In The Claremont Review of Books, Christopher Caldwell traces the rise of modern environmentalism: “The novelist Nathaniel Rich, in a new history, Losing Earth, has focused on the late Cold War origins of climate consciousness. His claim is that we might have stopped global warming in its tracks back then, had we been bold enough to act. ‘[I]n the decade that ran between 1979 and 1989, we had an excellent chance,’ he writes. ‘The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding framework to reduce carbon emissions…. [W]e came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels.’ No, we didn’t. We didn’t even come into the general neighborhood of doing that. A faithful reporter and a stylish writer, one with a gift for seeing complexity, Rich nonetheless has trouble thinking his way into the very different kind of environmentalism that existed before global warming became a global cause. But what did happen in those years is just as interesting, and visible at the margins of his book: a new internationalist ideology was born out of the ashes of the one that had just been vanquished.”

Joseph Epstein reviews The Body: A Guide for Occupants: “The book is an account of human parts, inside and out, and what is known and still unknown about them. It catalogues the diseases and mechanical failures to which flesh is heir; establishes a pantheon of heroic medical researchers and a rogues’ gallery of quacks; sets out some of the differences between humans and other mammals and between the male and female of our own species—and does all this in a ­fluent, often amusing, never dull manner. The point of view is ironical yet suffused with awed appreciation for that endlessly complex machine, the human body. In the first hundred pages of The Body, one learns that there are microbes in one’s belly button, that the average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, that the number of human facial expressions ranges between 4,100 and 10,000, that tears come in three varieties, that the human eye can distinguish between 2 million and 7.5 million colors, that humans choke more easily than any other mammal, that people who have had their tonsils removed when young may have a 44 percent greater risk of heart attack later in life, that one of the inventors of the lobotomy won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949, and that ­Leonardo’s Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. Scores of such items float through the book.”

The man Charlemagne: “In more recent times too, the name of Charlemagne has been used to evoke an idea of European integration. Immediately after the Second World War, when historians looked back at Charlemagne across the wreckage of the Carolingian heartlands, they saw the costs of his empire, and reflected gloomily on its – to them inevitable – failure. As recently as 2003, the eminent French historian Jacques Le Goff dismissed Charlemagne’s empire as an ‘anti-Europe’, created by brute force against the will of its inhabitants, and against the spirit of natural European diversity . . . In her new study, Janet Nelson does things quite differently. Taking an approach which she says is ‘in some ways that of an old-fashioned biographer’, she offers a Charlemagne who is not the father of Europe. In fact, he is not even ‘Charlemagne’: Nelson prefers to call him Charles, stripping him (except in her title) of the compound name he has enjoyed in English since the mid-18th century, and which, in its original Latin form, Carolus Magnus, goes back to the late ninth century. As it promises, her book is a study of an individual man in his context, not an evaluation of Charlemagne’s place in a European history of which he could have had no inkling.”

A century of Proust: “One hundred years ago, on December 10, the ten members of the Académie Goncourt met to decide the recipient of the Prix Goncourt for 1919. It went to Marcel Proust for his À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower). One of the members, his friend and champion Leon Daudet, decided to deliver the academy’s letter personally. Arriving at Proust’s fifth-floor apartment at 44 rue Hamelin in the 16th arrondissement, just south of the Arc de Triomphe, he found, of course, that he was asleep. He had largely taken to his bed in 1913. When eventually roused, Marcel expressed his gratitude and pleasure. It had been a close-run thing.”

In praise of model trains: “Don’t tell me model railways aren’t art. My little engine is a thing of spirit and beauty.”

Essay of the Day:

In First Things, Patricia Snow writes about the life and work of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, who converted to Catholicism and started what is today called Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. Snow writes that the “cause for her canonization is underway,” but there is a problem: “she eventually separated from the husband who converted to Catholicism alongside her”:

“Ever since Theodore Maynard published a biography of Rose in 1948, alcohol has been blamed for the separation. Some biographers have gone further than Maynard, portraying George ­Lathrop not only as unstable and alcoholic but also as physically abusive to Rose. George has been ­variously blamed for Rose’s sister Una’s nervous collapse at the time of Rose’s marriage, for recurring feuds in the Hawthorne family, for fiscal mismanagement, and for the ruin of his own ‘once promising career.’ In 2014, writing about Rose’s conversion in the Catholic magazine Magnificat, John Janaro followed the established line, and in 2018 Anthony Esolen doubled down on it, asserting that Rose’s marriage was ­unhappy from the beginning and after an only child died of diphtheria ‘[George] took to hard drinking and irresponsible spending.’ Passed seemingly automatically from one printed source to another, these negative assessments of George required that Rose be cast in the role of long-suffering wife, who, alone and adrift after her husband died of cirrhosis, finally found meaning and direction in caring for the ­cancerous poor.

“Unfortunately, or inconveniently, these accounts of Rose and George’s marriage are not accurate. In 1991, Patricia Valenti, an academic with an interest in the Hawthorne women, published a biography of Rose called To Myself a Stranger. In the preface to her book, Valenti mildly points out that previous biographies of Rose were essentially hagiographies written for a Catholic audience, none of which made good use of the abundant manuscript material available. Quoting extensively in her own work from letters and journals in various collections, Valenti ­gradually builds up a very different portrait of a marriage, one that challenges both long-standing assumptions and contemporary pieties.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Vaxholm Fortress

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