We're thrilled to hear that over at Books and Culture John Wilson has devoted a podcast to the April 2011 issue of Historically Speaking. Wilson, as many of our readers will know, is the editor of the intellectual feast Books and Culture. Launched in 1995, this literary magazine "contains in-depth
reviews of books that merit critical attention, as well as shorter notices of significant new titles." You may notice that some of the authors you see now and then in the pages of HS also appear in B&C: Paul Harvey, Don Yerxa, Peter Coclanis, Tal Howard, Tommy Kidd, Bruce Kuklick.Wilson highlights the forum on Daniel Rodgers's book, Age of Fracture, and the forum on John Lukacs's The Future of History. He also zeroes in on the lead essay by Jane Kamensky on lessons learned from fiction writing and the interview with Kamensky's co-author, Jill Lepore.
According to Wilson, Historically Speaking is "not at all written only for people in the profession. It's written for anyone who is genuinely interested in the whole range of history." We could not have put it better.
He gives the publication high marks for the degree of diversity in its pages. "It's very rare in a publication of that kind," says Wilson,"to get this kind of [political] diversity, despite the constant lip service paid to the notion diversity as a matter of fact in an awful lot of intellectual discussion you get a boring monotony of a certain range of narrow views."
