Kings of the Road

It is the 50th anniversary of the release of Jack Kerouac's On the Road . But lost in all the hoopla that will accompany that anniversary there is an anniversary that is perhaps even more significant. Jack London--then one of the most popular authors in America--published a memoir titled simply The Road. That book comes from an era when American writers like London, Dreiser and Sinclair wrote to make their readers aware of injustices and to rouse them to political action. In this article by Jonah Raskin in this month's The Nation, we relive London's account of his wild, eye-opening journey across the country by railroad, boat, and foot and remember that America's love affair with the road novel might have begun with London. For several generations readers, including the Beat generation, it served as as Raskin says as "an invitation to see the country firsthand, though not first-class." Read the full story here.

Why Intellectuals Love Genocide

In 2002, an Australian free-lance historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle, published a book that created a controversy that has still not died down. ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,’ sets out to destroy the idea that there had been a genocide of Tasmanian aborigines carried out by the early European settlers of the island. It turned conventional history on its head and is has forced historians to rethink their efforts. It has been an historical orthodoxy that there had been such a genocide. Robert Hughes accepted the idea in his best-selling history of early Australia, The Fatal Shore.

Winshuttle argued that those assumptions were based on poor research and the whole notion of a country founded on a genocide was thrown into doubt. Theodore Dalyrimple in The New English Review delves into the crisis that Australian historians and intellectuals underwent and the rethinking of the convention notions of Australia's dark history. Read the whole article here.

Has America Become The New Rome?

Comparing the present historical epoch to a past one is an excellent intellectual parlor game. It requires you to know enough about the two periods to assess their similarities and differences. It encourages a broad, synthetic analysis and a long view. And it defamiliarizes the present, forcing you to look with fresh eyes at cultural and political realities you had previously taken for granted. At its worst, it can become a mere display of superficial knowledge, in which facile analogies take the place of real engagement. But at its best, it can illuminate both periods, creating that simultaneous sense of recognition and mystery that the best history does. Cullen Murphy's "Are We Rome?" is an example of the parlor game played at its best. Read the full review here.

In Search of a Blair Zeitgeist

With Tony Blair's resignation imminent, there will be considerable refelction on the last ten years of British history and the legacy of Mr. Blair. From Cool Britannia and Peace in Ulster to devloution and the Iraq war, it is difficult to guage the zeitgeist of the Labour leader's Britain. Caroline Michel of The Guardian goes in search of the writer who best sums up the Blair years.

"A zeitgeist has to be a composite of many pieces of culture that act as two-way mirrors reflecting back on, to, and through us the drama of something built into a moment. To have a zeitgeist perhaps we must have a legacy that engenders the "spirit of our time". It's a cliche to say Blair is Thatcher's natural heir, and I wonder whether, in literary terms, Thatcher's legacy has produced some of the great zeitgeist writers, themes, and novels of Blair's 10 years." Read the full article here.