Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert, edited & translated by Marcel Kurpershoek (New York University Press): Around the time T. S. Eliot was writing The Waste Land, a faraway group of Bedouin poets in the Arabian dunes were composing their own complex dissections of modernity. These once-isolated poets had watched as telegraph and railroad lines began to snake across their desert homelands and lived to see their proud rulers forge pacts with Western forces long considered hostile. And, in opposition to these developments, they had also seen the revival of religious extremism as Wahhabism swept through the region. Little poetry from this time and place has been translated into English. Thankfully, Bedouin Poets of the Nafūd Desert, translated by the diplomat Marcel Kurpershoek, goes a long way in breaking the silence. Kurpershoek has translated the works of three Bedouin writers—Khalaf Abu Zwayyid, Adwan al-Hirbid, and Ajlan ibn Rmal—who provide a sweeping look at this lost world. —LL
London from the Air, by Jeffrey Milstein (Rizzoli): “To fly from, need not be to hate, mankind,” wrote Byron, in a remark definitely not made about aerial photography. But as Jeffrey Milstein demonstrates in London from the Air, to fly above London is to appreciate the great works of man, albeit from an unusual perspective. And so we feel the regularity of Christopher Wren’s Chelsea Hospital even more keenly when we see it from above. John Nash’s great swoop of Regent Street expresses itself more forcefully when taken in at one go. Milstein, a photographer, architect, and pilot, brings us on a flying tour of the Big Smoke, revealing the human achievement by soaring above. —BR
“Lost New York,” at the New-York Historical Society Museum & Library (opens April 19): The Crystal Palace, the Croton Reservoir, the Knickerbocker Stage Line Omnibus: the New-York Historical Society remembers the city gone by in “Lost New York.” Opening this Friday, the exhibition curated by Wendy Nālani E. Ikemoto features some ninety paintings, photographs, objects, and lithographs from the society’s collection. With highlights including Jules Crow’s 1906 watercolor of McKim, Mead, and White’s Pennsylvania Station, created four years before the Beaux-Arts train hall opened in 1910, and De La Prelette Wriley’s 1837 panel painting of his shop at No. 7 1/2 Bowery, here is a trove of the city’s lost treasures now found. —JP
“Fifth Avenue—Architecture and Society: History of America’s Street of Dreams,” delivered by Mosette Broderick, presented by the Skyscraper Museum (April 16): There’s something about early spring in New York—the sharper light, maybe, or the longer days—that can make the city’s architecture feel startlingly new, revealing unnoticed details and almost refurbishing old favorites. Yet certain threads in the architectural fabric will always escape the naked eye; among them are blocks and blocks of buildings, no longer standing, that nevertheless left a definitive mark on urban life before their demolition. But there are remedies for this, too, such as the talk to be delivered by the architectural historian Mosette Broderick this Tuesday, April 16: a chronological tour of Manhattan’s most famous thoroughfare, Fifth Avenue, stretching back to its origins as an eighteenth-century farm road. Sponsored by the Skyscraper Museum, the event is free to stream with rsvp. —RE
Podcasts:
“Music for a While #87: Spring forward”
Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music–but, more important, plays music.
From the Archives:
“Guilt trip: Versailles, avant-garde & kitsch,” by Roger Kimball (September 2014). On John Maynard Keynes’s revisionist history of World War I & its harmful consequences.
Dispatch:
“Another day, another pronoun,” by Joshua T. Katz. On pronominal landmines.