The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams. This week on
The World in Time, Lewis H. Lapham and Brown discuss Adams’ early years and his “posthumous life” after the death of his wife, his most influential writings, and his many friendships with familiar figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Henry Adams was a very curious man â curious both in the sense that he wanted to learn all he could about how America operated and curious because he disliked his own time and, in some ways, his own life.
Adams (1838-1918) is the subject of an engaging new biography by David Brown, who teaches history at Elizabethtown College. He previously has explored the lives of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and the historian Richard Hofstadter.
âThe Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adamsâ (Scribner) is about a historian who thought he would rather have been a politician. He was not a politician, like his forebears, because he wanted offices thrust upon him and no one did the thrusting.
Front Porch Republic
“Failures of Leadership in a Populist Age.” In an essay that rings even more true after the events of Wednesday, Yuval Levin warns would-be populist leaders to shun the temptations of fantasy and root their words and actions in reality:
It is the task of leaders in populist eras … to offer ways to use political power effectively to address [populist] complaints that are rooted in reality. And they need to push to the side or disperse the power of those complaints that are rooted in fantasy, so that they don’t render populist movements pointless, ridiculous, or dangerous.
Book World; The best new audiobooks: Tales of deception, suspense - and some history
Katherine A. Powers, The Washington Post
Jan. 8, 2021
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- White Ivy
It s not surprising that Susie Yang s remarkable debut, a character study rich in plot twists and suspense is being developed into a Netflix series. At its center is Ivy Lin, a Becky Sharp or Lily Bart for the 21st century. Preoccupied with race and class, she is ashamed of her family with whom she emigrated from China to America when a child. Ivy grows up lacking a sense of identity she can live with, becoming a practiced liar and thief. She develops a middle-school crush on Gideon Speyer, son of a politician, and enters a relationship, alternately friendly and antagonistic, with another boy, Roux Roman, son of a kept woman. Years later, Gideon and Roux enter her life again. Rotating between determination and despondency, Ivy sees hope for an ideal life in Gideon and destruction of that hope in Roux. Narrato