This week: Casanova, Steven Isserlis, the island of Kasos, the Battle of Midway & more from the world of culture.
The Silver Waterfall: How America Won the War in the Pacific at Midway, by Brendan Simms and Steven McGregor (PublicAffairs): What is it about Midway that made this World War II battle such a decisive Allied victory? In The Silver Waterfall: How America Won the War in the Pacific at Midway, Brendan Simms and New Criterion contributor Steven McGregor look to the American combination of bravery and ingenuity. While Imperial Japan boasted the biggest battleship guns, the U.S. Navy had the Douglas “Dauntless” dive bomber and the pilots to turn their plummeting weapons into guided missiles. Taking off from beyond Japanese range, this silver waterfall of armament turned the tide of war and resulted in a naval victory as consequential as Salamis and Trafalgar. Released in time for Memorial Day, the book concludes by considering today’s naval challenges and the rising threat of Red China in the Pacific. —JP
Adventurer: The Life and Times of Giacomo Casanova, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press): If Leo Damrosch’s previous book, The Club, had a fraternal bent, then his newest work takes its bearings by a different set of lights. Though the title Adventurer gives a clue as to the breadth of its subject’s activities, what best expresses the signal theme here must be the name of the man himself, Casanova, the most famous byword for seducers and beguilers at least since Don Juan. For two centuries, Casanova’s own sweeping Histoire de ma vie has captivated cultural historians and libertines alike, but, as Damrosch notes in his introduction, that appellation should give us pause—the word histoire means both “history” and “tale” in French. This new account is grounded but no less scandalous. —RE
“Steven Isserlis plays Haydn and Bach,” at the Orchestra of St. Luke’s Bach Festival, Carnegie Hall (June 2): The Orchestra of St. Luke’s third annual Bach Festival kicks off in New York this Thursday with a concert at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall featuring the cellist Steven Isserlis. The Bach legacy will be in the hands of C. P. E. Bach, the fifth of J. S. Bach’s thirteen children, who made a name for himself as the “Berlin Bach” as a court composer and musician for Frederick the Great of Prussia. On the program are a cello concerto and symphony of C. P. E. Bach’s, along with the same by one of his greatest followers, Franz Joseph Haydn. —IS
A Postcard from Kasos, 1965, by Robert A. McCabe (Abbeville Press): As the mercury shimmies up the glass with alacrity today in New York, citydwellers could be forgiven for dreaming of a cool Aegean night. The photographer Robert A. McCabe brings readers just that in A Postcard from Kasos, 1965, which collects 112 black-and-white photographs of Kasos, a small Dodecanese island, from 1965, before mass tourism intruded upon Greece’s distant lands. This book is transporting. —BR
From the podcast:
“Douglas Murray on ‘The War on the West.’” An address to the Friends of The New Criterion.
By the Editors:
“Zabar’s is still thriving.”
James Panero, The Spectator World Edition
From the archive:
“Is modernism the enemy? The case of Mies van der Rohe,” by Roger Kimball (May 1989). A review of Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich by Elaine S. Hochman.
Dispatch:
“Storm warning,” by Isaac Sligh. On a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Sheen Center, New York.