By Robert Kanigel.
Scribners. 438 pp. $27.95
Paul Johnson, in National Review (June 10,
1991), 150 East 35th St., New York, N.Y. 10016.
Percy Bysshe Shelley in 182 1 called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." But Ludwig van Beethoven (1770- 1827) had already staked out a similar claim on behalf of a genuinely lowly group: musicians. In fact, it was Beetho- ven, according to journalist-historian Johnson, who "first established and popu- larized the notion of the artist as universal genius, as a moral figure...
PERIODICALS
About This Mona Lisa
Fed up with "the red rant of unearned praise," novelist Stanley Elkin fires away in Art & Antiques (Summer 1991) at some "overrated masterpieces," from Hamlet to Citizen Kane. But when he comes to Leo- nardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, the curmud- geonly critic almost succumbs to her fam-ously mysterious smile.
See her there in her cat-who-ate-the-canaries, her smug repose and babushka of hair like a her odd, asexual face, in where the myster...
PERIODICALS
Colley and E. Hedges, Scottish troops of the 78th Highland Regi- ment, led officers in kilts and tam-o'shanters, advance in rows, fir- ing on the retreating French. One Highlander, meanwhile, rushes to assist the wounded Peirson, who braces himself against a building near where his troops entered the square. In placing him at the edge of the scene, Saunders notes, the artists "chose reportage over drama."
Copley, by contrast (and despite at least one battlefield accoun...
he might have rec- ognized a Salinas presidency in exchange for more favorable treatment of his coali- tion in the Senate and at the state and local levels." The next year, he founded a new party, whose very name-the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)-under- scored his challenge. "The PRD's call for a revolutionary change in the way Mexico is governed," Reding observes, "has, in ef- fect, transformed every election in which it participates into a referendum on authoritarian...
those in Russia and the West who are eager to justify the Kremlin's new authoritarianism as a necessary evil," Starr says, there is "ample evidence that Rus-
sians, freed from fear, possess as much ini- tiative and capacity for independent action as do members of other developed soci- eties in Europe, Asia, and the Americas." The West, he says, should accept "at face value" the democratic movement in the Soviet Union, not "belittle it simply be- cause it has not, in...
FEMINISM WITHOUT ILLUSIONS: A Critique of Individualism
By Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.
Univ. of N.C. 347 pp. $24.95
SIGNPOSTS IN A STRANGE LAND
By Walker Percy. Edited with an Introduction by
Patrick Samway.
Farrar, Straus.
428 pp. $25
LEARNING TO CURSE: Essays in Early Modem Culture
By Stephen J. Greenblatt.
Routledge.
188 pp. $25
Compiled by Yves Bonnefoy.
Trans. under the direction of Wendy Doniger. 2 volumes.
Univ. of Chicago. 1267 pp.$250