Hannah Arendt was among the most eminent twentieth-century political theorists. Born in Germany in 1906, she came of age during the darkest of “dark times.” Although born into a supposedly assimilated or “Germanized” and unobservant Jewish family, she felt the sting of anti-Semitism early on. She was 28 when Hitler came to power, doubling down on already stringent anti-Semitic laws. In the course of her research on anti-Semitism, the Gestapo arrested and imprisoned Arendt. After eight days, she was released to await trial. She fled her native Germany for France, settling in Paris. Now stateless and a citizen of nowhere, she was without protection of the law and subject to internment and deportation to Germany. Once again, she escaped, first to Switzerland and then to Portugal, and finally to the United States. The theme of statelessness and its dangers runs like a red thread through her political writings.  Some scholars, myself included, have attempted to trace the influence of Arendt on American political thought. Richard H. King’s Arendt and America turns the tables and tries to trace America’s influence on Arendt’s political thought. He is remarkably successful in this effort.  Steeped in Continental philosophy, particularly in German Idealism, Arendt’s arrival on American shores provided a salutary shock. Like many immigrants, she was immensely grateful to be taken in and spared the horrors of the Holocaust. She wrote to her friend and mentor Karl Jaspers, “I am always thankful that I ended up here [in America]. For my citizenship test [in 1951], I learned a bit of American constitutional history—really great [grossartig] down to the smallest detail—and much of it still lives.” Who but Arendt would prepare for her citizenship test by reading the works of the American founders! “It’s breathtakingly exciting and wonderful, the American Revolution . . . and the founding of the republic. Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, John Adams. What men. And when you look at what’s there now, what a comedown.” Not only were presidents Truman and Eisenhower mediocre men, but what passes for politics in America—with the pull and tug of competing interest groups—is far removed from the republican ideas of liberty (understood as the freedom to participate in politics) and civic equality. One of the more striking features of Arendt’s political thinking is how much of it is concerned with loss. With chapter and essay titles like “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure” and “What Was Freedom?” one gets a sense of her longing for what has been lost and her hope for its rediscovery and restoration. In On Revolution, she contributed significantly to the rediscovery of the republican tradition of political thought and action, along with Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, J.G.A. Pocock, and other American historians. (The first, though unacknowledged, contribution to this rediscovery of the republican tradition was Zera Fink’s The Classical Republicans in 1944, which fell almost immediately into undeserved obscurity.)  The two great themes of Arendt’s political thought are her critical dissection of totalitarianism in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and her attempted recovery of the Republican tradition of political thought in On Revolution (1963) and Between Past and Future (1963). For her, writing On Revolution was “an act of gratitude” to the nation that had granted her the gift of citizenship. Parts of that path-breaking book read almost like a love letter to her adopted nation, its founders, and the institutions they created. What Arendt loved most about America were its ideas and ideals, from the Revolution to the constitutional founding. She decidedly did not love what America later became: a capitalist consumer society in which liberty referred foremost to the free market—the very antithesis of republican liberty.  In the early 1950s, anyone who spoke or wrote critically of capitalism and, admiringly, not of communism but certain communists, such as Rosa Luxemburg, or was married—as Arendt was to a former communist (Heinrich Blücher)—had a target on her back. Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade spread a wide net in which Arendt and many others could easily be snared. As King notes, Arendt kept her suitcase packed in case she needed to make a quick exit, as she had done from Nazi Germany and from France in her youth. Fortunately for her and many others, McCarthy’s campaign imploded from its own excesses. Even so, she never lost the fear of exile and “statelessness,” about which she wrote so searingly and poignantly.  To be without a country—as Arendt had been—is very nearly to be deprived of one’s humanity. What makes us fully human is the capacity to think, speak, and act politically as citizens. As citizens, we engage in “representative thinking,” that is, imagining ourselves in the place of our fellow citizens to discover why they believe what they believe and think and act as they do. Putting ourselves in their shoes and themselves in ours is an enlarging experience. Needless to say, this has now been all but obliterated in our age of hostile tribal politics (which Arendt would say is not really politics at all). Her hope was for “the recovery of the public world” in which citizenship is much more capacious than mere legal status. To read Arendt on the possibility of politics as a liberating and enlarging activity is a bracing experience. To see America as Arendt did—as a civic republic populated by active and engaged citizens—is to learn about the treasure we have lost but which some of us, anyway, hope to recover.  King’s Arendt and America offers original and insightful accounts of Arendt’s major works, especially those written in and influenced by her adopted country. 

Ross King has published three engaging books, over the past sixteen years or so, that describe the creation of three of the best-known works of the Italian Renaissance: Florence’s Il Duomo (Brunelleschi’s Dome, 2000); the fresco ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling, 2002); and The Last Supper, the subject of this review. While Leonardo and The Last Supper offers less insight into the working method and problems confronted by the artist than the previous two books, King still reveals the fascinating background to the creation of the masterpiece, insights into the painting itself, and, as a backdrop, the political machinations of Leonardo’s patron, Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. He also spices the text with a few swipes at the twentieth-century art historian, Bernard Berenson. The text is accompanied by 48 black-and-white and nine color illustrations. There is also a map of Italy during the period, a Sforza genealogy, and an illustrative who’s who around the table of The Last Supper.

Leonardo first came to the duke’s attention in 1482 when he traveled to Milan from Florence and soon ingratiated himself in the duke’s court. Lodovico commissioned Leonardo to create what is arguably the latter’s best-known unfinished work: the bronze horse (originally it was to have included a rider) to commemorate Lodovico’s father, Francesco Sforza. The statue was to have surpassed any previous equestrian statue cast in Italy—twenty-three feet high with rider and rearing on its hind legs no less. For this, seventy-five tons of bronze had been set aside. Yet, as King relates, "By the end of 1493, Leonardo had spent as many as eight or ten years on the giant equestrian monument.” At the beginning of 1494, “[he] was putting the finishing touches to his clay model and deliberating the practicalities of casting in bronze” (p. 11). Then politics intervened.

In a ploy that presaged Niccolò Machiavelli, Duke Lodovico, in an attempt to keep some of his rivals at each other’s throats, invited the King of France, Charles VIII, into Italy to claim the Kingdom of Naples, then under the reign of the newly crowned Alfonso. Alfonso’s daughter was married to Giangaleazzo Sforza, the rightful Duke of Milan whose title Lodovico had usurped. The ease with which Charles swept down the Italian peninsula alarmed Lodovico and encouraged Charles’s cousin Louis, the Duke of Orléans, who also had a tenuous right to the duchy of Milan. After making various alliances (notably with Venice), and switching sides more than once, the perfidious Lodovico belatedly realized the French were a far greater threat to him. Eventually, the bronze set aside for the memorial statue was requisitioned to be cast into cannons, thus ending that artistic venture.

King provides a mini-profile of Leonardo’s life leading to these events, including his apprenticeship with the Florentine painter and goldsmith Andrea del Verrocchio from the mid-1460s to the early 1470s. At this point, King allows himself a bit of speculation: “Verrocchio must have been the one who first awakened Leonardo’s interest in things such as geometry, knots, and musical proportions—and their application to artistic design” (p. 29). He supports this assertion by linking a motif in Verrocchio’s tomb slab for Cosimo de’ Medici with Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.

King judges Leonardo received the commission to paint The Last Supper onto the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie either at the end of 1494 or the beginning of 1495. At the same time as Leonardo’s commission, the Milanese painter Giovanni Donato da Montorfano was commissioned to paint the crucifixion scene on the opposite wall. King points out that the pairing of the two scenes was not unusual. Perhaps Montorfano was chosen as he was an experienced frescoist whereas Leonardo had no experience in fresco painting.

Here King describes the usual technique for painting a fresco—the drawing of the cartoon (a stencil of sorts) and the painting directly onto the wet plaster—which he describes in detail in Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling. Leonardo eschewed this technique and painted directly onto the wall—thus The Last Supper is not technically a fresco. The wall onto which Leonardo painted was a surface of his own creation. “Once his first coat of plaster dried,” King writes, “he covered it with a thinner, slightly granular layer of calcium carbonate mixed with magnesium and a binding agent probably made from animal glue. Once this preparation layer had dried, he added an undercoat of lead white: a primer, in effect, to seal the plaster and enhance the mural’s luminosity” (p. 107). Leonardo did this because instead of working in the traditional egg tempera he used oils, which were gaining acceptance. Perhaps this extra prep work caused the delay which troubled Duke Lodovico and the friars at Santa Maria delle Grazie; Leonardo finished his masterpiece in 1498, whereas Montorfano completed The Crucifixion three years earlier.

The book excels in showing Leonardo’s mature powers as an artist. King describes a technique in which seeming faults in the painting come together to create, arguably, the greatest piece of iconography in Western civilization. King also places Leonardo’s Last Supper in the context of other Last Supper paintings of the period. Like many of the other Last Supper paintings, Leonardo’s mural takes as its starting point the moment after Christ has revealed he will be betrayed by one of the disciples later that evening. Thus the “action” of the picture is born of surprise, denial, and anger. Perhaps even embarrassment. King analyzes this action, including Christ’s near physical connection to Judas. Leonardo differed in his Last Supper from many of his predecessors in that St. John is not resting his head upon Christ’s breast. Instead, he is inclined away from Christ, the better to hear what St. Peter is saying. He also points out the figure of Christ is out of proportion vis-à-vis the disciples. None of this information is new, of course, but King’s style brings a fresh approach to it all. King also posits the idea that the dining table and linen mirror that which the friars used in the refectory. To that end, he discusses the effect of the mural on the dining friars and at what point in the room the mural appears to be an extension of the refectory itself. He also discusses the food on the table, the tapestries on the walls, and what many people miss, the Sforza coat of arms on the mural’s back wall.

An epilogue describes the downfall of Lodovico Sforza (captured and imprisoned by the French) and his death in 1508, Leonardo’s own last years, and the fate of The Last Supper. According to at least one Renaissance commentator, the mural began to deteriorate about twenty years or so after Leonardo had completed it, before the end of his life. But hubris, time, climate, inept restorations, nor cutting a door in the wall could succeed in destroying the mural. Neither could the RAF which bombed Santa Maria delle Grazie during the Second World War. King not only discusses the causes of The Last Supper’s deterioration (primarily working with oils and painting onto a drywall rather than a wet plaster), but he also catalogs the errors made in restoration over the centuries, including that done in the mid-twentieth century. “Some critics have argued that The Last Supper is now 80 percent by the restorers and 20 percent by Leonardo. The mural’s restoration has become a puzzle of spatiotemporal continuity…,” King sums up toward the end (p. 274). Yet for King and for the rest of us except the most persnickety this is enough. “The Last Supper is arguably the most famous painting in the world, its only serious rival Leonardo’s other masterpiece, the Mona Lisa,” King pronounces (p. 275). And it is hard, very hard, to disagree.

1. Aristotle (384 B.C. - 322 B.C.)—one of the West’s most influential philosophers—was born in Stagira, Chalcidice, in the year 384 BCE. His father, Nichomachus, was the royal doctor to Amyntas III and his mother, Phaestis, was a midwife.

2. Both parents died by the time Aristotle was about 13 years. Proxenus of Atarneus took the young orphan in for a short period before sending him to Plato’s Academy in Athens, where he would diligently study for 20 years. 

3. From reasoning to rhetoric, Aristotle wrote on a large variety of topics. Despite his vast array of writings, only 31 of his 200 works are still in circulation today.

4. Aristotle’s teaching method was certainly unique. As opposed to standing in front of his students and lecturing, he walked around the school’s vicinity and taught as his students followed behind. For this reason, his students were colloquially called “The Wanderers.”

5. One of Aristotle’s most famous ethical principles is called the Golden Mean. In this system of thought, someone is optimally functioning when they are living in between two opposing extremes. For example, courage is the Golden Mean that lies between cowardice and foolhardiness. If one lives a courageous life, then they are living well. 

6. Aristotle spent a lot of time considering what made someone truly good. One of his propositions was that all good people knew how to have a conversation. Good conversational traits, according to his philosophy, were wit and a great sense of humor. For Aristotle, laughter was of the essence.

7. He believed that moral goodness results from habit. If someone is morally askew, we should not punish them for their shortcomings but provide them with better teaching and guidance. 

8. Aristotle thought that there were three classes of friendship: fun friendships, strategic friendships, and true friends. For Aristotle, a true friend is someone who deeply cares for you and empathizes with you in your suffering.

9. Aristotle invented rhetoric, the art of persuasion. His general advice to public speakers and writers was to recognize your audience’s emotions. By doing so, you establish a relationship with them. After this, state your points, then illustrate them in order to instruct your audience on how to apply what they have learned properly. 

10. During the year 322 BCE, Aristotle died in Chalcis, Greece, after suffering from digestive issues. He asked to be buried beside his wife, Pythias. His works would be nearly forgotten as they were stored in a cellar for almost two centuries. His philosophy would see a resurgence around 100 BCE and would greatly influence medieval scholasticism and thought. 

John Maynard Keynes is so often called the “most influential economist of the twentieth century” that it has become a cliché. But even though the former Cambridge don is cited more often than anyone else in the field, his work is not well understood. The Cambridge Companion to Keynes is a collection of essays aimed at deepening our knowledge of the father of macroeconomics. It also succeeds in debunking some of the myths that still surround him. Editors Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman have compiled works investigating Keynes the man, the economist, the philosopher, and the business person. The book’s first several essays concern Keynes’s academic work and the most lucid of these is "Keynes and the birth of modern macroeconomics" by David Laidler. Laidler effectively balances careful analysis of Keynes’s economics with an easy-to-understand writing style. He argues that where Keynesianism begins—and where the classical tradition of economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo ends—is with the Cambridge economist’s rejection of Say’s Law. Say’s Law posits that a general glut (conditions in which goods and services pile up because no one can afford to buy them, like what occurred during the Great Depression) is impossible because supply creates its own demand through the payment of wages. Keynes broke with the intellectual tradition of his forebears by asserting that supply doesn’t necessarily create its own demand. According to Laidler, Keynes’s rejection of this precept flowed primarily from his views on psychology. The alleged impact of psychology, what Keynes called “animal spirits,” was that wild swings in the collective mood of investors could cause a mismatch between savings and investment. Households and individuals save their excess income, but because of low investor confidence, those savings are not recycled back into the economy as investment. As Laidler puts it, Keynes found that “in times of optimism, the natural rate of interest rose, and in times of pessimism it fell, and the market rate of interest failed to keep up with its fluctuations” (the natural rate of interest is defined as the rate at which savings equal investment). Cutting through the jargon, the author explains that animal spirits had very real implications for households. Keynes asserted that the mismatch between savings and investment tended to correct itself over time, but not through adjustment in the real interest rate (which is what the classical economists assumed). Rather, declining investment led to unemployment, which in turn sapped household savings. Savings and investment do equilibrate but at a suboptimal level. High unemployment becomes the norm. Laidler concedes that these views weren’t entirely original to Keynes—John Stuart Mill first raised the issue of a savings/investment mismatch a century earlier—but contends he was the first to develop a comprehensive framework for explaining why downturns turn into recessions, and why recessions turn into depressions. Even more important, he offered a way out. Embed from Getty ImagesThe next section of the book covers the practical implications of Keynes’s intellectual musings: what policy prescriptions he recommended, and to what extent they were followed in his native Britain and elsewhere. Of these, "Keynes and British economic policy" by George C. Peden offers the clearest account of the man’s impact on policy. Peden finds that, contrary to the high school textbook account of Keynes, his ideas on economics had a surprisingly small effect on policy in Britain and elsewhere. While rocking the intellectual landscape with the 1936 publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes had only a marginal influence on British policymaking before 1940, when the Treasury retained him as an advisor. The issue was how to finance the Second World War without causing inflation or incurring large amounts of public debt. In this case, Keynes recommended that the Treasury raise taxes to keep inflation in check. What’s more, the supposed “Keynesian consensus” of the postwar years was much less influenced by his work than is often assumed. Factors outside of demand management helped buoy postwar employment and, says Peden, “it was not difficult to maintain full employment during the long postwar boom.” To what extent governments did follow Keynes’s prescriptions, as was in their support for capital investment, and not in consumer demand management schemes. Investment shortfalls were the culprit for sinking aggregate demand, and his position was the governments should fill the gap with low-interest rates and direct investment. Later essays cover topics including Keynes’s personal life, philosophical views, writings, and business dealings. The most notable of these is Keynes’s political philosophy by Samuel Brittan. Our subject was an avowed liberal, but Brittan presents a version of him that is strikingly balanced. Keynes’s personal letters indicate a fierce individualism—“nothing really exists or feels but individuals”—but this was tempered by distrust of liberal market principles like fixed rules and self-regulating markets: “the world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide.” Ultimately, we see a man of firm principles but flexible views, and a belief that both the state and the market should have a role in promoting the universal goals of “economic efficiency, social justice, and individual liberty.” Co-editor Bradley W. Bateman wraps up the volume with a brilliant overview, "Keynes, and Keynesianism." Bateman finds that many commonly-held ideas about the man’s work are false, hence what we’ve come to call “Keynesianism” would not necessarily be supported by the man himself. The author debunks myths common on both ends of the political spectrum, starting with the conventional right-wing view that Keynes was an enthusiast of fiscal profligacy and ever-expanding government. Bateman cites a 1940 pamphlet titled How to Pay for the War in which Keynes argued that “the ordinary Budget should be balanced at all times.” Bateman also criticizes the view from the left that Keynes favored government-subsidized consumption and, even more egregious, that he promoted the idea that budget deficits pay for themselves over time. “Keynes had never shown much belief in the efficacy of adjusting consumption,” Bateman writes. Rather, he “argued instead for policies that would affect investment.” The Cambridge Companion is a comprehensive volume without glaring weaknesses. Readers without a strong background in economics will find some of the essays difficult, however. And it would have benefited with at least one essay from the great man himself. But this collection is one of the best sources available for a deep and wide understanding of the life and work of John Maynard Keynes.

The Philosophes of the Enlightenment era were a renowned group of French thinkers, famous for their brilliant advocacy and advancement of reason, knowledge, and education. Intent on departing from the old, superstitious, tyrannical thought of the medieval period, leaders such as Voltaire, Diderot, Pascal, Descartes, and Montesquieu rejected religious institutional authority, criticized social injustice, and promoted the aesthetics of a culture and ethos worthy of “The New Man” in Western civilization. One of the most (in)famous Philosophes was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), a Swiss-French philosopher, writer, political scientist, and composer who deeply influenced and angered European society throughout his life and through his prolific, provocative writings. In Rousseau: The Arguments of the Philosophers (Routledge, 2003), Timothy O’Hagan, Emeritus Professor of philosophy at the University of East Anglia, expertly and meticulously analyzes the quintessential Rousseau works, showing the Philosophe in true form and true beliefs, for better and for worse. O’Hagan writes, “The present book is selective. It covers a limited number of themes in Rousseau’s thought, and it concentrates on just three of his texts, the Discourse of Inequality (the Second Discourse), the Emile and The Social Contract. These three constitute the axes [human race, individual, and citizen] of Rousseau’s idea of formation” (O’Hagan, 7). Providing needed context to these tenets and books, O’Hagan offers a fascinating biography of Rousseau, providing oftentimes disturbing details of Rousseau’s “eccentric upbringing;” his development as a writer and genius; his numerous (though sometimes self-imposed) exiles from France, Switzerland, and England; and his later years replete with sorrow, loss, and solitude. The result of O’Hagan’s brutally honest presentation is a sense of compassion for Rousseau, despite his irritating and (potentially) emotionally disturbed ways. He writes, “I hope that readers of this book . . . will conclude that Rousseau deserves if not reverence, at least respect, for the qualities which Hume recognized in him . . .” (O’Hagan, 7). Toward this end, O’Hagan employs a conversational style of investigation and deliberation throughout the rest of the book on key parts of Rousseau’s definitive works and assertions, showing Rousseau’s tension with Enlightenment society and popular thought, his brilliant and astute mental masteries of philosophic principles, as well as his sometimes convoluted and inaccurate arguments and interpretations. He writes, “To say that Rousseau addresses this array of problems is not to say that he solves them, or even that he orders them in a wholly coherent framework. But the morality of the senses provides the guiding thread through much of his thought” (O’Hagan, 10). Reading through O’Hagan’s work, though, one cannot help but notice the plethora of negative terms the author uses to describe Rousseau’s philosophy and ruminations. In discussing Rousseau’s axiom, “Virtue is a state of war,” O’Hagan writes, “In propounding the morality of the senses, Rousseau regards psychological conflict with alarm, as a symptom of the insuperable division, even disintegration, within the individual, to be deplored and, if possible, avoided” (O’Hagan, 18). In his section, “The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men,” O’Hagan writes, “He concludes that the present corrupt and inegalitarian order of things has no legitimate basis, but is the outcome of historical accidents. He thus exploits the iconoclastic, naturalistic approach of the Encyclopédistes, and applies it to the most sensitive political problem of his day” (O’Hagan, 23). In discussing Rousseau’s notions of civil society, the specious contract, and despotism, O’Hagan writes, “Rousseau paints a dramatic picture of the contemporary world of extreme inequality, riven by disordered amour-propre. As so often, he draws up a balance sheet, since even this nightmare world brings with it certain benefits, even if they are outweighed by losses” (O’Hagan, 37). On “Cosmopolitanism,” O’Hagan writes, “Rousseau is pessimistic about the possibility of extending ties of fraternity so far, and for that reason he gives cosmopolitanism its predominantly negative charge” (O’Hagan, 111). Even though O’Hagan affirms much, Rousseau comes across as a man of the shadows. More implied than asserted, O’Hagan shows that a toxic milieu surrounded the whole of Rousseau’s life and culture, tainting all good ideas with a residue of negativity and conflict. This is not surprising, though, considering the social disintegration that occurred in France and Europe during (and after) the French Revolution. As Jennifer Donnelly notes in her historical fiction book, Revolution (Random House, 2010), “Little by little, the old world crumbled, and not once did the king imagine that some of the pieces might fall on him.” Absolutism was bad, but the end of absolutism and the transition to a modern democratic social structure had its own share of bad elements, too, especially in France. Many people dismiss Rousseau for his seemingly pessimistic approach to life, and yet in reading through the various aspects of society that Rousseau bravely and honestly deliberated upon and discussed in this book—the morality of the senses, negative education, freedom, judgment, knowledge, the empire of the laws, major inequalities, voting, anthropology of identity, social differences, (in)tolerance, negative theology, religion, and morality, etc.—it is no wonder that his writings have an edgy and unsettling quality about them. As Rousseau stated in Emile, “Ordinary readers, forgive my paradoxes: one must make them when one reflects; and whatever you may say, I prefer being a man with paradoxes than a man with prejudices.” Fortunately for the reader, Rousseau: The Arguments of the Philosophers (Routledge, 2003) provides an even-handed analysis and explanation of Rousseau and his controversial aphorisms, which helps keep this investigation of the Philosophe in balance. Timothy O’Hagan offers proof that this Philosophe was more than just a petulant savant; he was a sincere man of thought and action (despite chaotic past experiences and personal limitations) who hoped to offer his countrymen a better understanding of the social fabric of life.

1. The highly praised architect, Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), had quite the complex personal life. He was married three times throughout his lifetime and had eight children, seven biological and one adopted.

2. He was admitted into the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1886, but departed from the university after a single year of study. He never earned a degree, but gained experience by serving as an apprentice to Joseph Lyman Silsbee and Louis Sullivan. 3. Wright refused to join the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Of the association, he snarkily remarked, “Feeling that the architectural profession is all that’s the matter with architecture, why should I join them?” Despite his disapproval, the association awarded him the AIA Gold Medal in 1949. 4. On September 15, 1914, a tragic event occurred in Wright’s Wisconsin home, Taliesin. An angered butler started a fire in the house as Wright was away on business. As members of the home were attempting to escape, the butler murdered them with an axe. He killed seven people, including Wright’s wife and two of his children. 5. He owned a Japanese block art dealing business. It has been said that at various stages throughout his lifelong career, this business earned Wright more money than his architectural works. 6. Ayn Rand, the Russian-American objectivist, based her protagonist of The Fountainhead on Wright himself. Prior to the novel’s publication in 1943, Rand had never met Wright. They were introduced to each other soon after The Fountainhead was released. 7. Wright had an incredible car collection of over 50 vehicles. One of his favorite cars was a convertible Stoddard Dayton, which he had constructed himself. 8. His legendary career boasted over 1,000 architectural designs. Though only 532 of them were constructed, his vast array of designs included residential houses, churches, commercial buildings, mausoleums, museums, and more. Along with his architectural blueprints, he even dabbled in fashion design, though few of his designs exist today. 9. In 1916, Wright’s son John Lloyd Wright created the popular toy set, Lincoln Logs. 10. Though he was known for constructing beautiful homes, he spent the final years of his life living in a hotel room while supervising the construction of the Guggenheim Museum.

1. Although we know that William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26th, 1564, his exact date of birth is unknown. Most historians commonly celebrate it as April 23rd because this also happens to be the date of his death in 1616.

2. When he was 18, Shakespeare married the 26-year-old Anne Hathaway, who was already pregnant with their daughter Susanna—a considerable scandal at the time! 3. The first “official” theater to host a Shakespeare production (King Henry VI, Part 1) was an establishment called The Rose, which doubled both as a theater and a brothel. 4. No one knows why Shakespeare disappeared during his “lost years” exactly, but a common theory for many years was that he was on the run for poaching deer from Sir Thomas Lucy, an aggressive anti-Catholic enforcer with whom Shakespeare supposedly had bad blood. 5. To prevent his plays from being performed by other companies, Shakespeare never released their scripts to the public, and it wasn’t until the release of the First Folio that there was an “official” publication of his works. Nevertheless, his plays were often written down and shared without his consent—a sort of 17th century equivalent of modern-day internet piracy! 6. There is evidence to suggest that Shakespeare was also an actor as well as being a playwright and according to the First Folio he even acted in a few of his own plays. It is not known, however, which roles he might have played or how his performance was received. 7. Shakespeare’s family had very close connections to the conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot, including Guy Fawkes: it was only by some quick royalist flattery in the form of Macbeth that Shakespeare was able to appease King James and clear suspicion from his own name. 8. In 1593-95, playhouses were closed because it was believed that crowded locations would spread the already-rampaging plague, forcing Shakespeare to turn to writing poetry. Shakespeare himself lost three sisters to the plague; his son Hamnet died of unknown causes at the age of eleven, and may very likely have fallen prey to the plague as well. 9. Shakespeare is the inventor of over 1700 words, ranging from “critic” and “ode” to “obsequiously” and “skim milk”! 10. There is a common theatrical superstition that holds that speaking the name “Macbeth” in or near a theater will cause disaster, leading many to refer to Macbeth by its nickname “The Scottish Play.”

1. The actual family name of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning author (1902-1968) was “Grossteinbeck,” which his paternal grandfather shortened to “Steinbeck” when he first came to the United States from Germany.

2. The Steinbeck family home in Salinas, California, was a modest home that reflected the family’s middle-class status. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father worked various jobs such as managing a local flour mill. The family did not reach true financial stability until Steinbeck was enrolled at Stanford. His modest upbringing largely influenced the everyman, working-class protagonists within his novels. 3. Illness and accidents plagued Steinbeck from an early age. He suffered from pleural pneumonia, kidney infection, detached retina, shattered knee cup, stroke, and back injury. 4. Before becoming an established writer, Steinbeck held a number of jobs, both in his native California and in New York, where he moved in the mid-1920s. He worked as a farmhand, painter’s apprentice, and construction worker. 5. Steinbeck’s first novels went unnoticed. It was his fourth work, Tortilla Flat (1935) that propelled him into the public’s eye. John Steinbeck6. Steinbeck preferred to write by hand than on a typewriter. It is said he used 300 pencils to write East of Eden. 7. Seventeen of his works were made into Hollywood movies. Steinbeck also tried screenwriting. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 movie, Lifeboat. 8. In 1947, Steinbeck traveled to the Soviet Union. His trip was one of the three travels he made to that country. Due to accusations of The Grapes of Wrath being a communist novel, coupled with his travels to the USSR, many suspected him of being a communist. He had been previously placed under FBI surveillance in 1940, the year after his novel was released. His trips to the USSR inspired A Russian Journal, where he wrote about his experiences in the Soviet Union. 9. Steinbeck owned several dogs throughout his life. One of them, a poodle, was featured in Steinbeck’s 1962 travelogue, Travels with Charley. 10. Steinbeck died of heart disease on December 20, 1968, in his apartment overlooking East 72^nd Street in New York.

While Marcia Landy, author and Distinguished Professor of English/Film Studies, offers an erudite and meticulous examination of the phenomenon known as “stardom” in Italy, the title and subtitle (Stardom Italian Style: Screen Performance and Personality in Italian Cinema) are, ultimately, a bit misleading. This is especially true when taken in conjunction with the cover picture of the exquisite and sensual Monica Vitti. These would give indications that the material would attempt to dissect that which many feel is immeasurable: the je ne sais quoi, the X-factor, that intangible something that hurls certain actors, and not others, to the pinnacle of cinema success: Stardom. But that wouldn’t be the truth of this work. It is, instead, an examination of the film stars of the era covered in the book, primarily the twentieth century beginning with the silent film era to the later years of the period, within the context of the political events and their influences on each time span on film and stardom. Once beyond the misleading cover, it is clear from the onset what the intention of the book is, when, on page 4, a section is entitled, “The Making of a Political Divo: Mussolini in the 1920s.” In her introduction, Landy states clearly, “I take a retrospective look at expressions of stardom in relation to changes in the Italian cultural and political milieu.” (p. xiii) No less intriguing, Landy’s work is a compendium of the Italian stars throughout the age, all the while comparing and contrasting them to what is happening in the world, and the movers and shakers that are making it happen. The book is divided into distinct portions, focusing on what the author perceived as the major shifts in the cinematic culture. The first, Eloquent Bodies: The Cinema of Divisimo, centers on the silent film era and the theory of divisimo, a theory that distinguishes “stardom” to being “unique.” Within this section, such influences on stardom as Gabriele D’Annunzio and Mussolini are taken into consideration when discussing the work of Bartolomeo Pagano (Cabiria), for example. On the feminine side are the “incarnations of the diva,” with such examples as Italia Almirante Manzini. Here Landy offers more definitive conclusions, “These feminine images of the silent screen were the creation of light and shadow, silhouetted images of the body, close-ups of the face, choreographed movements akin to dance and lyric opera, acting styles expressive of the world of dreams, and exotic and dreamlike landscapes indebted to the Symbolist poets and to the Surrealists.” (p. 15) In the second section, The Stars Talk, Landy shows the effects of fascism and the beginnings of the influence of Hollywood on filmmaking. In this era, such notables include Vittorio de Seca, Assisa Norris, and Isa Miranda. Neorealism, an Italian film movement drawing its characteristics from the lives of the poor and working class, is the focus of the third portion, Stars amidst the Ruins: The Old and The New, and cinema’s distinctive post-war personality. For many, this section will hold the true “stars” of the work, for in it is found the breath-taking Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni. There are few who would debate the author’s contention that, “Loren and Mastroianni were able to translate their roles for audiences beyond Italy to become international stars.” (p. 120) But Landy seems to give little credence or credit to their amazing “charisma” for such success. Popular Genres and Stars is the subject matter of the fourth section; a characterization found after the 1950s. Here Landy, rightly, brings in the harsh and forceful influences of economics on filmmaking and stardom. Budgets proved an excellent guiding factor, giving rise to “spaghetti” westerns for one example, and to the rise of “Ordinary People” stars for another. In each section, the extensive descriptions of many films—descriptions that can last for pages and pages … and pages—while fascinating, does not always speak to the thesis of the book. In those instances where it does, the author effectively uses film content to support her contention. Though the subjects are Italian—one of the most naturally passionate and demonstrative of ethnicities and discussed—it is, at most times, a sterile, antiseptic and coldly analytical telling. With such patently extensive research, such overwhelming evidentiary support, the academic author could have easily infused the dynamism with which she distinguishes Italian stardom in the telling of it. Where is it written that academic material must be written in unanimated, flat language, especially on such a volatile topic? How much more stirring would the clarity be, were such a picture truly painted by the narrative, rather than merely reported? How much more lasting the impressions of these magnificent people who graced movie and television screens and gave their audience, if only for an hour or two, a wondrous escape?

1. George Orwell's birth name was Eric Arthur Blair. He adopted the pen name “George Orwell” in 1933, combining the patron saint of England (St. George) with the name of a small river in East Anglia (the Orwell River).

2. Orwell's experiences as a British colonial policeman in Burma greatly influenced his writing. He resigned from his post in 1927, deeply troubled by the oppressive nature of imperialism, and this experience informed his critical perspective on power and authority. 3. Orwell was a staunch anti-communist, but he also criticized capitalism. He believed in democratic socialism and fought for social justice, advocating for a society where wealth and power were distributed more equitably. 4. In addition to being a writer, Orwell was also a journalist and worked for various newspapers and magazines, including the BBC. His experiences as a journalist shaped his understanding of media manipulation and propaganda, themes he explored in his novel “1984.” 5. Orwell was an avid gardener and found solace in cultivating his own food. He wrote about his experiences and insights on gardening in an essay titled “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad,” where he reflected on the connection between nature and human well-being. 6. Orwell's novel Animal Farm, which allegorically portrays the Russian Revolution and Stalinist era, faced numerous rejections before being published. Many publishers were wary of its political implications, but it eventually found a home and has since become one of his most famous works. 7. During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell fought against the fascist forces as a member of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). He was wounded in action, an experience that influenced his writing and strengthened his resolve against totalitarianism. 8. Orwell's essay “Politics and the English Language” is widely regarded as a masterpiece in the field of linguistics and writing. In it, he argues for clarity and precision in language, criticizing the use of vague and meaningless phrases that obfuscate meaning. 9. Despite his critical view of Soviet-style communism, Orwell identified as a socialist throughout his life. He believed in the potential for a democratic socialist society that balanced individual freedoms with social equality. 10. Orwell's final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (often abbreviated as “1984”), coined several terms that have become part of the English language lexicon, including “Big Brother,” “Thought Police,” and “Newspeak.” The dystopian world he depicted continues to be referenced in discussions about government surveillance and authoritarianism.

1.Born circa 1162, Chinggis Khan’s birth name was Temujin, meaning “blacksmith.” The spelling of his name, Chinggis, differs among scholars; such alternative spellings are Chingis, Jenghiz, and most popularly, Genghis.

2. In only 25 years, Chinggis Khan and his army conquered more territory than the Roman empire did in 400 years. At its peak, the total expanse of the empire was roughly the size of Africa, accumulating to 12,000,000 square miles. 3. After a rival tribe poisoned his father, Chinggis’ tribe abandoned him and his siblings. Chinggis was only nine-years-old. After the tribe’s departure, his half-brother hid food for himself while other castaways were starving. Because of this great injustice, Chinggis killed him. 4. Chinggis Khan killed millions of people. Though the exact number is disputed, most scientists agree Chinggis killed enough people that the carbon imprint of the 13th century dropped significantly. 5. We have no accurate record of what the Great Khan truly looked like. Some sources vaguely claim he had long hair and a bushy beard. Seventy years after Chinggis’ death, the Persian historian Rashid al-Din purported the Khan had green eyes and red hair. 6. He established the largest postal system prior to the modern era. Called the “Yam,” this system comprised buildings that horse riding mail carriers could stop and rest at. Once stopped, the first carrier could pass on the mail to the next carrier in line. Riders hauled the cargo about 200 miles per day, proving the “Yam” to be an efficient mail-carrying method. 7. Some estimates suggest he is an ancestor of about 0.5% of the world’s population. Hundreds of conquered females were in the Khan’s sexual reserves, and he had plenty of children with these women. His descendants maintained similar practices, with his eldest son, Jochi, having anywhere between 15 and 44 sons. 8. Unlike other medieval rulers, Chinggis Khan was mostly tolerant of religious diversity. He established religious liberty for all his subjects and made tax exemptions for some places of worship, although he made these exemptions for political purposes. 9. We are not sure how he died. Some historical accounts claim he died from injuries sustained by falling off his horse during battle, while other accounts claim he succumbed to such things as malaria, an arrow to the knee, or even a wound during sex. 10. Though he ruled the largest empire in history, Chinggis Khan’s gravesite remains unknown. Buried in 1227, he was laid to rest in an undisclosed area within northern Mongolia. Some legends say a river was diverted to cover his grave. SUGGESTED READING [table id=44 /]  

 

The author of such literary classics as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, James Joyce (1882–1941) was one of Ireland's most celebrated novelists known for his avant-garde and often experimental style of writing.

Philip Kitcher has taught at several American Universities and is currently John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia. He is the author of over a dozen books including Advancement of Science, Science, Truth and Democracy, The Ethical Project and Joyce's Kaleidoscope. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was also the first recipient of the Prometheus Prize, awarded by the American Philosophical Association for work in expanding the frontiers of Science and Philosophy. He joins us on Culture Insight to share his insight into the life and work of James Joyce.

1. Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809. Today, his interest in plant life would have rendered little Charles a genius, but back in Darwin’s day his teachers felt such studies were superfluous, and discouraged his interest in the natural world around him.

2. Forced to follow in his father’s footsteps to become a physician, Darwin enrolled at the University of Edinburgh in 1825 to study medicine—but quickly changed his course after becoming sick at the first sight of blood.

3. There were two major obstacles that nearly derailed Darwin’s first scientific expedition, (1831–1836), to South America, Australia, and Africa aboard the HMS Beagle. The first one was his father, who, ironically, feared that his son’s scientific inclinations would overturn a respectable career as a clergyman. (He was right.) The second, intense seasickness, was combated early enough for Darwin to collect an overwhelming number of samples, requiring two ships to haul them all back.

4. While aboard the Beagle, Darwin predicted the existence of an insect he actually didn’t find, deducing that a great white orchid he’d seen in Madagascar could only be pollinated by a bug with a foot-long proboscis—an elongated appendage from an animal’s head. It took twenty years for the “bug” (a hawk moth) to be found—and named Xanthopan morganii praedicta.

5. Great minds may think alike, but that’s no explanation for Darwin and Einstein both marrying their first cousins. On January 29, 1839, Darwin married his cousin, Emma Wedgewood. (Einstein’s cousin, Elsa Lowenthal, would be his second wife.)

6. Clearly, you’ve heard of Darwin’s groundbreaking book, “On the Origin of Species” (1859), which sold out its entire first edition in one day. But have you heard of the book’s full title, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life?” Say that ten times fast.

7. When you think of evolutionary theories, you immediately think of Darwin. However, as Darwin was developing his theory, so was another scientist named Alfred Wallace, who conducted his studies in Papua New Guinea. Darwin simply beat Wallace when it came to publishing his research.

8. Scientist Richard Owen (perhaps best known for inventing the word “Dinosaur”) had worked closely with Darwin studying fossil specimens in the early stages of their careers, but later, like many of his peers, openly disagreed with his one-time partner’s Theory of Evolution.

9. The disease that ultimately caused Darwin’s death on April 19, 1882, was never diagnosed during his lifetime, but today it is believed he caught Chagas Disease, a parasitic infection he contracted via a South American bug bite.

10. In 2000, Darwin’s iconic image replaced another famous Charles (Dickens) on England’s 10-pound note.

SUGGESTED READING

[table id=19 /]

Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris—better known as Le Corbusier, the name he adopted in 1920—was among the most significant architects and urban planners of the 20th century, and his career was marked by astonishing productivity and self-promoted celebrity. In his lifetime, he designed 75 buildings in a dozen countries and committed himself to nearly 50 urban planning projects. In addition to his architectural prowess, Le Corbusier wrote 34 books and hundreds of articles while painting more than 400 canvases and producing dozens of sculptures. In this brief and visually appealing book, Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, surveys 25 of Le Corbusier’s most significant architectural achievements, ranging from his massive residential and administrative complexes to the posh homes he designed for wealthy clients across the globe. Above all, as the subtitle suggests, Le Corbusier wrestled with the effects of modernity on the urban environment. Having grown up in La Chaux-de-Fonds, a small Swiss watch-making town, Le Corbusier appreciated the “interaction between industry and the visual arts” and the “educative virtues of geometrized form” (7). As a young man, he roamed extensively throughout Europe, observing and carefully studying a variety of built environments he encountered on his travels. He studied under Auguste Perret, the French master of reinforced concrete whose influence was visible in Le Corbusier’s famous “Domino” houses, open-floor plans comprised of concrete slabs and held aloft by thin columns of reinforced concrete. This model served as the skeleton for much of his work from World War I through the late 1920s. During these years, Le Corbusier also developed his radical philosophy of urban planning, which he believed required a thorough break with the past. He was in many respects a passionate reformer who believed that industrial cities had developed in ways that produced rampant crowding, moral degeneration, and filth. Departing from what he viewed as an insufficient, piecemeal, “medical” approach to the Parisian housing crisis, Le Corbusier proposed a comprehensive, “surgical” method that would almost literally cut off the diseased tissue and replace it with towering prostheses (10). As Cohen amply describes, Le Corbusier’s career was marked by “a series of divergent if not contradictory stances” that he took in order to resolve these deficiencies and re-harmonize people to the built landscape (15). Most significantly, Le Corbusier’s forays into urban planning led him to conceive large-scale, low-cost housing for ordinary working people—projects that, when actually implemented and imitated by others, generated immense and soulless concrete monstrosities that drew the ire of critics and isolated the poor who inhabited them. For readers who might wish for more of a contextualized history of Le Corbusier’s work, Cohen’s approach will not be terribly satisfying. He describes the architect as a controversial figure—a “Nietzschean rebel” to some and a “nihilistic destroyer” to others—but there is little substantive discussion of his critics, nor is there any effort to place Le Corbusier within a larger political tradition that includes 19th century French utopians like Charles Fourier or Saint-Simon (14). The book is arranged chronologically, although it devotes less attention to the architect’s actual biography—a choice that sometimes leaves the formal analysis and discussion seemingly incomplete. Instead, readers are treated to elegantly composed and richly illustrated overviews of some of Le Corbusier’s most representative work. As is the case in books from the Taschen series, the writing is frequently opaque to non-experts. For example, writing about the Villa Stein-de Monzie, built from 1926-29 in Vaucresson, France, Cohen mingles formal details with casual references to contemporaneous architects: The façade of this house, set within a parallelepiped, is flat and governed by a regulating plan based on a golden section, which determines the proportions and positioning of the windows. Through its transparency, the garden façade, on the other hand, reveals the complex interplay of the indoor volumes and the walking linking the terraces to one another and to the garden . . . [Colin Row and Robert Slutzky] thought [they] recognized in the villa’s cylindrical stairwells and curved partitions . . . as objets-types featuring in Le Corbusier’s Purist paintings . . . (39) Even so, the writing in this slim volume should not tax the patience of anyone looking to discover the variety of Le Corbusier’s work.

1. Although René Descartes is primarily known for his philosophy, he was also a mathematician. He created the rectangular coordinate system, which is also known as the Cartesian coordinate system. It is rumored that he came up with the system while lying in bed, watching a bug crawl on his ceiling. He also believed that monkeys were able to talk, but did not communicate with humans so as not to be controlled by them.

2. Descartes entered the Jesuit college of La Flèche in Anjou at the age of eight and studied there for eight years. 3. Because of his poor health, Descartes was allowed to sleep in an extra five hours at his school. In fact, it is rumored that he never awoke before 11 in the morning! Despite the lost time, Descartes was still considered an excellent student, preferring to do his work in bed. 3. Descartes stood only 5'1" tall. 4. Descartes had a daughter, Francine, with a domestic servant named Helena Jans van der Strom. Although Francine was considered an illegitimate child of Descartes, her baptism records record her birth as legitimate. She died at the young age of five of scarlet fever. 5. Descartes loved to dress up in fancy clothes. He was rarely caught in any casual clothing! 6. Although it never interested him, Descartes was a licensed lawyer. However, he never entered the practice, preferring philosophy instead. 7. In 1619, Descartes believed he received some prophetic dreams. These dreams encouraged him to pursue knowledge, truth, and philosophy. He claimed that by following these visions, he was able to come up with analytical geometry. 8. Startled by Galileo’s house arrest for his heretical publications, Descartes became more private with his own writings, and parts of his works, especially Le Monde, were destroyed. 9. Descartes corresponded with Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia and exchanged philosophical ideas with her. His Principia Philosophiae was dedicated to her. 10. Descartes died in Stockholm, Sweden in 1650. But because Descartes was a devout Catholic, he was initially buried in a cemetery for unbaptized babies as Sweden was a Protestant country. His remains are now rumored to be in the Panthéon, and there is a possibility that his heart is in a cemetery in Paris. SUGGESTED READING [table id=37 /]