Sad news first: Tony Horwitz has died of a cardiac arrest while he was promoting his new book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, in DC.

The story of Faber & Faber: “For someone writing both a family history and a publishing one, Tony Faber deals fairly with the personalities, conflicts, failures and courageous decisions that shaped the firm. His format is fascinating. The book primarily consists of extracts from letters and memos composed on the run, snap literary judgements jotted down while its staff juggled the fraught financial intricacies of keeping the firm solvent. The remaining text is a commentary to contextualise a story that begins when Geoffrey Faber commenced a fraught partnership with Sir Maurice and Lady Gwyer, owners of the Scientific Press, whose primary income came from a magazine called The Nursing Mirror. The new firm, originally named Faber & Gwyer, aimed to build both literary and medical backlists.”

Nineteen Eighty-Four at 70: “Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is one of the bestselling novels of all time, with sales of thirty million copies in at least five dozen languages. Just as anno 1984 was thirty-five years from 1949, we today stand thirty-five years beyond 1984. The relevance of Orwell’s novel, with all its protean associations, has proved enduring, transcending its Cold War context and acquiring ever-expanding applications as the drone-cum-digital age proceeds . . . So it is hardly surprising that numerous English-language editions of Nineteen Eighty-Four have been published since the 1950s and are currently on the market. The vast majority of them, ever since the novel’s
initial publication in June 1949, have been issued without a preface or an introduction, apparently on the assumption that the novel is easily understandable and the reader requires no guidance. On the novel’s seventieth anniversary, might we interrogate that premise?”

How John Marshall made the Supreme Court supreme: “Most serious American readers know National Review columnist and National Humanities Medal laureate Richard Brookhiser as the author of a shelf of elegantly crafted biographies of our nation’s Founding Fathers, from George Washington and Alexander Hamilton up to our re-founder, Abraham Lincoln. Those crisp, pleasurable volumes rest on the assumption that these were very great men who created (or re-created) something rare in human history: a self-governing republic whose growing freedom and prosperity validated the vision they strove so hard and sacrificed so much to make real. It’s fitting that the most recent of Brookhiser’s exemplary works is John Marshall: The Man Who Made the Supreme Court, for it was Marshall—a junior member of the Founding Fathers, so to speak—who made the Court a formidable bastion of the nation’s founding governmental principles, shielding them from attacks by demagogically inclined presidents from Jefferson to Jackson, until his death in 1835.”

Why conservatives fail: “The great virtue of Whiplash! From JFK to Donald Trump: A Political Odyssey, Arnold Steinberg’s long but worthwhile memoir, is its well-informed angst about the shortcomings of conservative politics. Steinberg has practiced such politics skillfully for half a century. A true believer in small government and unlegislated social conservatism, he knows how to win—and when and why winning isn’t possible. No conservative candidate should hire a consultant who hasn’t sat through a week of seminars with Steinberg. Unfortunately, today’s Republican or conservative politics is a mess, partly because people like Steinberg are scarce in its major roles. How did this mess develop? One major theme in Whiplash! is the ongoing tactical stupidity of conservatives and Republicans. Another is many Republican elected officials’ failure to understand, let alone hold to, their stated principles. Yet another is the selfishness and flakiness that have always been, it seems, endemic among leaders of the modern American Right.”

A Reader Recommends: Sean McDermott recommends Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim: “Have you ever wondered how a medieval scholastic priest would respond to the discovery of aliens, or whether modern academia could endure such a scandal? Flynn makes sci-fi/fantasy not only intellectually reasonable but historically plausible. Through the narrative, one encounters the great medieval philosophers, the tumultuous political upheavals, and the challenges of the Church through the eyes of a country priest in the backwoods of Germany. This book makes you think hard, laugh out loud, and turn the pages as quickly as possible.”

Essay of the Day:

Peter Max’s paintings regularly sell for $30,000 in Park West showrooms on cruise ships, and his studio has been cranking out the works—until, that is, it was discovered that Max has dementia and can hardly paint. This is an excellent investigative piece from Amy Chozick:

“The scene played out for years. Twice a week, in the late afternoon, above the Shun Lee Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a creaky elevator would open, and out would step an elderly man. Thin as a rail, with a sparse mustache, he would sometimes have little idea about where or who he was. A pair of security doors would buzz unlocked once surveillance cameras identified him as the artist Peter Max.

“Inside, he would see painters — some of them recruited off the street and paid minimum wage — churning out art in the Max aesthetic: cheery, polychrome, wide-brushstroke kaleidoscopes on canvas. Mr. Max would be instructed to hold out his hand, and for hours, he would sign the art as if it were his own, grasping a brush and scrawling Max. The arrangement, which continued until earlier this year, was described to The New York Times by seven people who witnessed it.

“In the 1960s and 1970s, Mr. Max was a countercultural icon, a rare painter to achieve name recognition in the mainstream. His psychedelic renderings could be found on the cover of Time, the White House lawn and even a postage stamp. But several years ago, he received a diagnosis of symptoms related to Alzheimer’s, and he now suffers from advanced dementia. Mr. Max, 81, hasn’t painted seriously in four years, according to nine people with direct knowledge of his condition. He doesn’t know what year it is, and he spends most afternoons curled up in a red velvet lounger in his apartment, looking out at the Hudson River.

“For some people, Mr. Max’s decline spelled opportunity. His estranged son, Adam, and three business associates took over Mr. Max’s studio, drastically increasing production for a never-ending series of art auctions on cruise ships, even as the artist himself could hardly paint.”

Read the rest.

Photos: The ice of Lake Baikal

Poem: George Green, “Barry’s House and the Burkean Sublime”

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