By Patrick Hunt – Every year for the past five years, after fieldwork in the Alps I come down to Torino (Turin) in August. Following Hannibal’s route, I come not to conquer the Taurini like Hannibal but instead to be conquered by Torino, so famous for its slow food – […]
Reviews
Hannibal and Me: A Review
By Patrick Hunt The subtitle of Andreas Kluth’s insightful book Hannibal and Me is “What History’s Greatest Military Strategist Can Teach Us About Success and Failure”. It has more than just Hannibal wisdom, as expected from a writer for whom history is family and family is history: his great […]
Schall’s Historic Photos of Paris and Remembering Paris
By Staff Rebecca Schall has published several fascinating photographic histories of Paris with stunning black and white photos that once again prove the important role of photodocumentation in our understanding of the past several centuries. While art may render history on its own terms, photojournalism has its special place in preserving […]
Turing’s Cathedral
By Staff George Dyson is a rare bird, descended from a long line of creative genius, rendering him more than merely sympathetic to genius as an historian of science. His new book almost out, Turing’s Cathedral: Origins of the Digital Universe (Pantheon 2012) is an insightful paean to a […]
King Solomon the Chakam or the Wizard?
by Patrick Hunt Solomon is one of the huge enigmas of biblical legend, larger than life yet still mostly mysterious, although a brilliant new book distills much of the lore. This book by Steven Weitzman, Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom (Yale, 2011) carefully explores the conundrum of what we can […]
The Muse of History
By Staff What intellectual “postcard” should we choose to send ourselves from any great repository of history? Several of our Electrum Magazine staff-members (Patrick Hunt, A.C. Williams, P.F. Sommerfeldt and Melissa Guertin) were at the British Museum this past week (late March 2011) – and some of us for five […]
Following The Art Thief
by Melissa Guertin Edvard Munch may not now be screaming over his work’s repeated purloinings (1995, 2004) from several museums, since they’ve been returned, but Isabella Stewart Gardner should be turning over in her grave because the 1990 heist of twelve masterpieces from her lovely Boston palazzo museum is still […]