Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936 to 1986, by James Rosen (Regnery): When Antonin Scalia died unexpectedly in 2016, there was the undeniable feeling in the air that a giant had left us. His ascension to the highest court in the land has all the makings of an American fairy tale, but it is no fable—it is “proof of the vitality of the American Dream,” as James Rosen puts it in Scalia: Rise to Greatness, 1936 to 1986. Rosen’s new biography ably narrates the first fifty years of Scalia’s life, aided by access to much of the justice’s previously unseen writings. The author draws out everything from Nino’s humble beginnings in Queens, New York, through his Supreme Court confirmation hearing. Of that hearing in particular the author gives us a lively picture, including the “verbosity” and “loose, non-linear” style of questioning posed by a certain Senator Biden. Here is a comprehensive look at the formative justice’s formative years. —LL
Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World, by Colin Elliott (Princeton University Press): In the ancient world, as Colin Elliott reminds us in Pox Romana, disease was attributed not just to uncleanliness but also to impiety—see the beginning of the Iliad, when Apollo punishes the rape of Chriseis by loosing a plague on the Greeks. So when the disease known as the Antonine plague swept through the Mediterranean in the late second century A.D., some Roman writers traced its origin to a sacrilege committed at the Mesopotamian city of Seleucia, where pillaging Roman legions had smashed up a shrine to Apollo and released, the story goes, a cloud of pestilence that followed them back to Rome before ravaging the rest of the empire. This “shrine leak” theory has been viewed by modern scholars as a species of Roman xenophobia, not without reason, and yet Elliot is careful not to dismiss it out of hand. It’s well possible, as he notes, that the mysterious disease did in fact come from the East. But his real achievement is to show how, at the supposed height of Pax Romana, it was the very elements that had secured Rome’s ascendancy—its governing institutions, commercial networks, transportation infrastructure, and, of course, vast military presence—that now made the empire ripe for the first true pandemic in history. —RE
“Klimt Landscapes,” at Neue Galerie, New York (through May 6): Now best known for his “Golden Style” portraits, Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) turned to the golden light of nature in the last twenty years of his career. Depicting the landscapes around the Attersee in the Salzkammergut region of Austria, where the artist spent his summers, these square paintings took inspiration from Impressionism, photography, and his own all-over color sensibilities for the “total work of art.” Now on view at Neue Galerie through May 6, “Klimt Landscapes” draws on the museum’s own rich Klimt collection with loans from the Harvard Art Museums, the Museum of Modern Art, the Wien Museum, and other collections in the United States and Europe. Accompanied by a scholarly catalogue edited by Janis Staggs, the exhibition presents these verdurous works alongside examples of the artist’s interest in prints, photography, fashion, and the decorative arts. —JP
Mark Padmore & Mitsuko Uchida, at Zankel Hall, New York (March 15): The pianist Mitsuko Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore are eminent Schubertians. Last year they gave us a recording for Decca of Schubert’s Schwanengesang, which found both musicians in fine form, though Padmore’s delicate tenor was recorded too low in the mix to rise above Uchida’s playing in its more fiery passages. This Friday, Carnegie Hall’s smaller Zankel stage will be the ideal venue to hear the duo in Schubert’s masterwork Winterreise cycle, twenty-four songs of heartbreak and sorrow setting the haunting poetry of Wilhelm Müller to music. —IS
Jan Lisiecki, at Carnegie Hall, New York (March 13): The pianist Jan Lisiecki makes his solo recital debut at Carnegie Hall this Wednesday, though the twenty-eight-year-old former child prodigy first tread that stage at the age of nineteen in 2016. It looks to be an exciting program: preludes of various shapes and sizes by J. S. Bach, Rachmaninoff, Szymanowski, Messiaen, Górecki, and Chopin. Lisiecki, a Canadian of Polish descent, steers by his compatriot’s star: about half of his young career’s recorded output has been music by Chopin. That composer’s complete set of preludes will round out Wednesday’s program: twenty-four gem-like essays that, from the rollicking, quasi-baroque breeze of the opening number to the stormy furor of the famous “Raindrop,” run the gamut of emotion and musical expression with remarkable laconicism. —IS
Bohemian Soul: The Vanishing Interiors of New Orleans, by Valorie Hart (Rizzoli): New Orleans may be the “Big Easy,” but there’s nothing easy about assembling interiors that reflect what the designer Valorie Hart calls “a sensibility marked by exuberance, fantasy, irony, the makeshift, and the macabre.” Those defining traits of life in New Orleans are on full display in Hart’s new book of interiors from the Crescent City. Here Greek key motifs pair with Southwestern rugs, while toile curtains guard the windows; Mardi Gras beads hang around the neck of a classical head; and color is everywhere. Here is a delightful peek behind doors rarely open. —BR
By the Editors:
“The History of England’s Cathedrals Review: Sacred Architecture”
Benjamin Riley, The Wall Street Journal
From the Archives:
“François Truffaut: saved by the cinema” by John Simon (September 1990). On Truffaut in his letters.
Dispatch:
“Over the garden wall” by Anthony Daniels. On the compartmentalization of evil & The Zone of Interest.