Lapham's Quarterly
In place of a book review, this week I offer a magazine review. Lewis Lapham (editor emeritus and national correspondent for Harper's and author of over a dozen books) launched Lapham's Quarterly late last year with a purpose that may sound pretentious to some:
In answer to the problem of disappearing context, Lapham's Quarterly discovers in the uses of history both a natural resource and an applied technology. Some things change, others don't, but absent a knowledge of which is which, where then do we find our bearings in the gulf of time, and how do we not become orphans, marooned on the islands of the dream-ridden self?Cicero framed the thought as an aphorism, "Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy marks for the dealers in junk science, totalitarian politics, and quack religion.
The inaugural "States of War" issue is a spectacular read: Over 200 ad-free pages filled with some of the most significant words ever written about war, followed by several contemporary essays. Who do we meet? Which events are described? Everything from Homer's siege of Troy, Sun Tzu's Art of War, and Thucydides' Melian dialogue up through Augustine's "just war" and Grant's "unconditional surrender," to Twain's "War Prayer" and Bush's "axis of evil"...with dozens of others in between. (I wonder, though, why LQ uses the deprecated "BC" instead of BCE for dates preceding the common era.)
I welcome Lapham's Quarterly as a new favorite magazine. It is well worth its $15 cover price, and I hope it will continue to be so with whatever topics are selected for future issues. History will no doubt furnish adequate material for collection and contemplation. (The LQ blog is a nice effort as well, but why isn't it syndicated? There's no excuse to publish a blog without a feed.)