writing, after all — the mission that distinguishes it from its tame cousin, nature writing — is to sound an alarm, to awaken the reader to the ecological crimes of the human race. And there is no doubt that, over the last century and a half, American environmentalists have done an important service with... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/stern-german/74418/ Wed, 9 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Walking near the Metropolitan Museum not long ago, I saw a young man, about the right age for a graduate student, wearing a T-shirt that declared "I ♥ Adorno." I'm not sure how ironically the slogan was intended, but it perfectly captures the ambiguity that still surrounds Theodor Adorno's name, nearly 40 years after his death. On the one hand, he is the kind of intellectual who has not just readers but fans, who define themselves in part by their allegiance to him. The breadth and... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/those-who-do-know-the-past/74048/ Wed, 2 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST In the sixth century, Bishop Gregory of Tours began his "Histories" with the observation, "A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad." This is, as John Burrow writes in "A History of Histories" (Knopf, 544 pages, $35), an "entirely accurate" reflection. It is also, of course, an absurd one, and it takes a certain alertness to pick up on the dry satire hidden in Mr. Burrow's bland endorsement. In his deadpan mockery, and in his choice of a pious Christian target, Mr... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/writing-mans-burden/73674/ Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST If there is one area in which British literary journalists definitely exceed their American cousins, it is in the whipping up of degradingly personal scandals. And whenever such a scandal erupts, it is a fair bet that Martin Amis will be involved somehow. Ever since he published his first novel, "The Rachel Papers," in 1973, Mr. Amis has been the target of much free-floating envy, thanks to his literary pedigree, his undeniable talent, and his precocious success. (The world's unlikeliest book... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/convergence-of-civilizations/73176/ Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, / Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat." Anthony Pagden doesn't quote Kipling's famous lines in "Worlds at War" (Random House, 625 pages, $35), his colorful and informative book about the dire things that have happened when the twain have met over the last 2,500 years. It would be surprising if Mr. Pagden, a historian at UCLA, did quote Kipling, at least unironically. The poet's frank imperialism... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/war-games/72723/ Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Even a book as bad as "Human Smoke" (Simon and Schuster, 576 pages, $30), Nicholson Baker's perverse tract about the origins of World War II, helps to confirm the continuing centrality of that war in our moral lives. Myths call forth debunkers, and the myth of "the good war" — that complacent phrase that camouflages the most deadly conflict in human history — has provoked Mr. Baker to remind us of some of the ways in which World War II was not good. There is nothing to object to in this: On the... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/searching-for-joseph-conrad/72341/ Wed, 5 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST It takes a perverse kind of ingenuity to make a boring book out of Joseph Conrad's life. After all, it's hard to think of a novelist whose career was as adventurous as Conrad's, or whose work raises more aesthetic and political passions. The man born as Joseph Korzeniowski in landlocked Berdichev in 1857 followed his youthful dream to become a ship's captain, visiting ports from Malaysia to Venezuela. He attempted suicide in Marseilles, had a ship blown up under him in Sumatra, almost died of... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/obama-bests-clinton-at-craft-of-writing/72169/ Mon, 3 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST When Democratic primary voters go to the polls tomorrow in Ohio and Texas, it's a safe bet that few will be casting their votes based on senators Clinton's and Obama's merits as writers. To judge a candidate based on his or her literary ability would be as irrelevant, most people agree, as voting for the better ballroom dancer. It may be a nice talent to have, but it has nothing to do with being president. It even seems a little naïve to judge a politician as the author of a book bearing his or... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/cuddling-up-with-the-celtic-tiger/71948/ Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST When you consider how large a place Ireland occupies in our cultural imagination, it's astonishing to realize how small a country it really is. Its current population is slightly more than 4 million; more people live in the boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens than in all 26 counties of the Republic of Ireland. If the island seems to loom like a continent, the reason is, first of all, the Irish emigration that did so much to shape America in the 19th century. According to the Census Bureau, some 34... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/arabian-knights/71551/ Wed, 20 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST In the old days, if you were an ambitious young Englishman looking for adventure and glory, your career path was obvious: You became a servant of the British Empire. The memoirs of George Orwell and Leonard Woolf, like the fiction of Rudyard Kipling, give a vivid sense of how exciting a young proconsul's life could be. Back home, he was just another 22-year-old, on the bottom rung of the career ladder; in India or Burma or Malaya, he was a combination of king, judge, and general, ruling a... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/brave-new-world/71207/ Wed, 13 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST In 1938, five years before his death, Max Reinhardt directed the Thornton Wilder play "The Merchant of Yonkers" on Broadway. Back home in Germany, Reinhardt's visionary productions had made him one of the most famous and influential theater directors in the world. In 1905, at the opening night of his "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which featured a revolving stage covered in real grass, the audience called, not for any of the actors, but for Reinhardt — the first time in the history of the theater... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/imperial-appetite/70826/ Wed, 6 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST In 1860, at the climax of the Second Opium War, a joint English and French army marched on Peking and burned the imperial summer palace to the ground. It was the most dramatic possible demonstration of the accelerating superiority, military and financial, of Europe over the rest of the world. China was far larger in territory and population than either France or England, yet the thought of a Chinese force storming Buckingham Palace was self-evidently absurd. The Middle Kingdom had no choice but... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-civilizations-clashed/70450/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST How far back in history do you have to go before it stops making sense to take sides? Even today, it is impossible for an American to read about the Civil War or the American Revolution without engaging in silent partisanship. Hundreds of years after the fact we feel personally implicated in those struggles. In some sense that is not quite logical, but also far from discreditable, we root for the North to maintain the Union for the 13 Colonies to throw off the British yoke, as though our own... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/native-son/70032/ Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Literary biography is a genre that it is always safe to disdain; everyone knows the charges regularly brought against it by its accusers. Gossip about a writer's misbehavior distracts us from the nobler self projected in his work; the biographer is always tempted to draw simplistic correspondences between a writer's life and his creations; the reverence owed to genius is eaten away by gossip like a palace by termites. No one who reads literary biographies can deny that all these accusations are... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/in-praise-of-fine-language/69630/ Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST Should we trust eloquence? As we enter another presidential election year, with its quadrennial reminder that eloquence has all but disappeared from American politics, this may sound like a purely academic question. It is customary to blame television, with its demand for artificial naturalness, for the decline of public speaking. Howard Dean in 2004 was the most recent politician to learn that what sounds like passion on the stump comes across as mere screaming on the news. But in fact, the... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/among-the-dead/69177/ Wed, 9 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST The greatest poem about the Civil War doesn't mention North or South, slavery or secession. Walt Whitman knew about all these things, of course; many of the poems in "Drum-Taps," the collection he published a few months after Appomattox, address the political and military realities of the war head-on. But "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" leaves them out of sight. Even when Whitman describes the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln, which wound through the country in the spring of... ADAM KIRSCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/heralding-the-end-of-war/68782/ Wed, 2 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST In 1816, as Europe emerged from 20 years of war and revolution, the French political theorist Benjamin Constant wrote an essay comparing ancient and modern ideas of liberty. The modern European differed most fundamentally from the Athenian and the Roman, Constant argued, in his attitude toward violence. In the ancient world, being at war was a normal state: "Each people incessantly attacked their neighbors or was attacked by them ... All had to buy their security, their independence, their...