Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Monday, August 18. 2008

One of those books: The Flowering of New England

I am reading one of those books that I've heard about on and off all my life, but never read: Van Wyck Brook's 1937 The Flowering of New England: 1815-1865.

While the book is mainly about the blossoming of American scholarship and literature, I would have to rank the book as a piece of literature itself. Wonderful stuff. It's not literary history - it's history, told in an engaging and often humorous way.

The parts about the remarkable Daniel Webster are hilarious, as are the bits about one of America's first world-renowned eccentric geniuses, Nathaniel Bowditch.

Brooks was one of those old-fashioned scholar-writers who knew everything about everything.

Posted by The Barrister in History, Our Essays, The Culture, "Culture," Pop Culture and Recreation at 13:01 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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