Alcohol can cause delusions—among Americans, anyway, who think it’s reasonable to let a person vote and go to war before giving them the right to sip a fuzzy navel. And these are just the latest symptoms of this affliction, which dates back to colonial days. According to wine-industry lawyer and vintner Richard Mendelson, author of the very engaging From Demon to Darling: A Legal History of Wine in America (University of California Press, $30), “early temperance advocates believed that beer and wine played a critical role in encouraging a life of temperance. So accepted was this wisdom that the ‘Massachusetts

The prolific A. S. Byatt has been publishing novels since the mid-’60s (her first, The Shadow of the Sun, came out in 1964), but it wasn’t until 1990, when she won the Booker Prize for Possession—the story of a pair of contemporary scholars whose research on two Victorian poets reveals an extramarital affair between them—that she became an international (literary) household name. But Dame Byatt, who was awarded the DBE ten years ago (and the CBE nine years earlier), credits not the Booker Prize but the Web with her considerably raised profile: “Everything I say or write is now perpetuated

The fall of Bataan on April 9, 1942, remains the single largest surrender of United States military forces in history, with roughly seventy-six thousand soldiers (most of them Filipino allies) handed over to Japanese captors. Japan’s attack on America’s Clark Air Base in the Philippines destroyed an entire airfield of unprotected planes and unprepared men. While the Pearl Harbor attack of four months earlier is universally acknowledged as a watershed moment of US involvement in the Pacific theater, Bataan, with its less heroic mix of humiliation at the hands of the enemy and betrayal by those in command, has remained

Unbalanced tokens, check your syntax. Non-closure is at the end of this excerpt: n fear. Others cheered. This was in June, in Somalia, as reported in the 69New York Times.4849

In 1913, the French writer Charles Péguy observed that “the world has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has changed in the last thirty years.” Kate Cambor’s new study, Gilded Youth, tracks the changes of that era through the figures of Léon Daudet, son of the beloved French writer Alphonse; Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of the groundbreaking neurologist Jean-Martin; and Jeanne Hugo, granddaughter of Victor. These childhood friends, all born in the late 1860s, were caught between two epochs, between the “pessimism and pensiveness” of the nineteenth century and the “energy and activity” of the twentieth. Sigmund Freud, Émile Zola,

On a date in the late 1960s with Annette Messager, the woman who would become his wife, Christian Boltanski wiped off his hands, postdinner, by running them through his hair (much to Messager’s shock). He’d learned the questionable habit from his father, a doctor who believed the practice helped make his hair “beautiful.” The artist’s disclosure comes in one of a series of interviews by curator Catherine Grenier, which she has pieced together to form the absorbing, if flawed, autobiography The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski.

The Bauhaus is coming to New York. A retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art later this fall will be accompanied by an immense catalogue, detailing a dazzling array of the school’s ideas and objects. But before the onslaught of Gropius, Klee, Kandinsky, Albers, Breuer, Moholy-Nagy, Itten, and Schlemmer, one ought to peruse this intimate volume of work and writings by Gunta Stölzl, the school’s only female master. Coeditor Monika Stadler (both editors are the artist’s daughters), in a nostalgic glance back at her childhood, calls the interwoven text and images a “picture book,” and the term is quite

Middle of the night and your head teems with half-formed thoughts: Did I pay the car insurance? Where did I park the car? Is my best dress shirt at the dry cleaners? What time’s the wedding on Saturday? Need a map of Vermont to get there. I should frame my vintage maps one of these days. Maybe start with that bird’s-eye view of New Amsterdam, or the blue-tinted mariner’s chart . . .