Deborah Cramer's SMITHSONIAN OCEAN: OUR WATER, OUR WORLD in the New York Times

Diving Into a New World
Edward Rothstein
New York Times, September 26

The Sant Ocean Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, which opens on Saturday, isn’t just about 71 percent of the Earth’s surface. It is the largest renovation in the museum’s century-long history and a transformation of its largest exhibition space, making it as much about the museum’s future as about the ocean’s.

Yes, of course, water takes center stage. When you enter the new hall off the Beaux Arts rotunda, the dimmed, atmospheric lighting is meant to suggest the sea; an illuminated blue panel coaxes: “Dive in. Discover it with us.” And well above floor level are eight giant video screens showing schools of fish and sea creatures near Belize, the Galápagos Islands and other aquatic utopias pulsing with oceanic life. It is as if the entire 23,000-square-foot exhibition space were submerged in a giant natural aquarium...

There is room for improvement, of course. In some galleries explanations could be clearer. And the museum could have been more imaginative in some expositions, the way Deborah Cramer so often is in her inspiring companion volume to the hall, “Smithsonian Ocean: Our Water, Our World.”

But so much can be learned here, and the new model of the museum is so well integrated with the valuable parts of the old that the Ocean Hall makes the sea change in museum life look promising.

For the full article, click here.

Ben Taylor Interviews Philip Roth

Featured September 19 as PW Daily's "Picture of the Day," Ben Taylor, author of The Book of Getting Even and Tales Out of School, relaxes with Philip Roth and his publicist before a live broadcast interview of Roth and his new novel, Indignation.

James Galbraith and THE PREDATOR STATE on NPR's On Point

The Super-Bailout
NPR, On Point with Tom Ashbrook, September 22

George W. Bush pushed what he and others called the “ownership society,” the privatization of nearly everything.

Now, instead, what the country is getting may be the biggest public bailout of private industry in American history.

Seven hundred billion dollars would be on the line, says Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. It may be a trillion. Public money. To staunch private losses.

It may save the economy, but the economy — and financial facts of life — will be different on the other side. And what should taxpayers get for stepping up?

This hour, On Point: The mother of all bailouts for Wall Street — and what comes with it...

Guests:
Dennis Berman, editor and reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He also writes for the paper’s Deal Journal blog.

James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government and Business Relations and Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin. His new book is “The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals should Too.”

Kenneth Rogoff, professor of economics at Harvard University. He was chief economist and director of research at the International Monetary Fund from 2001 to 2003.

To listen to the clip, click here.

Peter Gosselin's HIGH WIRE on NPR's Talk of the Nation

U.S. Finances Precariously Perched On A "High Wire"
NPR, Talk of the Nation, September 18

American families are nervous about the stability of their finances — and Peter Gosselin says that they should be. In his new book, High Wire, he writes that an increasing number of families are only one mortgage-, doctor-, or emergency- payment away from financial ruin.

To listen to the NPR clip and read an excerpt of High Wire, click here.

Benjamin Taylor's TALES OUT OF SCHOOL on KUHF FM's The Front Row

Tales Out of Ike
St. John Flynn
KUHF FM 88.7 Houston, September 13

Holed up at the station as KUHF deals with Hurricane Ike and we work to get as much information about what's happening where out to our listeners, I've got some down time and want to put it to good use.

Ike has been my first experience of a hurricane, and obviously in such a situation our regular concerns get swept away with the first elevated winds of the storm. But now that the eye has passed us by and left its indelible mark, I can write a blog entry that has some cultural relevance.

It occurred to me as the winds reached hurricane force last night and prepared to make landfall at Galveston that about 10 years ago I read an excellent novel set against the backdrop of the infamous hurricane of 1900 that completely devastated the coastal city.

Galveston, Texas, was struck on September 8th, 1900, by a Category 4 storm that packed winds of 135 mph. Official reports state that 8,000 people lost their lives making the "Great Storm" (this was before authorities began assigning alphabetical names to tropical storms) the U.S.'s deadliest natural disaster to date.

At the end of the 19th century, Galveston was a boomtown with a population of 42,000. It was the biggest city in Texas, and it's trade center. The Great Storm put paid to Galveston's pre-eminence, and Houston grew to fill the void.

The hurricane significantly changed the course of Texas history.

Benjamin Taylor's debut novel, Tales Out of School (Grand Central Publishing, 1997) is set against the Great Storm and the havoc it wreaks on the Mehmel family. The year is 1907, and Felix Mehmel, whose father died in the hurricane, is coming of age in Galveston among the members of his German-Jewish family, a family that seems to be disintegrating.

For the full post, click here.

To hear the interview with Benjamin Taylor, check out KUHF's website.

James Galbraith's THE PREDATOR STATE in USA Today

'Predator' Urges Change in Definition of 'Free Market'
Steve Weinberg
USA Today, September 8, 2008

James Galbraith used to work inside Congress, as executive director of the Joint Economic Committee. Then he settled in as a professor at the University of Texas.

Like his renowned father, economist John Kenneth Galbraith, James is an iconoclast. In previous books, polemics for national magazines and research studies for academic journals, he questions the central tenets of economic policy and the underpinnings of waging imperialistic wars on behalf of capitalism and democracy.

In a book published two years ago, Galbraith showed what he considered the intellectual dishonesty of Republican Party — and supposedly, "conservative" — economic policy. That book, Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire, sought to demonstrate the devotion of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and then-Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan to helping the wealthy (including themselves) at the expense of equity (or at least a semblance of fairness) in American society.

Galbraith's new book, The Predator State, takes plenty of well-aimed, well-deserved shots at Republicans and conservatives, Democrats and liberals. Mostly, though, as the subtitle suggests, it is a denuding of an idea — the idea of how vital "free markets" are to a capitalistic, democratic nation.

For the full article, click here.

Philip and Alice Shabecoff's POISONED PROFITS in Rocky Mountain News

Poisoned Profits: The Toxic Assault on Our Children
Verna Noel Jones
Rocky Mountain News, August 21 2008

Nonfiction. By Philip Shabecoff and Alice Shabecoff. Random House, $26. Grade: A

Book in a nutshell: Rachel Carson first warned of the harmful assault of pesticides on the environment in her 1962 book Silent Spring. At that time, about 200 pesticide products were on the market. Now some 900 pesticide ingredients formulated into 18,000 different pesticide products are actively being used nationwide, causing disease, disability and dysfunction to one of every three of America's 73 million children, warn authors Philip and Alice Shabecoff.

Philip, chief environmental correspondent for The New York Times for 14 years, and Alice, a freelance journalist, present detailed evidence showing that children are 10 times more vulnerable than adults to cancer-causing chemicals and accumulate half of their lifetime risk of cancer by age two.

Since the 1970s, brain cancer in kids is up about 35 percent and acute lymphocytic leukemia is up 47 percent. Long-term studies, they say, have shown that the five most popular varieties of weed and seed garden herbicides are associated with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Pollutants also have been linked to many birth defects.

The authors name names in providing evidence of harm to our children, and show how the U.S. president, Congress and scientists-for- hire (who create "purposely flawed studies") aid and abet the polluters.

For the full article, click here.

Ruth Butler's Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin in NYT

Author Gives Voice to Artists’ Silent Muses, Their Wives
By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times, September 3, 2008

Years ago Ruth Butler was walking through the Musée Rodin in Paris when she glimpsed a small oil painting of a woman with short brown hair, intense eyes and pursed lips. It was labeled a portrait of Rodin’s mother.

“I said, ‘That’s ridiculous,’ ” recalled Ms. Butler, who was on the museum’s board and is now professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts in Boston and the author of a Rodin biography. She recognized the portrait as that of Rose Beuret, Rodin’s model and later his wife.

“I thought that if even the Musée Rodin doesn’t care about Rose, then I should write about this,” Ms. Butler said as she sat sipping a cappuccino in the Petrie Court at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, gazing out at Central Park.

The book is “Hidden in the Shadow of the Master: The Model-Wives of Cézanne, Monet and Rodin,” recently published by Yale University Press. In it Ms. Butler tries to rescue from obscurity the women who she argues were so much a part of the triumphs of these visionaries.

“These artists would find people whose body and face make a statement that they could not otherwise make,” Ms. Butler said, arguing that the models have never been given their due. The women “made a contribution,” she added. “They deserve to be seen, not just visually but biographically.”

As artists in the second half of the 19th century shifted from painting historical, mythological and religious subjects to everyday life, they looked for a new kind of model. For the first time, Ms. Butler said, artists used the same model — often a wife or lover — over and over and over again in different paintings and in different scenes.

The switch was related in part to the end of official patronage, which centuries of artists had depended upon for support. The collapse of this system of sponsorship and the beginnings of an art market set off a series of changes for artists, not the least of which was often poverty.

The three artists that Ms. Butler focuses on — Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne — all spotted their models on the streets of Paris, drawn to something unique in a face or manner. All later married and had sons. But the women were often treated badly.

Ms. Butler “provides good reason to look at these artists’ work again,” a reviewer in the British magazine The Spectator wrote, because “each look brings a lost soul back to life.”

Very little is known about Hortense Fiquet, Cézanne’s model and wife, who sat for 27 oil portraits and numerous drawings. Ms. Butler said she tried to get information from their descendants, but they either snubbed or misled her. The feeling in the family, she said, was that Hortense “was a lowlife, that she spent his money.”

“They didn’t like her,” she added.

For the rest of the article, and an excerpt of the book, please click here.