From the Wall Street Journal.
Full disclosure: Of the books listed, I’ve only read Crime and Punishment.
All posts by Lars Walker
Site of first Shakespeare theater found in London
Shakespeare acted himself, and staged his first plays, at a London site which is now being excavated.
The remains of a London theatre where William Shakespeare’s early plays including “Romeo And Juliet” were first performed have been discovered by archaeologists, a museum said Wednesday.
Shakespeare appeared at The Theatre in Shoreditch, east London, as an actor with a troupe called The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, which also performed his efforts as a playwright there.
Full story here.
Finding Atlantis, by David King
People always seem surprised to discover that institutions of higher learning tend to be raging battlegrounds of clashing egos on an epic scale.
The common stereotype of the professor is of a vague, mild-mannered oldster in an incorrectly buttoned sweater, blinking vaguely as he searches for the glasses that sit perched atop his forehead. In fact, scholars tend to be people who have all their lives been the smartest people in the room, suddenly thrust together into a single institution with a bunch of other people who’ve also always been the smartest people in the room, and resenting it. Add to this the fact that really smart people tend to grow up too busy with their interior worlds to bother with mundane exercises of basic interpersonal skills, and you’ve got the ingredients of gunpowder.
Finding Atlantis: A True Story of Genius, Madness, and an Extraordinary Quest for a Lost World tells the story of a man of extraordinary intellect and achievement who grew so enamored of his revolutionary theories that he failed in humility, university politics, and the judgment of posterity.
Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) was a Swede, the son of Gustavus Adolphus’ personal chaplain. As a young medical student he dissected a calf, in order to discover the source of a milky substance he saw in the carcass. The result was the discovery of the lymphatic system (although there is controversy as to who identified it first), and Rudbeck became a scientific celebrity. Appointed to the University of Uppsala, he oversaw the construction of a large dissection theater and a botanical garden (botany was another of his specialties). He was also much admired as a musician and singer. Continue reading Finding Atlantis, by David King
Repost: Damnation Street, by Andrew Klavan
(Tonight, another reposted Klavan review.)
One-line review of Andrew Klavan’s Damnation Street: “Woo-hoo!”
I got a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for Christmas, and Damnation Street was one of the books I chose to get with it. I don’t generally buy hardbacks, but I felt this was a special case.
It was, in fact, a more special case than I knew. Because it appears that Klavan’s Weiss and Bishop books (the previous ones are Dynamite Road and Shotgun Alley) are not going to be an ongoing series, but a trilogy (unless I read the ending wrong). Continue reading Repost: Damnation Street, by Andrew Klavan
Pauline Baynes, 1922-2008
Thanks once again to reader Dale, who alerted me to the recent death of Pauline Baynes, illustrator for both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. He also sent this link to an entry on her from Brian Sibley: The Blog.
A thumbs up
Our commenter Dale directed my attention to this very generous review of my book Wolf Time, at the Nearly Impossible Adventures blog.
My thanks to A. Walter.
A little slice of immortality
I got a nice “birthday present” last week. It was a free copy of this book. It was sent to me by its designer, who is the son of the author.
The story behind the gift goes like this. In the course of my researches for my novel, The Year of the Warrior, I made contact with a fine woman associated with a historical society in the Stavanger, Norway area. She put me in touch with Dr. Torgrim Titlestad of the University of Stavanger. Dr. Titlestad might be called a man with a mission. He’s a proponent of a revolutionary view of Norwegian history which traces the origins of the Kingdom of Norway to the western part of the country, rather than to the Oslo area, which has been the traditional, authorized view.
I promote the traditional view in TYOTW, by the way, mainly because I wasn’t aware of the new one when I wrote the first part of the book. If I’d known about the controversy, I’d have found a way to weasel around it. Continue reading A little slice of immortality
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008
We would be greatly remiss not to note the passing of one of the towering figures of the 20th Century, both in literature and in the wider arena of culture: Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn turned unbelievable suffering into vital art, and through that art helped to bring an end to a mighty evil in the world. Exiled to America, he found this country a deep disappointment. When he addressed students at Harvard on the subject of good and evil, he was booed. Yet he persevered, and triumphed. He was a Christian, of the Orthodox faith.
He wrote in The Gulag Archipelago:
Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil.
All copies not created equal
Because of technology, the word “copy” in relation to a document means something very different to us than it did to our ancestors. To us it means a photocopy or an electronic scan. But to past generations, it meant a second document done in pen and ink.
That would seem to be the explanation for the fact that the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum of Philadelphia has had an original copy of the document outlining the terms for Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox Courthouose for many years, and had stored it away thinking it was just a photostat copy.
Coldren said it had been glued to a cardboard backing and varnished, an apparent attempt to preserve it.
“Old photostat copies from the ’20s and ’30s are shiny like that, so this is why you’d think this is not a real document,” he said.
Full story here.
Rare books accessible online
The British Library is bringing some of the world’s rarest books online, with the intent of giving as wide an audience as possible the most accurate experience of reading the real thing.
Full story here.
Users will need to use a software program called “Turning the Pages.” At this point, 20 rare books are available for study.