Eric Hanson's Blog, page 24

Prodigies

On May 14, 1643, Louis XIV was crowned king of France. He was four years old. History is full of four year-old monarchs, hovered over by helpful and malign viziers and privy counsellors and stage mothers, all lovingly asserting their own power. It's a familiar picture. Mary became Queen of Scots before she celebrated her first birthday. She was given lots of advice by her French uncles.

The more famous prodigies are musical. Mozart playing the piano for kings and grand dukes before his feet coul

Restlessness

People change. Authors dress differently and stop eating in the same restaurants after they hit the bestseller lists. Hemingway's second wife was rich and he began wintering in Gstaad instead of Schruns. Ballplayers reach a sweet spot in their careers and decline from there, becoming clubhouse sages and managers and posing in ads for Interwoven socks. Rock stars continue on and on, always wealthy, always attractive, because they sell their souls to the devil. This is why lives are interesting to

Father's Day

Is it too early to talk about Father's Day? I don't think so. Men buy their wives Mother's Day presents the afternoon of the day before; women are more organized and probably bought the father of their children a gift in the post-Christmas sales. So, I am counting on the kids.

Kids? Fathers love books. Biographies are great. Military biographies even better. Sports biographies, excellent choice. Political biography?

It's getting hard to choose isn't it? Which do you go for? The safest idea might

Mother's Day

On the day after our maternal parents have been celebrated, kissed, given potted plants and cards drawn with crayon and plaster handprints of small children, we are left to wonder what it's all about. Motherhood is one of many themes in A Book of Ages. No surprise, really. It's a book about life's changes, the relationships we nurture and endure, and there is no relationship more profound than that of mother and child.

Famous people have mothers too. Mothers who died young, like Lincoln's, Somer

Heroism and Anti-Heroism

On May 10, 1873, Father Damien arrives on the island of Molokai in Hawaii. He is 33. He will live there as parish priest to the leper colony until he dies in 1889.

On May 10, 1775, American forces under the command of Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen capture Fort Ticonderoga in New York. The 34 year-old Arnold then leads a 1100 men on a heroice but unsuccessful invasion of Canada, where he is wounded in the assault on the citadel of Quebec. He is wounded again, more severely, winning a brilliant

de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America on this date in 1831. He was 25 and, as the "de" before his last name indicates, an aristocrat. His purpose was to observe the American penal system, but he saw other things as well, town government in action, street mobs, political machines and what Europeans called vox populi. We called it something else. He was sharp-eyed and sharp-penciled. Simply by travelling around the country for eight months he was able to collect enough insights to lard the aft

Acknowledgments

I thought I'd take a day to thank some people.

Firstly, I owe a debt to the magazines I read. The critics who've taught me most of what I know about the authors and poets and artists and composers and performers who create the culture. The analysts who explain politics while events are still warm, before they become history, and the history in the background of those events.

In the book I thank the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the New York Times and their book review, th

Beethoven, The Brownings, Seabiscuit

On May 7, 1824, Beethoven conducted the first performance of his Ninth Symphony. The setting: Vienna’s Kartnertor Theater. The orchestra and soloists were told to ignore the composer and instead follow the count of the assistant conductor. Beethoven was, by this time, completely deaf and couldn't hear the orchestra or the applause. Despite the packed house he lost money on the night. Beethoven appears on pages 187 and 211 in A Book of Ages.

Composers Johannes Brahms and Pyotor Ilich Tchaikovsky

Freud, Eiffel, the Four Minute Mile

It was also on this day, in 1954 that a 25 year-old medical student from Oxford University ran the first mile in under four minutes. His name was Roger Bannister. His record lasted less than a month before it was broken by an Australian whose name nobody remembers. Bannister retired from running within the year, but he will always be the first to break this arbitrary barrier, just as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had been the first to climb Everest a year earlier.

It was on May 6, 1889 that E

The Sack of Rome and The Sun King moves to the Suburbs

May 6th, 1527 is the date of the infamous Sack of Rome. Most people think this took place during the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, made famous in the book by Edward Gibbon (p 158 in A Book of Ages). Actually, the Empire collapsed a thousand years earlier. This episode took place at the end of the Italian Renaissance. Michelangelo was living in Florence at the time and missed the whole thing. Three years later the greatest sculptor of the age, the painter of the Sistine Chapel frescoes, w