Uncling

After my nephew Harrison came to visit us, I wrote a short essay about being an uncle vs. being a father and it was published in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine yesterday. Here's the link.

Museum Review

A review I wrote of "Art and Empire: Treasures from Assyria in the British Museum" has been published in the latest issue of Near Eastern Archaeology (vol. 71 #4, cover dated December 2008).

It's too late to see the show at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and the review is not online, but it was a fun assignment because it was the second time I saw the show. The first was over a decade ago at the Met. The Met version was a lot more intellectual and had more scholarly information. The MFA version was incredibly beautiful and aestheticized. What surprised me, as a scholar of Assyrian art, is that I may prefer the MFA version.

The reasons I preferred the new iteration:

• exhibitions like this are not for experts; they are to encourage the general public to learn more about specific areas of art,
• more information can always be found in the catalogs of shows, and
• it was just plain gorgeous and made me appreciate the art I have studied for years in a new way.
  

Public Humanist

Another post, this one about the amazing Tara Donovan, a sculptor who has her first one woman show at the ICA Boston.

World History Matters

My latest publication is as a contributor to World History Matters: A Student Guide to World History Online, a nicely illustrated and well organized guide to scholarly internet sites. Yes, you can cite these in your papers!

Public Humanist

I have two new posts up at The Public Humanist.

The first is on the traveling British Museum exhibition of Assyrian art, Art and Empire.

The second is on the announcement of the Iraq Heritage Project.

Please comment on both or either. I'm very curious to know what others think about these topics.

Book Review: Babylon's Ark

Babylon's Ark by Lawrence Anthony is a memoir of a conservationist's trip to Baghdad soon after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to save the animals at the Baghdad Zoo. After reading a number of books on the topic, mostly on the archaeological looting, but also the excellent Imperial Life in the Emerald City, as well as numerous articles in the New Yorker and elsewhere, I feel like I know the story of the initial invasion (and bungling of the occupation) pretty well. For this reason, I found the first couple of chapters of Anthony's book a little tiresome (he also perpetuates the mistaken belief that since many of the major items looted from the Baghdad Museum were returned, that the looting was minor; it was not). The last chapter is also a bit much, a manifesto on respect for earth's creatures and awareness of our fragility, earth in the balance, blah blah blah.

That said, the middle of the book sucked me in. Anthony is South African, and SA was officially a neutral party in the occupation. The stories of the sidemen, the Department of Defense photographers, or the Afrikaan mercenary/security contractors, as well as the NGOs interested in conservation is pretty compelling. The story of the animals in the Zoo is really sad, although ultimately positive. There are also anecdotes about Uday and his pet lions that are pretty disturbing. In general, the portrait of Third World zoos and treatment of animals seemed pretty accurate based on my experiences. And Anthony is sympathetic to the Iraqis who are looting anything to feed their families, but he also rightly wonders about the psychosis that compelled people to loot things --iron bars from animal cages?-- they couldn't possibly sell. I was also interested to read that Captain William Sumner, who oversaw the Baghdad Museum, was also in charge of putting the Zoo right (it's all Civil Affairs).

At 250 pages or so, the book seemed a bit overlong to me, but there's definitely some good stories in there. An interesting angle through which to lament the war.

Movie Money Charts

For fans of Edward Tufte or other graphic designers (if you can name one, you are a fan):

Movie box office charts.

Well designed.