The fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission offers an opportunity for reconsideration of the Apollo program; even Buzz Aldrin has gotten into the act, publishing Magnificent Desolation, his second memoir. Criterion has contributed to the effort by releasing on DVD and Blu-Ray Al Reinert’s magnificent 1989 documentary For All Mankind. To make the film, Reinert, a journalist with no prior filmmaking experience, trolled through millions of feet of official Apollo 16-mm footage, then combined his selections with audio recordings extracted from hundreds of hours of interviews with astronauts.

One of the virtues of Jia Zhang-ke’s recent film 24 City (2008) is that he focuses on particular losses: the psychological and physical wounds inflicted upon the employees of Factory 420 in Chengdu, first under Mao’s regime in the 1960s and 1970s, and then during the shift from a planned economy to a market economy, the effects of which are still being felt today.

Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center began as a broad proposal for the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT about risk, and in particular about the rise of risk management as a form of planning. In the past fifteen to twenty years, it seems like planning focused on concrete visions or goals has given way to planning that catalogues the risks to which one is vulnerable—with the goal of preserving and expanding the status quo.

Rather than pay close attention to the merits of individual exhibitions or examine the public’s perception of the institution, Gross revels in the internecine squabbling among Met directors, board members, curators and New York City officials over the growth, acquisitions and public orientation of the museum. The book, akin to a 500-page Vanity Fair article, is an unabashedly unofficial history – Gross makes much of being denied official access to the museum’s archives and its employees [...]

Paradise Found ranges across five centuries of North America’s ecological history and narrates a striking diminishment of earlier natural abundance. Steve Nicholls offers copious evidence that even today our society is far from embracing as members of our “community” all of the earth’s living organisms. Yet, in recent decades, the sense of connection to the natural environment felt by figures like Leopold has swelled into what sociologist James William Gibson labels a “culture of enchantment” that is potentially broad, deep, and socially transformative. [...]

From William Leach’s fascinating book Land of Desire: “It was in the department stores, not in the museums, that modern art and American art found their first true patrons.” [...]

Though Sven Beckert’s book The Monied Metropolis is primarily an economic and political history, it also incorporates some commentary on the upper-class culture of the period. As always with a good work of scholarship, an odd, telling detail or two will stick out of such a book like a coin gleaming on the sidewalk. [...]

“The more I read of Williams, the more I was convinced of his relevance to contemporary ethics, especially (at first) a prominent question in contemporary religious ethics, the relationship between religion and morality. Do we need religion in order to maintain a public morality? Can Christians in particular make a contribution to a vision for public morality without either appearing to endorse theocracy or appealing to a universalistic basis for morality?” [...]

“Melville usually wrote in the mornings and took his family for carriage rides in the late afternoon, after a midday meal. Among their favorite outings were visits to the Shaker settlement at Mount Lebanon.” [...]

Consider this post a bookmark (“book mark”?) meant to spur my own further library research. Early in Thomas Bender’s New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1987), he comments briefly on a figure previously unknown to me, Hocquet Caritat. Bender writes, [...]

Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War has received incredible press attention, both because it is a well-written work by a respected historian and because its author was recently named president of Harvard University. Eric Foner praised it in The Nation; Geoffrey C. Ward did as well, in The New [...]

Published in Artforum, January 2009. “The challenge of the next half century,” said Lyndon B. Johnson at the University of Michigan in 1964, “is whether we have the wisdom to use [our] wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.” Los Angeles–based artist Rodney McMillian, who [...]

One of the two term papers I wrote this past semester surveyed the reputation of Roger Williams as it has broadened and deepened since about 1950. Here is part of the introduction (minus footnotes, but with links): In the public imagination, Roger Williams—Puritan dissident, founder of Providence, tireless proponent (in both England and New England) [...]

Yesterday morning I completed what is perhaps the longest book I’ve ever read: Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press). The transformation that Howe studies involves the “revolutions” of both communications and transportation during the period. This is in marked contrast to earlier interpretations of the era, [...]

William Chapman Sharpe, professor of English at Barnard College in New York City, is the author of Unreal Cities (1990) and coeditor of Visions of the Modern City (1983). His new book, New York Nocturne (2008), examines images of the city after dark in literature, painting, and photography from 1850 to 1950. To get a [...]

State by State re-creates, in condensed form, the American Guide series, a collection of 48 books published between 1938 and 1941 as part of the Federal Writers Project. Practicality, however, is set aside; whereas the earlier books were published by each state and intended for tourists’ use, this volume offers decidedly personal literary endeavors.

Robert H. Abzug’s engaging study of nineteenth-century reform-movement figures, including those who agitated for temperance, abolitionism, and women’s rights, argues that their aims can only be understood in the context of their religious thinking. [...]