You probably have ten different places to be today, or at least it feels like it. Although that may be a little overwhelming, it’s a familiar feeling. A neatly cluttered schedule—that’s modern life, and perhaps you’re even proud of it. To the title character of Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, however, you
Many early perceptions of French culture saw France as “a secondary player or latecomer” to the Renaissance. Kings, Queens, and Courtiers: Art in Early Renaissance France, edited by Martha Wolff, asserts that French aristocrats and artists formed their artistic identity “by means of selective assimilation” and deserves a place as an originator of the Renaissance.
Adina Hoffman’s biography of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Al, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, is not a love story. Instead, it is a story of loss and how from that loss Taha has created art. Amira became a “muse” in Taha’s work, a symbol of everything his family lost when they became refugees; indeed, it was everything.
Before the trois-couleurs, before the Eiffel Tower, before the Larousse Gastronomique, a 15th-century artist named Jean Fouquet was at work creating images that were utterly and exclusively French – though, at that time, saying “That is so… French!” might not have been very meaningful to many people. In a new book entitled Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France: Art and Nation after the Hundred Years War, Erik Inglis shows us that Fouquet was, in fact, shaping a national identity through his court painting for Charles VII and Louis XI.
According to Taliban author, Ahmed Rashid, in this morning’s New York Times: “Afghanistan just got more dangerous and unpredictable.” Tim Bird and Alex Marshall’s Afghanistan: How the West Lost Its Way not only chronicles the United States’ longest war but also addresses the questions that have plagued the West since the early years.
With the Arab Spring affecting up to twenty nations, depending on the source, it is hard to know which warrants the most interest or concern. Victoria Clark, author of Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, argues that the United States needs to make understanding Yemen a priority or risk the cultivation of more terrorists.
What symbols do you wear every day? Does your haircut symbolize your gender? Are you wearing a ring to tell the world you’re married, you graduated from a certain college, or just that you can afford it? In A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence, from the Middle East to America, Leila Ahmed explores the trend of Muslim women embracing the veil since the 1970s after at least four decades of going bareheaded.
The “economy” has practically become a dirty word now. It’s usually the answer to the question, “What issue concerns Americans the most?” and has led to frantic searches for explanations. Whatever the “real” cause, one of the major scapegoats for the “Great Crisis,” as Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Kati Suominen call it, is globalization. In their book Globalization at Risk: Challenges to Finance and Trade, they argue that while globalization had a role in creating our current situation, we don’t have to send the Navy SEALs after it.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and its research institute, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), have announced that they will launch a landmark project in January of 2012: a digital archive of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art and a companion book series. From the Museum:
His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama turns 76 today, according to the best estimates. His role in Tibet is described by Sam van Schaik in Tibet: A History, which examines Tibetan history and politics from 600 C.E. to the present.