The stunning retrospective of the works of Jacob Van Ruisdael and the accompanying catalog by Seymour Slive, Jacob Van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape, receive a substantial review in the most recent edition of The New York Review of Books. What Jacob van Ruisdael’s standing was in his own time is
“If anyone still harbors the fantasy that the business scandals of the past few years were the handiwork of just a few bad apples, they should read John C. Bogle’s Battle for the Soul of Capitalism,” writes Jeff Madrick in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. Madrick’s review comes out
Ben Bernanke will take over next week as Chairman of the Federal Reserve for Alan Greenspan, who is stepping down on Tuesday after more than 18 years on the job. “An extraordinary act to follow,” says Princeton Professor Alan Blinder, the Fed’s Vice Chairman under Greenspan in the mid-1990s, on
Called “the first great woman in history,” Hatshepsut reigned for two decades during Egypt’s early New Kingdom in the fifteenth century BCE. First acting as regent for her young nephew Thutmose III, in 1473 BCE she assumed the title Pharaoh and exercised the full powers of the throne as senior
Syrian President Bashar al-Asad has recently become the subject of intense international scrutiny. The United Nations probe into the assassination of Lebanese Premier Rafik al-Hariri has stepped up its investigation of the Syrian regime in recent weeks, after the former Syrian vice president, in an interview on al-‘Arabiyya television, claimed
This day marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is perhaps the most remarkable figure in American history: the greatest statesman of his age, he played a pivotal role in the formation of the American republic. He was also a pioneering scientist, a bestselling author, the
Back when spies were spies, they spied by the rules—with the exception perhaps of those who did their spying for totalitarian regimes. The Constitution of the Soviet Union, for example, guaranteed the privacy of correspondence, but the government still read people’s private mail. By the end of the twentieth century,
“An enthralling new book,” says the Boston Globe in its recent review of Composers’ Voices From Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music, by Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve. The book and the two-CD set that accompanies it present a host of interviews with and about the
Just in time to coincide with the launch of the Bush Administration’s “Foreign Language Initiative,” Yale University Press has launched its new World Languages website. Unlike any other publisher, the Yale University Press language program publishes materials in both commonly taught and less commonly taught languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Kurdish,