Curious Book Research Articles

Thinking Piratically

Thinking Piratically Rebecca E. Karl (bio) UNDERGLOBALIZATION: BEIJING'S MEDIA URBANISM AND THE CHIMERA OF LEGITIMACY BY JOSHUA NEVES Duke University Press, 2020 UNDERGLOBALIZATION: BEIJING'S MEDIA URBANISM AND THE CHIMERA OF LEGITIMACY BY JOSHUA NEVES Duke University Press, 2020 This is a curious book. On the one hand, Underglobalization takes up a series of topical problems in the study of contemporary China and the world through the lens of media(tion) and urban forms. Neves concentrates on revealing how artistic and media creativity of and in realms of the illicit—those arenas not sanctioned by state or dominant media power—help expose the attempted legal suppression of everyday urban forms that shape the lives of city-dwelling people, in Beijing and elsewhere. By focusing on the piratical, or the "illegitimate" underbelly of contemporary urban society, Neves makes visible the dialectical ways in which Beijingers live in constant dialogue with (but are not subordinated to) the legitimating powers of state, brand, and media. Taking the practice of urban dwelling as a process of producing realms of the fake is helpful, necessary, and important. It illumines the necessarily layered environments of Beijing life in the twenty-first century, without prescribing some "solution" that reinforces dominant power. [End Page 185] On the other hand, the discussion is diffuse, and the author seems reluctant to stick with a topic long enough to delve deeply enough into it. Neves's tendency is to glide in and out of discussions; this ends up providing only a glancing introduction to the contemporary and theoretical issues he insightfully raises. Thus, while he presents various forms of the illicit—in art, media, screens, piracy, fakes, etc., and these forms are shown to be pervasive in contemporary Beijing life (as they are elsewhere)—and while various cultural theories are introduced as ways to illuminate the problems—there is so little sustained discussion that the curious reader is unable to gain a grounded sense of the dimensions of each issue. Perhaps a more sustained approach would have yielded a more consistently excellent book. Let me put my cards on the table: I am a historian of modern China by discipline, although I am trained in cultural studies as well. My own preference is to combine a historical approach with cultural studies to arrive at a better vantage on both, thus to situate China in various worlds. Neves's approach is similarly global. It is steeped in theoretical texts from an extensive cultural studies tradition, and his facility with these texts is impressive. He is firm in his conviction (which I enthusiastically share) that this theoretical tradition can help make China and/in the world legible. He is also clear (and I share this perspective as well) that China should not be exceptionalized. This approach sets him apart from many cultural discussions that wish to uphold the unique "uniqueness" of China and its incomparability to anywhere else on the planet. Happily, Neves will have none of that. By the same token, he skips among and between theoretical texts so sequentially and rapidly that the process often robs him (and the reader) of his voice. This is, to be sure, a style of writing/thinking/performing. It is not clear to me whether this is a chosen style or one demanded by his discipline. Whatever the case, it makes for a frustrating experience: not because there aren't insights—there are plenty, and Neves is clearly a careful observer and interlocutor—but rather because the relation between theory and topic often seems arbitrary. And the skipping around ultimately detracts from rather than illumines individual topics. Following Neves down the abstracted theory paths becomes wearying. Neves sets out to question linear narratives and normative notions of "development" as they get bandied about with regard to China—and [End Page 186] other non-Western places—by scholars of all persuasions and from most parts of the globe. He wishes to add ambivalence to the theorization of development by introducing such concepts as "underglobalization" and "political society" while elaborating on the entangled relations between culture, media, urbanism, and the global creative industries that underpin and provide the dominant logic for these formations. Thus, while development...

The Feeling of History: Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia By Charles Hirschkind

This is a curious book. It appears at times not so much as a work of scholarly history and more as a manifesto of some sort of intellectual gnosticism. The author begins: Muslim Iberia did not disappear from history with the seizure of Granada in 1492 by Christian armies, as our history books have it. Rather, forced into hiding, it continued on as an invisible warp within the fabric of Spanish society. The medieval realm of al-Andalus and contemporary Spain and Portugal, in other words, do not belong to two distant historical periods, one medieval and one modern, but cohere in a single continuous development, unbroken by the periodicities imposed by modern historiography. (p. 1) Any student of Islamic Spain is well aware that Islam here was not eradicated in 1492. Likewise, there are few (at least since the time of Américo Castro) who would not recognize that the Islamicate culture (including the Jewish culture) was essential to the development of modern Iberian culture. Not so with the suggestion (the ahistorical hyperbole) that the histories of al-Andalus and contemporary Spain and Portugal represent an ‘unbroken continuum’. Apparently, neither the mass exile of the descendants of the Peninsula’s Muslim inhabitants between 1609 and 1614, the eradication of Arabic, the colonial estrangement vis-à-vis the Maghrib of a Spanish Empire creaking towards modernity, nor the relentless historical, cultural and demographic churn of four centuries constituted a ‘disruption’.

Harmony and Discord between Sovereignty and the Body Politic in Edward Forset's Comparative Discourse

In the year 1606 Edward Forset published his quite curious book, under the title, A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique. His book is an example of the glorification of the idea of sovereignty, and thus requires more attention in the shadow of the works of Hobbes and Bodin. Forset is mostly preoccupied with the analogy between bodies natural and politic. In European political theory, starting with the 12th century, with John of Salisbury and his famous treatise Policraticus, one can notice the emergence of a political metaphor consisting in drawing an analogy between the medieval state and the human body. Furthermore the medieval and early modern mind was dominated by the idea that man was a microcosm which faithfully mirrored, on a lesser scale, the universal macrocosm. That was the basis for the analogy between the human body and the state and it was openly acknowledged by political and literary authors, such as Forset or the more famous James IV and I, king of England and Scotland. My aim with this paper is to explore the ideological backround of Forset's work, which could serve as a solution for the different and also ambigious historical approches, that concerned this work. In my reading the numerous inconsistencies of the discourse can only be processed if we approach the text as an ideological performance and not as an example of social and political conflict.

Place of Virtue Ethics within the Post-Classical Discourse on ḥikma

Preserved in what seems to be a unique manuscript at the Bodleian Library, al-Nafs wa-l-rūḥ wa-sharḥ quwāhumā (The Soul and the Spirit together with an Explanation of Their Faculties) of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) is a curious book. At the beginning, the author decribes the text as part of the philosophical sciences (as opposed to the religious ones) and clarifies that it deals with ʿilm al-akhlāq, meaning Aristotelian virtue ethics. The text is divided into two parts, the first explaining subjects of philosophical psychology, such as the nature of the soul, its faculties, and its survival after the death of the body. The second part explains how one can “treat” or “heal” the soul from certain negative character traits or vices. In both parts, the book makes liberal use of quotations from the Qur’an, from prophetical ḥadīth, and from sayings by other prophets and sages. This is quite unlike any other “book on philosophy” that Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī wrote.The article explains the distinction between philosophical and non-philosophical books in Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and what it means for a book to belong to the former group. Al-Rāzī’s works in the theoretical fields of philosophy (logic, the natural sciences, metaphysics, and theology) do not use evidence derived from revelation and hardly ever refer to it. The relationship between revelation and the practical disciplines of philosophy (among them ethics), however, is different from the relation between revelation and theoretical philosophy. This difference leads in Avicenna to an almost complete abandonment of the practical disciplines. In authors who follow Avicenna in his Farabian approach to the relationship between philosophy and revelation, it leads to hybrid works such as al-Nafs wa-l-rūḥ wa-sharḥ quwāhumā that follow a philosophical agenda but employ means and strategies that mimic and imitate revelation.

Émotions pures et sentiments masqués dans les "Contes d’enfants indiens" de Marguerite Yourcenar

En 1985 parait un ouvrage curieux, très peu connu du lectorat de Marguerite Yourcenar, à destination de la jeunesse : Contes d’enfants indiens. Cet ensemble d’historiettes enfantines présente un cas unique où l’auteur officiel s’efface derrière les textes et illustrations produits par des enfants et conçus pour des enfants. Libérant la parole de jeunes d’une réserve indienne du Maine, elle ne remanie aucunement leur écriture abrupte. Dans cette création sans fioriture, l’émotion est palpable mais le sentiment ne se dit pas. Nous faisons entendre la voix de ces petits Amérindiens de la tribu des Abenakis en analysant la structure des récits, empreints d’un folklore traditionnel ancestral, magnifiés par des dessins criant leur histoire. Mots clés : contes traditionnels, folklore amérindien, écriture d’enfants, dessins d’enfants, rêveset cauchemars d’enfants.

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Marion Rust For the second issue of 2021, we have many exciting awards to announce. The Early American Literature Book Prize for 2020 has been awarded to Lindsay DiCuirci, an associate professor of English at UMBC (the University of Maryland, Baltimore County), for Colonial Revivals: The Nineteenth Century Lives of Early American Books, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2019. A full statement regarding this award can be found on page 323 of this issue. Congratulations, Professor DiCuirci! The Modern Language Association Forum on Early American Literature has awarded its 2019 Richard Beale Davis Prize, which honors the best essay to appear in Early American Literature in a single year, to two cowinners: Reed Gochberg, for "Circulating Objects: Crèvecoeur's 'Curious Book' and the American Philosophical Society Cabinet," and Ana Schwartz, for "Mercy as Well as Extremity": Forts, Fences, and Fellow Feeling in New England Settlement." Both essays appeared in EAL 54, no. 2 (2019). A full statement regarding this award can be found on page 325 of this issue. Congratulations, Professors Gochberg and Schwartz! Congratulations are also due to Ajay Kumar Batra, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania, on winning the American Literature Society's yearly 1921 Award for Best Essay in American Literature (untenured category) for "Reading with Conviction: Abraham Johnstone and the Poetics of the Dead End." This essay appeared in Early American Literature's special issue "Beyond Recovery" (55, no. 2), guest edited by Professors Steffi Dippold and Lauren Coats. Thanks to the ALS for sponsoring this award, to the guest editors for including it in their special issue, and to Ajay Kumar Batra for his fine work. The EAL issue here is hard to sum up. Its four essays in the field of Black studies address crowd action (Betsy Erkkila), multispecies narrative (Kyle Keeler), scholarly projection (Rio Bergh), and embodied Black knowledge (Samantha Pinto). Two other contributions correct long-standing [End Page 327] misappraisals of key texts in the field: early seventeenth-century iconoclast Thomas Morton's May Day poem (Robert Hudson Vincent) and the anonymous post-Revolutionary "Panther Captivity" narrative (Alex Gergely). A revisionary assessment of fictional interventions in eighteenthcentury theories of consciousness (Matthew Rebhorn), a teasing out of literary nationalist satirical employments of the British Gothic (Ellen Bulford Welch), a review of new methodologies in the study of natural history (Elizabeth Polcha) and a cowritten twenty-first-century "beast fable" in the voice of a raven and a bobolink (Chi-Ming Yang and Sarah Rivett) round out the list. Taken together, these works overlap in their engagements with animal studies, Black studies, cognitive literary studies, gender studies, genre studies, natural history studies, settler colonial studies, textual criticism, Wampanoag studies, and more. This issue attests to the range, as well as quality, of work now going on in the capacious field of early American literary studies. I commend it to your attention. [End Page 328] Copyright © 2021 The University of North Carolina Press

From Pugwash to Putin: A Critical History of US-Soviet Scientific Cooperation. By Gerson S. Sher (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2019) 306 pages, $32.94

This is a curious book—part oral history of scientists engaged in international scientific cooperation, part commentary on the differences between Soviet-style science and U.S. scientific research, part history and analysis of U.S./USSR scientific cooperation, and part observation of the impact of scientific cooperation on foreign affairs after the fall of the Soviet Union. Sher, who was engaged for many years in the management of exchange programs between the United States and the Soviet Union and later Russia, speaks with knowledge and experience of the many programs begun in the dying days of the Soviet Union and continued thereafter. In particular, he chronicles the efforts to save what was left of the Russian scientific establishment after 1991 and restore it to some semblance of its previous status.Sher is a good writer; many of his examples and vignettes are engaging and informative. But he is neither a historian nor a scientist, though he is knowledgeable about the methods of both history and science. Much of the book is devoted to a history, as he experienced it, of the science agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union shortly before 1991, and then a detailed history of the relations after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Because of his focus on the fall of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, he has little to say about the years immediately after World War II, a period with its own revealing lessons of scientific cooperation with the Soviet Union. The centerpiece of the book, however, is an annotated history of experience in the programs of cooperation with the “new” Russia, presented in the words of the participants along with commentary interpolated by Sher. Problems, successes, scientific accomplishments, foreign-policy effects, human impacts, and bureaucratic difficulties are described, usually in the words of those engaged in the programs, occasionally by foreign-policy officials.The book does not fit into any specific realm of analysis—neither the history of science, international affairs, nor bureaucratic politics. Rather, it is a personal memoir analyzing Sher’s experiences in a little-studied area of international scientific cooperation. There have been other more typical disciplinary analyses of international scientific cooperation from the perspective of international affairs, as well as of the Russian state's influence on international policy after the Soviet Union's demise, the relevance of scientific cooperation to strategic issues, or even the relationship of research to scientific advance. Sher offers suggestions about how international cooperation affects these areas and makes several points about their relevance to foreign policy, though they tend to be anecdotal and sometimes based on personal reflections about prominent officials (Henry Kissinger takes his lumps) or about the Department of State in general. The occasional digressions of that kind, even when deserved, do not point to an underlying disciplinary analysis.Notwithstanding the personal nature of the history presented, the material does make contributions to specific disciplinary areas. Many of the comments about the differences between the structure and assumptions of the Russian/Soviet style of scientific research and that of the West, particularly the United States, are instructive and useful inputs to the history of science. The interesting and intriguing views that Sher is able to obtain from significant actors in cooperative programs often help to illustrate many of the problems and successes encountered in the cooperative research programs. They provide useful cautions about issues that can arise in cooperative efforts across nations and cultures. This book is largely a personal memoir, interesting but not a discipline-based or interdisciplinary analysis.

Speculations on Eudora Welty's Reading of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen

Speculations on Eudora Welty's Reading of Seven Gothic Tales and Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen Pearl Amelia McHaney Eudora Welty reviewed Isak Dinesen's 1957 Last Tales and two scholarly studies of the Danish writer's oeuvre for the New York Times Book Review. She read, and passed on to William Maxwell, Dinesen's essay "On Mottoes of My Life," and she also contributed to a memorial tribute for Dinesen (the pen name of Karen Blixen) in 1965. These commentaries are part of Welty's oeuvre and have been reprinted and made available to readers and scholars. Until 2019, the first known book review that Welty had published was of Marguerite Steedman's But You'll Be Back for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1942. Recently, however, I learned that in 1938 Welty had reviewed Dinesen's memoir Out of Africa in her hometown paper, the Jackson Clarion Ledger.1 In her review, Welty also acknowledges having read Seven Gothic Tales, Dinesen's first book. By 1938, when she first reviewed Dinesen's work, Welty had traveled throughout Mississippi for her five months as a junior publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration and had had one photography exhibit in the Jackson Municipal Art Gallery and two photography exhibits in New York City. She had published eleven short stories in truly "little" magazines and had written and burned the first version of "Petrified Man." Edward O'Brien had reprinted "Lily Daw and the Three Ladies" in his edition of The Best Short Stories of 1938. Welty was eighteen months away from receiving Diarmuid Russell's invitation to be her primary reader and agent. She was years away from writing a novel, and nearly a half-century would pass before she would write her own memoir. To write a book review is to read closely and then to think, almost from afar, of which details and which impressions to gather and share. To review Out of Africa, the second book by Dinesen, Welty begins by commenting that "'Seven Gothic Tales' appeared several years ago under the name Isak Dinesen. It was a widely read book of ornate, metaphysical stories designed carefully and with a sharp obviously feminine humor, to delight and tantalize the reader who likes curious and unreal things" (1). This brief summary of Dinesen's first book illustrates, most importantly, that Welty had read Seven Gothic Tales prior to writing her Out of Africa review, and, in addressing the "reader who likes curious and unreal things," she begins [End Page 125] the habit of reviewing from a reader's perspective—a point of view she maintains in nearly all of her book reviews. The library of books in Welty's home includes the 1934 Random House Modern Library edition of Seven Gothic Tales that reprints the Smith and Haas publication with Dorothy Canfield's introduction. This first collection of Dinesen's tales was an April Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was on the New York Times Best Seller list for April, May, June, and July of 1934. The book is a complex exploration of the Gothic: sudden dark, stormy, windy weather causing drastic consequences; ancient worlds bearing down on the present through elaborate allusions; corporeal ghosts and shadowy people; unexpected, fantastic events; death; strange visages and bodies; and riddles posed to the characters and readers. Dinesen asks, "'What is it,' she said very slowly, in the manner of a sibylla, 'which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused?'" (Seven 115).2 Peter Monro Jack reviewed Seven Gothic Tales in the New York Times Book Review under the headline "A Strange Book for Our Time." Jack found the tales "curious" with an "almost Proustian sensibility that illuminates, by refining, the romantic mood." Citing that Dinesen's "pattern is as flexible as Scheherazade's," Jack asserts that Dinesen's "inventiveness is apparently inexhaustible," and he concludes, "This is a work of the imagination, very subtle and graceful; a rare and curious book, it will be white magic to many and mere mummery to others … though both are in the book, there is more magic than mummery" (6). This evaluation, I believe, would...

Circulating Objects: Crèvecoeur's "Curious Book" and the American Philosophical Society Cabinet

Circulating Objects: Crèvecoeur's "Curious Book" and the American Philosophical Society Cabinet

Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England: Theology, Imagery, Devotion by John Munns

Reviewed by: Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England: Theology, Imagery, Devotionby John Munns Rodney Thomson Munns, John, Cross and Culture in Anglo-Norman England: Theology, Imagery, Devotion( Bristol Studies in Medieval Cultures), Woodbridge, The Boydell Press, 2016; hardback; pp. xvii, 333; 61 b/w illustrations, 12 colour plates; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781783271269. This is a curious book in that it is so hard to see what the author's focus is on. Right at the start he associates the 'affective turn' in devotional practice that began in the late eleventh century with 'the story of the transformation of the image of Christ on the cross from rex triumphansto Christus patiens' (p. 1). And yet he never explains what the association consists of. In fact the book is all about the imagery of the Cross and Crucified as it can be discerned throughout twelfth-century England. The author has chosen to restrict his choice of evidence to England, and (in the main) to images rather than the written word. He may be right to do so, but this choice incurs two methodological difficulties. Firstly, as all know, the Henrician Reformation entailed the almost entire destruction of illuminated liturgical books and artefacts incorporating precious metals and stones. Secondly, as a consequence of this, the evidence that survives, other than the books, does so in small parish churches, not great cathedral and abbey buildings. The author copes with the first problem by interpreting 'English' as widely as possible, drawing into discussion objects from continental churches but in English style. Some of their connections with England are dubious, some inadmissible. The most notable example of the latter is the so-called Cloisters Cross, formerly known as the 'Bury Cross'. The author is right to say that the case for its having been made at and for Bury St Edmunds Abbey was best advanced in the only monograph on it (Elizabeth C. Parker and Charles T. Little, The Cloisters Cross: Its Art and Meaning, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994). But research since has demurred, and current opinion locates its origin within the region where it first reappeared in modern times: central Europe, probably within the territory of the Empire. The second problem merely raises the question of whether objects from small churches mirror those which once adorned the larger, or whether they are quite different; there is no way of knowing. All in all, the author is more comfortable in discussing [End Page 242]scholarship on the individual origins than in fitting them into his large theme. I am unsure what light his discussion of them sheds on the larger issue, but they at least introduce the reader to a fascinating group of sometimes obscurely known artworks and their immediate contexts. Rodney Thomson University of Tasmania Copyright © 2019 Parergon

The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture by Courtney Fullilove

Reviewed by: The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture by Courtney Fullilove Shane Hamilton (bio) The Profit of the Earth: The Global Seeds of American Agriculture. By Courtney Fullilove. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. 288. Hardcover $40. This is a curious book. Nearly every page conveys the author's curiosity and her insatiable appetite for collecting historical anecdotes, allegories, oddities, and, befitting the subject, seeds. (Interspersed throughout the text are "field notes" in which Fullilove uses tales of her seed-collecting explorations in central Asia to offer wide-ranging musings on how seeds should be understood as "deep-time technologies.") The writing is sophisticated, erudite, and mesmerizing, yet much like the lines from Ecclesiastes from which the title is drawn, this book is remarkably gnomic. The central theme is clear enough: the book examines the "collection, circulation, and preservation of seeds and plants" (p. 10) that were brought to the United States in the nineteenth century as part of a political and technoscientific project of agricultural development. But rather than narrating a straightforward history of the agricultural innovations of private enterprises and public institutions in the period, Fullilove's chapters are intentionally destabilizing, producing uncertainty rather than clarity. The disorienting nature of the text is intended to support the central argument of the book, which tellingly appears only on the penultimate page of the main text: "Agricultural expansion in the United States, rather than an effervescence of innovation, was a muddled and circuitous practice of accumulation, rebranding, and reorganization of diverse intellectual and material resources in new institutions of commerce and governance" (p. 220). [End Page 990] Fascinating stories emerge in this circuitous history, such as the efforts of an antebellum huckster to market "Wyandot" maize as wondrously productive due to its supposed encapsulation of indigenous knowledge. We also learn of how the U.S. Patent Office and the U.S. Department of Agriculture worked to gather and distribute seeds and plants to American farmers—for example, wheat from southern Russia (successfully) and tea from China (unsuccessfully)—and how those institutions worked to obscure origins, casting plants "as products of nature rather than artifacts of accumulated knowledge and technological practice" (p. 65). Yet the book also dwells on the pharmacology of Echinacea; the politics of contemporary seed banks; a sci-fi novel about a pharmacist who journeys to the center of the earth via a Kentucky cave; the epistemology of time as explored by Fritz Lang in the 1927 film Metropolis; the contested periodization of the Anthropocene; and why some Mennonites were more successful farming wheat in Kansas than others. In other words, this is no ordinary history of agriculture. The book is bursting with pithy provocations, e.g.: "For seeds are not merely agricultural inputs, but symbols of prosperity and bounty masking the political-economic requirements of cultivation" (p. 124). Yet as a gnomic text, in which sentences, paragraphs, and chapters are often deeply mysterious regarding their meaning and purpose, the book often seems like the bureaucracy of patent medicine taxation explored in chapter 7: "a locus of disorder and provisional arrangement" (p. 192). Historians of technology will find the most interesting aspect of the book to be its discussion of seeds as "deep-time technologies." By this Fullilove means that seeds are "not products of nature" (p. 1) but instead encapsulate several millennia of interactions between human knowledge, labor, and the complex and often confounding raw materials of botanic reproduction. This is a thought-provoking concept, engendering sophisticated discourses on the epistemology of history, the politics of periodization, and the questionable assumptions underlying many histories of innovation. Fullilove is at her most convincing when she explicitly demonstrates how institutions committed to promoting agricultural development staked their claims to innovativeness by obscuring or erasing the deep histories of seeds. In the case of the aforementioned Wyandot corn, for instance, fraudulent claims of Indian provenance were made possible by the fact that Wyandot people "had been forcibly removed from the area ten years earlier" (p. 64). Or, in the case of "Turkey Red" wheat—known in southern Russia as "Krymka"—the Mennonite and Russian farmers who were sent into the Crimean peninsula as agricultural...

Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention. By MarySarah Bilder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 358 pp.Humboldt and Jefferson: A Transatlantic Friendship of the Enlightenment. By SandraRebok. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 220 pp.

Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention. By Mary Sarah Bilder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. 358 pp. Humboldt and Jefferson: A Transatlantic Friendship of the Enlightenment. By Sandra Rebok. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. 220 pp. These two curious books offer appraisals of America's third and fourth presidents. Neither of the authors is a historian--Mary Sarah Bilder is a legal scholar, while Sandra Rebok was trained as an anthropologist--and both studies are fundamentally flawed. Mary Sarah Bilder's inelegantly titled Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional analyzes in unprecedented detail the and development of Madison's on the Debates in the Constitutional Convention and thereby gives a much-needed and long-desired account of the transcription of and revisions the most important account of the drafting of the federal Constitution. Unfortunately, the work is marred by a number of shortcomings. Bilder purports answer three questions: First, how did Madison originally write the 'Notes,' and what story did they tell? Second, how and why did he revise the 'Notes' in subsequent years? Third, how does recognition of the original 'Notes' and their revision alter understanding of the and the Constitution? (4-5). The strength of the lies in Bilder's answer the second question--how and why Madison revised his Notes. In particular, her account of the revisions in 1789 is a fascinating discussion of how Madison transmuted the often heated exchanges of the summer of 1787 into a story of measured and polite deliberations. But Bilder's discussion of Madison's transcription of the Notes in 1787 paints an unconventional portrait, one that relentlessly assumes the most self-serving and venal motives. Madison, it seems, was vain, prickly, immature, a bit thick-headed, easily bored, cunning, and a blowhard. Bilder even berates the man for not taking detailed notes as Edmund Randolph presented the Virginia Plan. Why Madison, who had designed the proposal Randolph was presenting, would have needed take notes is not explained. Little escapes Bilder's censure; on page 93, we learn that Madison even used somewhat fancy Roman numerals. In the end, Bilder's description of Madison as catty, aggravated, frustrated, annoyed, and even furious (p. 6) seems less trenchant analysis than authorial projection. The answer the final question--how Madison's Hand might influence our understanding of the and the Constitution--Bilder, inexplicably, leaves largely the reader (p. 5). That a scholar who has researched the subject for years would abdicate the most important of her study is frankly astonishing. Throughout, Bilder struggles with basic concepts of historical method. She writes that the of the book is to show the importance of reading a primary document such as the 'Notes' with consideration of context, genre, audience, and subsequent provenance (6). But this is not the purpose of a work of history; it is the standard and minimal requirement of good historical scholarship. As well, Bilder seems be shocked that Madison was not completely objective. Like all historical documents, one degree or another, Madison's Notes reflects the author's biases and idiosyncrasies. This does not mean, however, that the Notes are still not the best and most complete account we have of the Convention. None of this is helped by Bilder's hopelessly wooden and choppy writing style: Congressional information fell along a spectrum of confidentiality. …

Rupert Croft-Cooke

In 1960 a curious book appeared, called English Cooking: A New Approach. The book was a brave and forlorn effort to rehabilitate traditional British cuisine. The timing was not ideal. By then, the days of rationing were forgotten and the influence of Elizabeth David, among other blights, had relegated British food to untouchable status. This articles puts English Cooking into historical context and discusses the attempts of other writers to preserve English foodways, noting Rupert Croft-Cooke's own opinions of their efforts while also providing a biographical account of Croft-Crooke's extraordinary life.

The Life Project Pearson Helen The Life Project 416pp £16.00 Penguin 9781846148262 184614826X

THIS IS a curious book. On the one hand, it looks and at times reads like fiction, while on the other, its content leans towards the factual. It examines British birth cohort studies, of which there have been many since the middle of the 20th century.

A Review of Voiture Minimum. Le Corbusier and the Automobile

Here is a full-on celebration of cars and someone’s addiction to cars. In its midst drives Le Corbusier. The book, Voiture Minimum. Le Corbusier and the Automobile (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 2011), has recently been published by Spanish architect and academic Antonio Amado. What a curious book. It is something between a detective story circling around determining the date of a single drawing (1928 or 1936) and, simultaneously, it is “Everything you always wanted to know about Le Corbusier and cars but were afraid to ask”.

The Limits of Jefferson Scholarship

The Limits of Jefferson Scholarship Garrett Ward Sheldon (bio) Maurizio Valsania . The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson's Dualistic Enlightenment. University of Virginia Press, 2011. vii + 207 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cloth); $25.00 (paper). This new book on Jefferson's political thought is written by a professor at the University of Torino, Italy, and published by "Mr. Jefferson's University" Press. Professor Valsania was a Visiting Fellow at the International Center for Jefferson Studies in Charlottesville, and this volume is published in a series entitled "Jeffersonian America" edited by Jan Ellen Lewis, Peter Onuf, and Andrew O'Shaughnessy. The book's thesis is that Jefferson's political thought deviated from the commonly believed Enlightenment optimism, rationalism, faith in progress, etc. This is an important subject and a potentially great contribution to our understanding of Jefferson, Early American political thought, and modern Western philosophy and history. Such an interesting and important thesis deserves a thorough, careful, and thoughtful study. Unfortunately, this book does not provide that. Instead, Professor Valsania presents, in increasingly florid language and wildly extravagant (and often incomprehensible) style, a simple statement of his thesis, requiring about five pages, and then proceeds to repeat it with ever more effusive, exaggerated idiolect to almost 200 pages. It is as if the author thinks an ever more excessive, extreme, and "poetical" expression of his theme, without the attending scholarly rigor and depth, will convince us of its validity and "dialectical" genius. Michael Zuckerman, a leading scholar of the Founding, describes this perhaps too tactfully in his prepublication blurb as "a distinctive point of view . . . and striking turns of phrase." Let's look at one of those striking turns of phrase: "Although the Enlightenment was a culture of performance, it was not an easy task to perform. Some compensatory beliefs were needed, and I suspect Jefferson harnessed his unabated version of optimism to this purpose. Was this just a trick? Was Jefferson sincere in his quite precritical optimism? Why did he boast this way? These are very difficult problems to sort out." [p. 54] [End Page 50] Yes. And the purpose of scholarship is—with thorough, careful research and reasoned thought—to "sort them out" and present them to the intellectual community in clear, coherent, and persuasive prose. Professor Valsania's book does not do this minimal requirement of a scholarly work. Instead, he presents a confused, rambling, at times frenetic outpouring of incoherent, emotional meditations that are disjointed, fragmented, and self-indulgent. If the book had been entitled "A European Historian's Stream of Consciousness on Life, Modernism, Post-Modernism, Hegelian Dialectics, and, By The Way, A Little on Jefferson" it would have been a more accurate description of the book. As it is, this is a sad example of the decline of academic scholarship, writing, and publishing in our own time. Even the syntax fails to come up to normal academic standards. "Wood's story is an excellent story on the whole" (p. 117). "Let me start with the old Jefferson" (p. 116). The author also frequently employs the first-person diction fitting for a memoir, but inappropriate to an academic work ("I am quite convinced that Jefferson was not unique as a traveler, but his travel certainly was," p. 15); and he seems addicted to putting often inconsequential words in quotes, perhaps to denote irony, a hidden philosophy, or some secret knowledge. For example on page 34: "The success of the Revolution demonstrated to Jefferson that the past was somehow always 'wrong' when compared to the new present." Or "even today, the 'appalling ocean' lying beyond the verdant land has many facets and elicits different answers" (p. 7) One struggles to comprehend this and many similarly flamboyant sentences in this curious book. Professor Valsania, one imagines, is a charismatic and entertaining speaker, but such jocularity does not always translate easily to written scholarship. Balancing sober judgment with artistic flourishes has always been difficult, as evinced by Marx (Groucho, not Karl). Some might try to explain and excuse these stylistic infelicities to a non-primary-English-speaking scholar; but other European Jefferson scholars write clearly and cogently, and with genuine brilliance and insight (one thinks of...

A Heretic in New Spain: Alberto Enríquez, Alias Brother Manuel de Quadros

Fray Manuel de Quadros's case was much talked about in the second half of the seventeenth century, when the Holy Inquisition of New Spain had returned to its floxedad antigua (old laziness) once the embers of the autos-da-fe that were the culmination of the persecution of practicing Jews during the Complicidad Grande (Great Complicity) had died (Inquisicion). (1) Quadros's case was truly unprecedented. For fifteen years the defendant was kept imprisoned and the inquisitors and clergymen involved were perplexed, the first proceedings begun in 1663 and Quadros's surrender to secular hands as a heretic ratified in 1678. Let us familiarize ourselves with Quadros's character and the context that formed him, since only then can we begin to intuit some of the possible motives in the trajectory that sent him to the stake, even if we may not understand his unique destiny in an era and a society in which heretics were already exceptional. Upon entering the Inquisition's jails on November 13, 1663, Quadros was un hombre de buen cuerpo, entrecano de barba, enjuto de rostro la nariz grande el pelo algo crespo la barba tambien, de edad al parecer de mas de 40 anos (a fit man, graying beard, skinny face with a large nose and somewhat curly hair and beard, apparently over forty) (Inquisicion). (2) The property confiscated from him was pitiable: an old torn book, Libro curioso, de phisonomia (curious book, about physiognomy), that dealt with the properties of things such as the herb rosemary, y tambien de experimentos (and also experiments), which included a perpetual lunar calendar; some small papers that contained little stones, fruit, and other seeds; old and dirty rags that contained pieces of ointment, dark powders, pieces of something resembling paint, little brushes, and a larger paintbrush. Eight pages that seemed to be about judiciary astrology and a little bag in the form of an animal's paw with five claws, enveloped in a sock and containing indigo ink, were also found on him. Quadros was extremely poor and his library was composed of a few booklets of quack prescriptions and pamphlets of popular astrology. In the first hearing that Quadros had before the inquisitors, he declared that he was forty-three years old, that his name was now Alberto Enriquez but had been Brother Francisco Manuel de Quadros, and that he was a member of the Franciscan order and General Confessor of the province of Lima in Peru. He said he was born in Tlaltenango, near Zacatecas, in New Spain, and took orders in Lima fourteen years ago, which he renounced only two years earlier. His trip to Peru and his return to New Spain was a veritable odyssey and an example of the mobility characteristic of some peninsular and Creole Spaniards who lived in the two great Viceroyalties of the seventeenth century, New Spain and Peru. (3) In fact, in 1621, when the prisoner was only one year old, his father suddenly abandoned Zacatecas in order to go to Peru, at that time at its peak in comparison with the situation that was beginning to affect New Spain around the same dates. Shortly thereafter, his mother and the children moved to Mexico, where the family lived until his father sent for them. His father was able to restore himself to a prosperous position in Peru. Accompanied by an uncle who also lived in Zacatecas, a black slave woman, and two black slave children, the family began an adventure which consisted of a trip by land--in sedan chairs and on the backs of Indians--and by sea, passing through Puebla, Oaxaca, Guatemala, Sonsonate, Realejo, Manta, Paita, Trujillo, Sana, and finally Callao, where they reunited with Quadros's father, who by that time had become the owner of ships and warehouses. The trip lasted a year, from the middle of 1632 until June 23, 1633, with interminable stops at various ports, as they waited for hypothetical departures. For reasons that were not stated, Quadros's father left his previous business to become the manager of the flour mill at the convent of Santa Clara in Lima. …

Introducing Research and Evidence-Based Practice for Nurses Jolley Jeremy Introducing Research and Evidence-Based Practice for Nurses 168pp Pearson Education 9780273719168 0273719165 [Formula: see text

This is a curious book of contradictions. On the one hand, it is easy to read, there is good use of humour and it offers sound advice. On the other, its title refers to evidence-based practice for nurses, but there is only one chapter devoted to it.

From conception to birth: ancient library sources of embryology and women anatomy kept in the Biblioteca Biomedica of the Università degli Studi di Firenze (Biomedical Library of Florence University).

The Biomedical Library of the University of Florence boasts a prestigious group of books collected at first in 1679 at the hospital "Santa Maria Nuova" and then continuously enriched in the course of time up today. The "Antique Collection" consists of 13 incunabola, hundreds of 16th-century books, more than one thousand books on medical subject from the 1600's, about six thousand 18th-century volumes and several large, valuable anatomical atlases. In this paper the most important, curious and fascinating books dealing with human ontogeny (from embryo generation to birth) and with female anatomy (mostly concerning pregnancy and childbirth) are reported in chronological order starting from the work of Hippocrates. Among the ancient sources useful for the reconstruction of the opinions about obstetrics there are also outstanding handbooks specifically edited for midwives. Many of these antique books are especially precious because they embed a great number of didactic pictures, some of which may compete against any modern book of anatomy, embryology and obstetric. Selected images from these books are shown.

Bettelheim: Living and Dying (review)

Reviewed by: Bettelheim: Living and Dying Kenneth Kidd David James Fisher. Bettelheim: Living and Dying. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. 180 pp. $57.00 (pb). "Anyone who writes a biography," Freud insisted to Arnold Zweig in 1936, "is committed to lies, concealments, hypocrisy, flattery and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth does not exist, and if it did we could not use it." David James Fisher opens his study of the controversial psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990) with this famous pronouncement, throwing down the gauntlet to the prevailing largely unflattering treatments of his subject. Bettelheim: Living and Dying isn't a biography per se but rather a volume with biographical tendencies, a collection of pieces written primarily about Bettelheim but also about his friend and fellow analyst Rudolf Ekstein (1912–2005). The book functions as eulogy and in fact includes memorial essays on Ekstein (Chapter 6) and Bettelheim (Chapter 9). The Ekstein-Bettelheim relationship is the subject of the longest chapter, Chapter 5, which includes reprints of twenty-two letters exchanged between them over several decades. Bettelheim: Living and Dying is also a memoir of sorts, detailing Fisher's relationship with Ekstein, his analyst for a decade, and also with Bettelheim, whom he befriended during the latter's final years. The book emerged from various essays and reviews, and all but Chapters 5 and 6 appeared previously in a 2003 German-language volume, Psychoanalytische Kulturkritik und die Seele des Menschen (Psychoanalytic Cultural Criticism and the Soul of Man). Perhaps thanks to its compositional history and its triangular energy, Bettelheim: Living and Dying is a curious book, engaging and often eloquent but not entirely persuasive as a rejoinder to Bettelheim's critics. At the time of his suicide in 1990, Bettelheim was one of the most respected psychologists in the world, praised for his work at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School in Chicago and for his writings on the Holocaust, autism, child abuse, kibbutz life, and fairy tales. Since his death, a more troubling portrait of Bettelheim has emerged, culminating in Richard Pollak's The Creation of Dr. B (1997), the second and most critical of the three Bettelheim biographies that have appeared to date. Pollak follows Nina Sutton (1996) in exposing Bettelheim's [End Page 127] forged credentials, pretended acquaintance with Freud, plagiarized writings, and exaggerated claims of clinical success. For Sutton, such lies or distortions are merely unfortunate, evidence of the man's complexity; she maintains that, whatever his faults, Bettelheim was a gifted therapist. Pollak, on the other hand, presents Bettelheim as a liar and a tyrant, underscoring his sexist attitude and autocratic tendencies, even alleging the sexual abuse of girl patients. In the most recent biography (2002), Bettelheim's friend and literary agent Theron Raines defends Bettelheim as a humane practitioner of tough love. Fisher, an analyst and cultural historian, likewise mounts a defense of Bettelheim, through a series of essays both personal and scholarly. Fisher clearly wants to set the record straight about Bettelheim, which suggests at least a little faith in biographical truth. In the introduction, he outlines an alternative view of Bettelheim, describing him as a self-made analyst who functioned outside the psychoanalytic establishment by choice as well as by situation. Bettelheim, he asserts, was a maverick, even a "psychoanalytic gadfly, someone who cajoled others to examine their received opinions, who demystified pieties, and who punctured dogma and shibboleths" (5). At the Sonia Shankman School in Chicago, which Bettelheim ran for almost thirty years, he preferred to hire "amateurs who were emotionally responsive and intellectually curious" (4) rather than clinically trained professionals with less obvious levels of empathy and curiosity. Here and throughout the book, Fisher presents Bettelheim as a passionate lay analyst who championed and practiced cultural criticism, hence the wide array of topics on which he wrote. Fisher sees Bettelheim as Freud's heir in this regard. As for the charges that Bettelheim was tyrannical and even abusive toward others at the Shankman School, Fisher concedes Bettelheim's darker impulses but insists that the School's "hothouse atmosphere" makes impossible any easy understanding of such. "It will take more time," he writes, "to sort out the nature of...