2009年8月31日 星期一

Ted Kennedy, 1932-2009


Ted Kennedy, 1932-2009: The Brother Who Mattered Most

Senator Edward Kennedy, waiting to be introduced to an audience at the University of Massachusetts in Boston on Feb. 4, 2005
Senator Edward Kennedy, waiting to be introduced to an audience at the University of Massachusetts in Boston on Feb. 4, 2005
Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters / Corbis

There was a time 40 years ago, right after the assassination of his brother Robert, when it looked like Edward Kennedy would become President someday by right of succession. The Kennedy curse, the one that had seen all three of his brothers cut down in their prime, had created for him a sort of Kennedy prerogative, or at least the illusion of one, an inevitable claim on the White House. For years he seemed like a man simply waiting for the right moment to take what everybody knew was coming his way.

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Everybody was wrong. Ted Kennedy would never reach the White House. His weaknesses — and the long shadow of Chappaquiddick — were an obstacle that even his strengths couldn't overcome. But his failure to get to the presidency opened the way to the true fulfillment of his gifts, which was to become one of the greatest legislators in American history. When their White House years are over, most Presidents set off on the long aftermath of themselves. They give lectures, write books, play golf and make money. Jimmy Carter even won a Nobel Prize. But every one of them would tell you that elder-statesmanship is no substitute for real power. (See pictures of Ted Kennedy's life and times.)

Because Kennedy never made it to the finish line, he never had to endure a post-presidential twilight. Instead, by the time of his death on Aug. 25 in Hyannis Port at the age of 77, he had 46 working years in Congress, time enough to leave his imprint on everything from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009, a law that expands support for national community-service programs. Over the years, Kennedy was a force behind the Freedom of Information Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. He helped Soviet dissidents and fought apartheid. Above all, he conducted a four-decade crusade for universal health coverage, a poignant one toward the end as the country watched a struggle with a brain tumor. But along the way, he vastly expanded the network of neighborhood clinics, virtually invented the COBRA system for portable insurance and helped create the laws that provide Medicare prescriptions and family leave. (See a Kennedy family photo album.)

And for most of that time, he went forward against great odds, the voice of progressivism in a conservative age. When people were getting tired of hearing about racism or the poor or the decay of American cities, he kept talking. When liberalism was flickering, there was Kennedy, holding the torch, insisting that "we can light those beacon fires again." In the last year of his life, with the Inauguration of Barack Obama, he had the satisfaction of seeing a big part of that dream fulfilled. In early 2008, when Obama had just begun to capture the public imagination, Kennedy bucked the party establishment. Just before Super Tuesday, the venerable Senator from Massachusetts enthusiastically endorsed the young Senator from Illinois, helping propel Obama to the Democratic nomination and ultimately the White House.

So does it matter that Kennedy never made it to the presidency? Any number of mere Presidents have been pretty much forgotten. But as the Romans understood, there can be Emperors of no consequence — and Senators whose legacies are carved in stone.

Rose Kennedy wanted a family. Joe Kennedy wanted a dynasty. They both got what they wanted, but only for a time. Joe had made a fortune in film production, liquor, real estate and stocks. But he wasn't just a businessman. In the scope of his ambitions and schemes, he was something out of Shakespeare. He married Rose in 1914, and as their children arrived, he formed the conviction not only that the boys belonged in public life but that one of them, maybe more than one, should be President of the United States. (See TIME's complete Ted Kennedy coverage.)

This was the atmosphere that Ted was born into on Feb. 22, 1932 — the last of the nine Kennedy children. But from the start, he had three elder brothers as a buffer between himself and the worst of the old man's ambition for his sons. All the same, he grew up at some distance from his parents. Over the years, Joe and Rose had become increasingly estranged. Overweight and lonely, Ted was shuttled through a succession of boarding and day schools, but he grew into an athletic, good-looking teenager, one who ambled into Harvard, where Jack and Bobby had gone before him.

He hadn't been at Harvard long before he screwed up in a way that would come back to haunt him years later. In his freshman year, Kennedy was having trouble with a Spanish class. There was a test coming up, and he needed to do well in order to be eligible to play varsity football the next year. With the encouragement of some of his buddies, Kennedy recruited a friend who was good at Spanish to take the exam in his place. The scheme backfired. The surrogate was caught, and both boys were expelled, though Harvard offered them the opportunity to be readmitted later if they showed evidence of "constructive and responsive citizenship."

Read TIME's 10 Questions with Ted Kennedy.

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Ted Kennedy, 1932-2009: The Brother Who Mattered Most

Senator Edward Kennedy, waiting to be introduced to an audience at the University of Massachusetts in Boston on Feb. 4, 2005
Senator Edward Kennedy, waiting to be introduced to an audience at the University of Massachusetts in Boston on Feb. 4, 2005
Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters / Corbis

(2 of 3)

Kennedy's abrupt next move was to join the Army, which sent him to Georgia to be trained as a military police officer and then, thanks to his father's intervention, to Paris to serve as an honor guard at NATO headquarters. In the fall of 1953, he was readmitted to Harvard, where he majored in government. After graduation, he went on to study law at the University of Virginia. He was in law school when he met Joan Bennett, a senior at Manhattanville College, a small Catholic school in New York State that his mother and two of his sisters had attended. Not much more than a year after they first met, they married. Over the next nine years, they had three children: Kara, Edward Jr. and Patrick. (Joan also suffered three miscarriages.) But by 1982, the combination of her prolonged struggle with alcohol and his infidelities led them to divorce. Joan often found herself burdened by the effort required to fill the role of a Kennedy wife. Years later, sounding a bit like Princess Diana, she told an interviewer, "I didn't have a clue what I was getting into."

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What she had gotten into was the Kennedys, a family whose family business was politics. Ted was still in law school when he was made campaign manager for Jack's 1958 bid for a second term as Senator. Though the real decision-making was left to seasoned Kennedy operatives, the campaign put Ted in the field constantly to meet and greet voters. It prepared him for a future, coming soon, in which he would be the candidate. When Jack was elected to the White House in 1960, there were four years remaining in his Senate term. The family wanted Ted to succeed him, but at 28, he was two years below the minimum age for the Senate. So a Kennedy loyalist was chosen to fill the seat for a couple of years while Ted used the time to make himself plausible to the state's voters as a man they should send to Washington. With Jack's help, he attached himself to a Senate fact-finding trip to Africa. He toured Latin America, Israel and Berlin. On Election Day, with 54% of the vote, Kennedy beat George Cabot Lodge, a descendant of the Waspiest of New England political dynasties. (Read "Kennedy's Absence Felt on Health-Care Reform.")

Ted had been in the Senate for less than a year when JFK went to Dallas the day Lee Harvey Oswald was lying in wait. Jack's death was more than a personal tragedy for Ted. It was a watershed. It put him one step closer to assuming the Kennedy burden, the perennial quest for the heights. It marked the beginning of his transformation into a true public figure. As a first measure, Ted devoted himself to ensuring the passage of legislation that had been important to his brother, especially the civil rights bill JFK introduced the summer before his death. On June 19, Ted added his vote to the 73-to-27 majority that turned that bill into the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then he headed to the airport to board a private plane that was to take him to the state Democratic Party convention in Springfield, Mass. But as the plane made its descent into a fogbound Springfield airport, it struck a row of trees and somersaulted across an orchard. The pilot, Ed Zimny, died at the scene. A Kennedy aide, Ed Moss, died a few hours later. Indiana Senator Birch Bayh and his wife Marvella, who were also on board, survived with minor injuries. Kennedy suffered a broken back and a collapsed lung.

What followed was a five-month recovery, mostly spent immobilized in a hospital bed, and a lifetime of back pain. Yet when he returned to the Senate the following year, Kennedy set to work with the energy that comes to a man who gets a second chance at life. It wasn't long before Ted scored a victory on another of Jack's unrealized goals, the reform of immigration quotas to allow more arrivals from nations outside Northern Europe. One year later, he secured federal support for neighborhood clinics, marking the first time he applied himself to the problem of health care, the signature issue of his public life. (Read "Eunice Kennedy Shriver Dies at 88.")

By 1967, Kennedy had also begun to speak out against the Vietnam War. Exasperation about Vietnam was one of the main reasons his brother Robert decided to seek the presidency in 1968. Then Bobby was shot down as well. His death was a crucial moment of recognition for Ted that the burden of the Kennedy legacy was now his to shoulder. For years he had been the Prince Hal of the Kennedy dynasty, the wayward son who would just as soon not inherit the kingdom. But now, at 36, he was the last of the line. There was no one else.

So when Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in the fall, Ted instantly became liberalism's last, best hope. There were people who thought he lacked Jack's intellect or Bobby's passion, that all his life he had merely trawled in their wake. But in his first speech after Bobby's death, he was already sounding the cry that would be the great theme of his political life: "Like my brothers before me, I pick up a fallen standard. Sustained by the memory of our priceless years together, I shall try to carry forward that special commitment to justice, to excellence, to courage, that distinguished their lives." (See pictures of TIME's coverage of Watergate.)

This was the moment when everyone assumed that the presidency would someday be his for the asking. But it was only a moment. On July 18, 1969, Kennedy hosted a reunion for six women who had worked at the center of Bobby's presidential campaign. The gathering took place in a rented cottage on Chappaquiddick Island, just off Martha's Vineyard. Around 11:15 that night, Kennedy asked his driver for the keys to his Oldsmobile so that he could leave the party with Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, a former aide to his brother. According to testimony he gave later at a judge's inquest, he took a wrong turn onto an unlit dirt road and then across a small, unrailed wooden bridge. His car went over the side of the bridge and landed upside down in the water. Kennedy managed to escape. Kopechne did not.

There are questions about Chappaquiddick that have never been closed. Where was Kennedy going with Kopechne at that late hour? (At the inquest in January, he claimed that he was taking her back to her hotel in Edgartown.) Why did he wait until the following morning, 10 hours later, to report the accident to the police? (He said it was because he had been in a state of shock and confusion.) Was the real reason for delaying the report that at the time of the accident he was drunk? (He insisted he was not.) At the inquest, he testified that after escaping from the car, he dived back into the water seven or eight times in a vain attempt to free Kopechne. Then he made the mile-and-a-half walk back to the cottage, where the party was still underway, collected two male friends and returned with them to the car, where they also attempted to free Kopechne. When that proved impossible, Kennedy decided to return to his hotel across the water in Edgartown. But instead of summoning the night ferry, he chose to swim 500 feet across the bay. (Read " Mary Jo Kopechne: The Girl Next Door.")

The inquest concluded that Kennedy had lied when he said he was taking Kopechne back to Edgartown. It also ruled that his "negligent driving" appeared to have contributed to her death. By the time the inquest was complete, Kennedy had already entered a guilty plea to leaving the scene of an accident and received a two-month suspended sentence. But it would be truer to say he was sentenced to life under the cloud of Chappaquiddick.

Had it not been for that night, he almost certainly would have been a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. He stayed on the sidelines that year and in 1976 as well, even though in the aftermath of Watergate, that looked to be a winning year for the Democrats. It would be, but for Jimmy Carter.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

Kennedy found new issues to throw himself into. In 1970 he introduced his first bill to establish a system of universal health-care coverage. He confounded people who thought of him as a doctrinaire liberal by pushing for airline deregulation and for required sentencing of convicted criminals. He promoted arms-control talks with the Soviet Union but also devoted himself to the cause of Soviet dissidents and would-be Jewish émigrés.

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It was Chappaquiddick as much as anything else that sabotaged his most serious attempt at the White House: his fight in 1980 to push Carter aside. Almost three decades later, that campaign is still a bit of a puzzle. His ideological differences with Carter never seemed great enough to justify a challenge to a sitting President of his own party. His main complaint was that Carter wasn't moving forward fast enough on health care, "the great unfinished business on the agenda of the Democratic Party," as he called it. In a televised interview on Nov. 4, 1979, just three days before he would launch his campaign, Kennedy gave CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd a notoriously rambling answer to the simple question "Why do you want to be President?" The man who had spent years on a trajectory to the White House still couldn't say exactly why. (Read "Could He Win in 72 Despite Chappaquiddick?")

In the end, Kennedy won 10 primaries. Carter took 24, then sailed into the propellers of Ronald Reagan in the fall. But that failed campaign liberated Kennedy. He gave the best speech of his life at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, the speech of a man who had no intention of exiting the public stage. Because the White House was never again a serious option for him, he was free to concentrate once and for all on legislating.

It was the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, and the Republicans had just retaken the Senate — not an easy time to be the torchbearer for liberalism. But Kennedy assumed the role gladly. He became not only a dogged defender of the faith but also an even more adept player of the congressional game. In the '80s, he teamed repeatedly with the unlikeliest of allies, conservative Utah Republican Orrin Hatch. It was Hatch and Kennedy who got the first major AIDS legislation passed in 1988, a $1 billion spending measure for treatment, education and research. Two years later, they pushed through the Ryan White CARE Act to assist people with HIV who lack sufficient health-care coverage. But if Kennedy knew how to play ball with the other side, he also knew how to play hardball. When Reagan tried to put Robert Bork on the Supreme Court, it was Kennedy who led the ferocious and ultimately successful liberal opposition. (Read "The All-American President: Ronald Wilson Reagan.")

Kennedy wasn't nearly as prominent in the next major battle over a court seat, the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas by George H.W. Bush. Even in the best of times, Kennedy's reputation for womanizing would have made it awkward for him to sit in judgment when Thomas was accused by Anita Hill of sexual harassment. But the Senate hearings on Thomas started at a particularly bad moment for Kennedy, just months after one of the messiest episodes in his public life. In March, while visiting the family compound in Palm Beach, Fla., Kennedy had roused his son Patrick and his nephew William Kennedy Smith out of bed so they could join him for drinks at a local bar. Smith returned to the compound that night with a young woman who would later accuse him of raping her. He was eventually acquitted after a nationally televised trial in which Kennedy was called as a witness. But the image of the capering Senator leading two younger men out to play reawakened all the old misgivings about Kennedy, women and alcohol. The man who had once been Prince Hal, the reluctant heir to the throne, was in danger of turning into Falstaff, the aging reprobate.

Kennedy pulled himself back from that brink. In the summer of the same year, a decade after his divorce from Joan, Kennedy re-encountered Victoria Reggie, a 37-year-old lawyer and gun-safety advocate who had briefly been an intern in his Senate office. Now she lived in Washington with her two children from a previous marriage. Soon they were dating, and a year later they were married. The new marriage transformed Kennedy, giving him a feeling of contentment and stability he had not enjoyed for years. It was a newly energized Kennedy who moved on to the legislative accomplishments of the '90s, like the Family and Medical Leave Act. When the Republicans retook Congress in 1994, it was Kennedy who would push Bill Clinton from the left when Clinton's old soul mates from the Democratic Leadership Council were urging him to move right. "The last thing this country needs," he said then, "is two Republican Parties." (See pictures of Bill Clinton's North Korea rescue mission.)

Yet when the next President turned out to be a Republican, Kennedy still found a way to work with him on shared goals. Kennedy spearheaded the effort to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, a priority for George W. Bush. But they later parted ways over what Kennedy felt was Bush's failure to adequately fund the program. And on other issues, there could be no common ground. In 2002, Kennedy was one of the 23 Senators who voted against authorizing the Iraq war. Years later, he would call it the "best vote" he ever cast in the Senate.

But by that time, there had been a lot of good votes — votes that left the country a changed place and a better one. Nobody talks about Camelot anymore. They struck the scenery long ago. Without Ted, the Kennedy legacy would be mostly beautiful afterglow, just mood music and high rhetoric. More than either of his brothers, he took the mythology and shaped it into something real and enduring.

On the weekend of his Inauguration in 1961, John Kennedy gave Ted, the last born of the Kennedy siblings, an engraved cigarette box. It read, "And the last shall be first." That was almost 50 years ago. Neither of them knew then in just what ways that prophecy might turn out to be true.

We do.

Read TIME's 1962 article "Teddy & Kennedyism."

See The TIME 100: Schwarzenegger On Kennedy




Ted Kennedy, 1932-2009: The Brother Who Mattered Most By Richard Lacayo Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2009
Senator Edward Kennedy, waiting to be introduced to an audience at the University of Massachusetts in Boston on Feb. 4, 2005
Senator Edward Kennedy, waiting to be introduced to an audience at the University of Massachusetts in Boston on Feb. 4, 2005
Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters / Corbis


2009年8月25日 星期二

Simon Michael Schama

Simon Michael Schama, CBE (born 13 February 1945) is an English historian and art historian. He is a University Professor at Columbia University[1]. His many works on history and art include Landscape and Memory, Dead Certainties, Rembrandt's Eyes[2], and his history of the French Revolution, Citizens[1]. He is best known for writing and hosting the 15-part BBC documentary series A History of Britain. He was an art and cultural critic for The New Yorker[1].

Contents

[hide]

[edit] Biography

The son of second-generation immigrant Jewish parents with roots in Lithuania and Turkey, Schama was born in London[1].In the mid 1940s, the family moved to Southend-on-Sea in Essex before moving back to London. Schama writes of this period in the Introduction to Landscape & Memory (pp.3–4):

I had no hill [the previous paragraph had talked of his enthusiasm for Puck of Pook's Hill], but I did have the Thames. It was not the upstream river that the poets in my Palgrave claimed burbled betwixt mossy banks. ... It was the low, gull-swept estuary, the marriage bed of salt and fresh water, stretching as far as I could see from my northern Essex bank, toward a thin black horizon on the other side. That would be Kent, the sinister enemy who always seemed to beat us in the County Cricket Championship. ...

Schama won a scholarship to Haberdashers' Aske's and went on to Christ's College, Cambridge, reading history under J. H. Plumb and graduating with a Starred First in 1966[1].

He worked for short periods as a lecturer in history at Cambridge, where he became a Fellow and Director of Studies in History, and at Oxford where he was made a Fellow of Brasenose College in 1976, specialising in the French Revolution[1]. At this time, Schama wrote his first book, Patriots and Liberators, which won the Wolfson History Prize. The book was originally intended as a study of the French Revolution, but as published in 1977, it focused on the effect of the Patriot revolution in The Netherlands, and its aftermath.

His second book, Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel (1978), is a study of the Zionist aims of Edmond James de Rothschild and James Armand de Rothschild.

[edit] In America

In 1980 Schama accepted a chair at Harvard. His next book, The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), again focused on Dutch history[3]. In it, Schama interpreted the ambivalences that informed the Dutch Golden Age of the seventeenth century, held in balance between the conflicting imperatives, to live richly and with power, or to live a godly life. The iconographic evidence that Schama draws upon, in 317 illustrations, of emblems and propaganda that defined Dutch character, prefigured his expansion in the 1990s as a commentator on art and visual culture.[4]

Citizens (1989), written at speed to a publisher's commission, finally saw the publication of his long-awaited study of the French revolution, and won the 1990 NCR Book Award. Citizens was very well-received and sold admirably. Its view that the violence of the Terror was inherent from the start of the Revolution, however, has received serious criticism.[5] [1]

In 1991, he published Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations)[6], a relatively slender work of unusual structure and point-of-view in that it looked at two widely reported deaths a hundred years apart, that of General James Wolfe -- and the famous painting by Benjamin West -- and that of (by murder) George Parkman, uncle of the better known Francis Parkman. Schama mooted some possible (invented) connections between the two cases, exploring the historian's inability "ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing the documentation," and speculatively bridging "the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration." Not all readers absorbed the nuance of the title: it received a greatly mixed critical and academic reception. (Australia's Keith Windschuttle, in his The Killing of History, took particular exception to the book's overt fictionalising). It, apparently, sold poorly, but it is highly valued by some.

Schama's Landscape and Memory (1995) focused on the relationship between physical environment and folk memory, separating the components of landscape as wood, water and rock, enmeshed in the cultural consciousness of collective "memory" that are embodied in myths, which Schama finds to be expressed outwardly in ceremony and text. While in many ways even more personal and idiosyncratic than Dead Certainties, roaming through widening circles of digressions, this book was also more traditionally structured and better-defined in its approach. While many reviews remained decidedly mixed, the book was a definite commercial success and won numerous prizes[7].

Schama at Strand Bookstore, New York City

Appropriately, many of the plaudits came from the art world rather than from traditional academia. This was borne out when Schama became art critic for The New Yorker in 1995. He held the position for three years, dovetailing his regular column with professorial duties at Columbia University; a selection of his best essays on art for the magazine, chosen by Schama himself, was published in 2005 under the title Hang Ups. During this time, Schama also produced a lavishly illustrated Rembrandt's Eyes, another critical and commercial success. Despite the book's title, it contrasts the biographies of Rembrandt van Rijn and Peter Paul Rubens.

[edit] BBC

The year 2000 saw Schama return to the UK, having been commissioned by the BBC to produce a series of television documentary programmes on British history as part of their Millennium celebrations, under the title A History of Britain (Schama was insistent on the title beginning with "A" rather than "The", so as to underline that his was a personal subjective view rather than an academic, didactic standard). Schama wrote and presented the episodes himself, in a friendly and often jocular style with his highly characteristic delivery, and was rewarded with excellent reviews and unexpectedly high ratings. There has been, however, some irritation and criticism expressed by a group of historians about Schama's condensed recounting of the British Isles' history on this occasion, particularly by those specialising in the pre-Anglo-Saxon history of insular Celtic civilization.[8] The series was eventually expanded to three, with 15 episodes[9][10] produced in total covering the complete span of British history up until 1965[10]; it went on to become one of the BBC's best-selling documentary series on DVD. Schama also wrote a trilogy of tie-in books for the show, which took the story up to the year 2000; there is some debate as to whether the books are the tie-in product for the TV series, or the other way around. The series also had some popularity in the United States when it was first shown on the History Channel[10].

In 2001 Schama received the CBE. In 2003 he signed a lucrative new contract with the BBC and HarperCollins to produce three new books and two accompanying TV series. Worth £3 million (around US$5.3m), it represents the biggest advance deal ever for a TV historian. The first result of the deal was a book and TV show entitled Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, dealing in particular with the proclamation issued during the Revolutionary War by Lord Dunmore offering slaves from rebel plantations freedom in return for service to the crown.

In 2006 the BBC broadcast a new TV series, Simon Schama's Power of Art which, with an accompanying book, was presented and written by Schama. It marks a return to art history for him, treating eight artists through eight key works (Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, Bernini's Ecstasy of St Theresa, Rembrandt's Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, Jacques-Louis David's The Death Of Marat, J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship, Vincent van Gogh's Wheat Field with Crows, Picasso's Guernica, and Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals).[11] It was also shown on PBS in the United States[12].

In October 2008 BBC broadcast a four part TV series called The American Future: A History presented and written by Schama.

In March 2009 Schama presented a BBC 4 Radio show entitled 'Baseball and me'.

[edit] Politics

[edit] Israel

Schama was critical of a call by British novelist John Berger for an academic boycott of Israel over its policies towards the Palestinians. Writing in The Guardian in an article co-authored with lawyer Anthony Julius, Schama compared Berger's academic boycott to policies adopted by Nazi Germany, noting “This is not the first boycott call directed at Jews. On April 1, 1933, a week after he came to power, Hitler ordered a boycott of Jewish shops, banks, offices and department stores.”[13]

In 2006 on the BBC, Schama debated with Vivienne Westwood the morality of Israel's actions in the Israel-Lebanon war.[14] He characterized Israel's bombing of Lebanese city centers as unhelpful in Israel's attempt to "get rid of" Hezbollah. [14] With regard to the bombing he said: "Of course the spectacle and suffering makes us grieve. Who wouldn't grieve? But it's not enough to do that. We've got to understand. You've even got to understand Israel's point of view." [14]

[edit] United States

Schama is a vocal supporter of Barack Obama[15] and critic of George W. Bush.[16] He appeared on the BBC's coverage of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, clashing with John Bolton.[17]

[edit] Writing style

Simon Schama has a literary way of writing that is attractive not only to historians but non-historians and is "packed with evocative detail: rich fruit cakes crammed with raisins, currants, nuts and glacé cherries all mulled in brandy sauce" [1]. He has also received criticism for dumbing down history, presenting a "grossly oversimplified,and mythologizing view of the history of nations" and not fostering critical thinking[18].

[edit] Prizes

Winner, 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, for Rough Crossings[19].

[edit] Publications

[edit] Books

[edit] Documentaries

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Snowman, Daniel. "Simon Schama." History Today 54, no. 7 (July 2004): 34-36. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 30, 2009)
  2. ^ a b c Binstock, Benjamin. “Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 361-366. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051386 (accessed April 30, 2009).
  3. ^ Daniel, M., and S. Steinberg. "Simon Schama." Publishers Weekly 238, no. 22 (May 17, 1991): 46. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 30, 2009).
  4. ^ "He provides a reading of cultural tints and social textures," the reviewers in Contemporary Sociology (vol. 17.6 (November 1988:760-762) found, "at a level of visual detail that is usually reserved for art history."
  5. ^ Notably in Timothy Tackett, "Interpreting the Terror" French Historical Studies 24.4 (Autumn 2001:569-578); Tackett's view of swiftly evolving revolution in his prosopography of the deputies, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture, 1789-1790 (Princeton University Press) 1996, was not fundamentally at variance with Schama.
  6. ^ Halttunen, Karen. Review of “Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations.) by Simon Schama.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Sep., 1992), p. 631 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2080071 (accessed April 30, 2009).
  7. ^ a b Williams, Michael. Review of: “Landscape and Memory. by Simon Schama.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 87, No. 3 (Sep., 1997), pp. 564-565 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2564086 (accessed April 30, 2009)
  8. ^ "Simon Schama Antidote". History News Network. Retrieved on 28 March 2007.
  9. ^ "A History of Britain". IMDb. Retrieved on 28 March 2007
  10. ^ a b c Cooper, Barbara Roisman. "'A WILD RIDE' THROUGH A HISTORY OF BRITAIN WITH SIMON SCHAMA." British Heritage 23, no. 6 (November 2002): 48. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 30, 2009)
  11. ^ Simon Schama's Power of Art. BBC Arts. Retrieved on 28 March 2007.
  12. ^ a b Nalley, Richard. "SIMON SCHAMA'S POWER OF ART." Forbes 180 (September 18, 2007): 165-165. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 30, 2009).
  13. ^ John Berger is wrong, Simon Schama and Anthony Julius, The Guardian, 22 December 2006
  14. ^ a b c Simon Schama & Vivienne Westwood, This Week, BBC, 24 July 2006
  15. ^ Schama, Simon (2008-08-30). "In its severity and fury, this was Obama at his most powerful and moving". The Guardian: pp. 34. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/30/barackobama.democrats20081. Retrieved 2008-11-05.
  16. ^ Schama, Simon (2008-11-03). "Nowhere man: a farewell to Dubya, all-time loser in presidential history". The Guardian: pp. 1-2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/nov/03/george-bush-legacy-dubya. Retrieved 2008-11-05.
  17. ^ "Road to the White House". The Evening Times. 2008-11-05. http://www.eveningtimes.co.uk/news/display.var.2465762.0.road_to_the_white_house.php. Retrieved 2008-11-05.
  18. ^ "SIMON SCHAMA; Dumbed Down." New York Times (November 24, 2002): 4. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed May 1, 2009).
  19. ^ JULIE BOSMAN. "National Briefing | Arts: National Book Critics Circle Winners." New York Times (March 09, 2007): 20. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed May 1, 2009).

[edit] References

Bibliography

Binstock, Benjamin. “Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 2 (Jun., 2000), pp. 361-366. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051386 (accessed April 30, 2009).

Cooper, Barbara Roisman. "'A WILD RIDE' THROUGH A HISTORY OF BRITAIN WITH SIMON SCHAMA." British Heritage 23, no. 6 (November 2002): 48. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 28, 2009)

Daniel, M., and S. Steinberg. "Simon Schama." Publishers Weekly 238, no. 22 (May 17, 1991): 46. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed April 30, 2009)

Halttunen, Karen. Review of “Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations.) by Simon Schama.” The Journal of American History, Vol. 79, No. 2 (Sep., 1992), p. 631 http://www.jstor.org/stable/2080071 (accessed April 29, 2009).

JULIE BOSMAN. "National Briefing | Arts: National Book Critics Circle Winners." New York Times (March 09, 2007): 20. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed May 1, 2009).

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