Good morning. First up, Nicole Gelinas reviews a new film showing “how hard—and necessary—it is to rebuild Notre-Dame.”

Why have half of Tom Perrotta’s novels been adapted for film and TV? “You may be familiar with the work of Tom Perrotta, even if you have never heard of him. In the 23 years since he published the first of his eight novels, four of them have been adapted for the screen—two as Oscar-nominated movies.”

Raymond Chandler’s America: “Chandler’s view of American culture . . . is developed most plainly and relentlessly in The Long Goodbye, a novel unsparing of the idle, self-indulgent and corrupt rich, of local government and the politicians who run it, and of the gangsters who prey upon and exploit everyone and everything within their reach.”

Arthur Conan Doyle at war: “Eight years after giving up medicine for writing, the internationally famous creator of Sherlock Holmes became Dr. Doyle once more, on the front line of the Boer War.”

William Voegeli reviews Amity Shlaes’s Great Society: “To fully appreciate Great Society, however, one must read (or re-read) Shlaes’s 2007 bestseller, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. That the books form a two-volume set is appropriate: because Lyndon Johnson was obsessed with Franklin Roosevelt, he shaped the Great Society to resemble, complete, and surpass his hero’s New Deal. The New Deal was born of an unprecedented economic contraction, the Great Society of an unprecedented expansion. One might suppose, then, that these two domestic policy crusades would end up being very different. Shlaes, however, makes clear that it’s the similarities between the New Deal and the Great Society that are striking and important, and the reason for this continuity is that the same restless ideology—progressivism—animated both. Specifically, her two books show that progressives’ central principle is that activist government is the only mechanism able to solve a modern society’s problems.”

Jack Youngerman passed away last week. Cornelia Channing writes about visiting his studio after her own father died: “We began by talking about my father, but our conversation quickly roamed to other topics: his art, what books he was reading, the many ways the East End has changed in recent years. He showed me what he was working on—the design for a cobalt-blue wooden relief—and gave me a tour of his personal archive, housed in an adjacent barn. We sifted through old photographs of the years when he shared a studio space with Agnes Martin, Ellsworth Kelly, and Frank Stella. Jack was charming, funny, and abundantly kind. As I walked home after that first meeting, he called down the road after me: ‘Don’t be a stranger!’ So I wasn’t.”

Essay of the Day:

In Humanities, Abram Van Engen writes about the rise and fall of Perry Miller’s Puritans:

“Miller’s most lasting influence, however, came not from his overall study of the Puritans but from his assertions about one particular text. In deciding that ‘the uniqueness of the American experience’ was fundamentally Puritan, Miller turned to the precise origin of America—the founding of Boston in 1630 with the arrival of John Winthrop on the Arbella. Or, to be more precise, he turned to the moment marked as an origin in a mostly forgotten text. After all, other Puritans founded Salem in 1628; the Mayflower Separatists established Plymouth in 1620; the Dutch arrived in Manhattan in 1609; the Spanish set up St. Augustine in 1565; and Native Americans had been here all along. Then, too, there was that other English colony farther south, Virginia, founded in 1607, which Miller dismissed for lacking the ‘coherence with which I could coherently begin.’

“In other words, Miller did not seek an origin of America so much as an expression of origins: ‘the first articulate body of expression upon which I could get a leverage.’ For Miller, the Puritans ‘spoke as fully as they knew how, and none more magnificently or cogently than John Winthrop in the midst of the passage itself, when he delivered a lay sermon aboard the flagship Arbella and called it “A Modell of Christian Charity”’ . . . In the many years that history textbooks hit the market before Miller’s career, none made the coming of Winthrop’s ship a special beginning to American history, and none called the United States a ‘city on a hill.’ After Miller died, Winthrop’s sermon began spreading across textbooks at every level of schooling, so that by 2010 a new U.S. history textbook appeared taking City upon a Hill as its title.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Santa Maddalena

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