February
27 ,
2004
Front-Page
News
Ringing
Endorsement Iceland’s Bell, a major Icelandic
novel by Halldor Laxness newly translated into English, is a “darkly
magnificent” work, wrote MHC’s Brad Leithauser in
the February 15 edition of the New York
Times Book Review. Leithauser,
Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities, describes
Iceland’s Bell as the story of “two contrary immortals”:
Jon Hreggvidsson, a scoundrel and schemer who continually evades
execution, and Arni Arnaeus, a collector who dedicates his life
to preserving the Saga Age manuscripts that secured Iceland’s
place in literature. “Laxness, who won the Nobel Prize
in 1955, often disconcerted his countrymen by the harshness with
which he portrayed them in their struggles, and Iceland’s
Bell may well offer his bleakest depiction of his homeland,” Leithauser
wrote. Seventeenth-century Iceland, the book’s setting, “is
essentially a place administered by crooks—the colonial
Danish masters who monopolize its trade and plunder its few resources—and
populated by a drunken, despairing, loafish lot only fitfully
energized by the pleasure of watching some act of public cruelty.
More than any other novel I know, Iceland’s Bell recreates
a world where Pieter Bruegel would have felt right at home, not
merely in its fascination with bumblers (petty thieves, purblind
watchmen) and grotesques (faceless lepers, hanging corpses),
but also in its unearthly ability to find beauty in a landscape
of destitution, wisdom in a congress of fools,” Leithauser
wrote.
Fife and Drama In Washington’s Crossing, David Hackett
Fischer has written a “riveting narrative” of the
battles at Trenton and Princeton that proved to be the turning
point of the Revolutionary War, wrote Joseph J. Ellis in the
February 15 edition of the New York Times
Book Review. Ellis,
MHC professor of history, tips his cap to Fischer, university
professor at Brandeis University, for destroying several “myths
and misconceptions” about the crossing of the Delaware,
and for his skill in giving the reader a sense of what warfare
was like in the late eighteenth century. “For reasons beyond
my comprehension, there has never been a great film about the
War of Independence,” Ellis wrote. “The Civil War,
World War I, World War II, and Vietnam have all been captured
memorably, but the American Revolution seems to resist cinematic
treatment. More than any other book, Washington’s Crossing provides the opportunity to correct this strange oversight, for
in a confined chronological space we have the makings of both
Patton and Saving Private Ryan, starring none other than George
Washington. Fischer has provided the script.”
Code Breaker New York Times writer David Cay Johnston turned
to John O. Fox, visiting associate professor of complex organizations,
for perspectives on the nation’s increasingly complex income
tax code. Congressional promises to the contrary, Johnston wrote
in “Talking Simplicity, Building a Maze,” that the
federal income tax code has become only more complicated in the
past several years. “Simplification, Mr. Fox said, will
not come about until voters ask politicians on the campaign trail
hard questions about how the 1986 promise to tax all income morphed
into a tax code larded with special-interest tax breaks,” Johnston
wrote. He added that Fox “favors broadening the tax base
so that tax rates can be lowered. He estimates that close to
half of all income goes untaxed each year, because individuals
can defer tax into the future through devices like retirement
savings plans, or avoid them entirely through devices like the
Roth IRA.”
Scratching the Surface Darby Dyar,
professor of astronomy and geology at Mount Holyoke, was among
the scientists and researchers commenting on the Mars rover
mission in the February 2 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Science writer Keay Davidson noted that the rover Opportunity
landed next to what scientists believe may be Martian bedrock—a
stroke of good fortune. “In order to understand the chemistry
and geological history of Mars, we need to study rocks that
show the fewest signs of weathering,” Dyar explained. “Any
loose sediment or boulder, by definition, has been freed from
bedrock by either chemical or physical weathering processes,
and therefore is likely to have been altered since its formation.
Access to bedrock gives us a chance at analyzing unaltered
rocks.’’
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