To the Linksland (30th Anniversary Edition), by Michael Bamberger (Avid Reader Press): As all who play golf know, there’s more to the game than just the game. For golfers, golf is not subculture but culture itself, and nowhere is that more true than in Scotland, home of the game’s invention. To understand that culture, nothing can beat a trip to those fabled lands, but reading Michael Bamberger’s To the Linksland might be a close second. In 1991, Bamberger, then a newly married reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer, decided the time was right to understand finally the game that had captivated him since childhood. At times hilarious, often wistful, never boring, To the Linksland details Bamberger’s brief employment as a caddie on the European Tour and his journey to Scotland to get to the heart of the game. Golf fans will treasure this volume, released to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of the book’s initial publication, but it deserves a wider audience of anyone interested in the culture of sport, the culture of Scotland, and culture writ large. —BR
“Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon,” at Bookstein Projects, New York (through May 31): The paintings in “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon,” now on view at Bookstein Projects, span a remarkable eighty years. A suite of bold new work, of celestial bodies pared down to brushstroke, color, and form, all painted in Resika’s ninety-fifth year, connects to Moonlight, a small landscape from 1943–44 painted when the artist was just sixteen years old. The brightness values may vary, but in all a minimum of line defines depth in what is otherwise a blind and blinding sight. Illuminated across time, the assembly reveals a consistency of vision and a connected sense for the bare essentials of painterly composition. —JP
The Philadelphia Orchestra performs Schumann & Mozart, at Carnegie Hall (April 30): Robert Schumann’s Fourth Symphony (1841, revised 1851) is a fascinating work, by many accounts the most inspired and successful of his four symphonies. It is perched at the crossroads of nineteenth-century Romantic music: in its shocking dissonances and progressive structure, which melds four movements into a whole almost devoid of pauses, one can see the iconoclasm of Liszt and Wagner in the decades to come, while its serene Romanze movement and heroic finale point ahead to Brahms’s more conservative Third and First Symphonies respectively. This Tuesday at Carnegie Hall, Nathalie Stultzman will conduct the Philadelphia Orchestra in Schumann’s Fourth together with that harbinger of Romanticism, Mozart’s Requiem. —IS
Yefim Bronfman plays Prokofiev, Schubert, Schumann, Salonen & Chopin, at Carnegie Hall (May 5): Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo! Enter Bronfman to play Prokofiev at such a pace and with such bravado as to knock my morbidity clear out of the ring. . . . With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly gone, and though he takes all his fire off with him like no less a force than Prometheus, our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, NOBODY—not if Bronfman has anything to say about it! So wrote Philip Roth rather wonderfully in The Human Stain. As luck would have it, Yefim Bronfman will be giving us a little Prokofiev (the thundering Piano Sonata No. 7—could it have been the same that Roth heard?) this Sunday at Carnegie Hall, together with works of Schubert, Schumann, Salonen, and Chopin. —IS
Lecture on the Perelman Performing Arts Center, with Joshua Ramus, at the National Arts Club (May 2): The new Perelman Performing Arts Center opened in lower Manhattan last September to widespread applause, receiving kudos for its understated modernism and thoughtful integration into the surrounding World Trade Center. It’s hard not to be impressed by the building’s sleek, marble-clad profile, but of course what’s inside is just as important. To judge for yourself, an ideal complement to a guided tour would be the talk presented at the National Arts Club this Thursday, May 2, by Joshua Ramus, the founding principal of REX, about the firm’s latest high-profile project. —RE
By the Editors:
Roger Kimball considers the Trump trial on Chicago’s Morning Answer with Dan Proft & Amy Jacobson.
From the Archives:
“Columbia’s Jewish problem,” Notes & Comments (March 2005). On Joseph Massad & recent crises at Columbia University.