May 9, 2011

Things Noted Here & There

by Cliopatria

David D'Arcy, "The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Islamic galleries will dwarf rivals," The National, 8 May, previews the opening of the Met's new wing of 15 galleries devoted to the history of Islamic art.

Tessa Hadley, "Love in Literature," Guardian, 7 May, reviews Simon May's Love: A Secret History.

Paul Dietz, "The Founding Fathers and Their Gardens," NYT, 6 May, reviews Andrea Wulf, Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation.

On the 300th anniversary of David Hume's birth, Robert Zaretsky, "A Philosopher in Love," NYT, 6 May, finds the philosopher's claim that reason is a slave to passion illustrated in the his life.

Clancy Martin, "The Scientific Revolt Against Death," NYT, 6 May, reviews John Gray's The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death.

Sugata Bose, "Do or Die: The enigma of Mahatma Gandhi," Harvard Magazine, May/June, reviews Joseph Lelyveld's Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India.

Alvin Powell, "Evolution of ‘final solution'," Harvard Gazette, 21 April, reports on a conference opening "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," a traveling exhibit now at Harvard Medical School's Countway Library of Medicine.

Edward Rothstein, "What Shostakovich Was Really Expressing," NYT, 6 May, reviews Wendy Lesser's Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets.

Francis Fukuyama, "Friedrich A. Hayek, Big-Government Skeptic," NYT, 6 May, reviews Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty. The Definitive Edition. (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume XVII.) Ronald Hamowy, ed.