Navigate to News section

The Brothers Blum

Comment of the Week

by
Marc Tracy
July 15, 2011
(Ravi Joshi/Tablet Magazine)
(Ravi Joshi/Tablet Magazine)

Winner gets a free Nextbook Press book appropriate to his or her comment (provided he or she emails me at [email protected] with his or her mailing address).

This week’s winner is “Roy,” who, musing on books critic Adam Kirsch’s review-cum-profile of French ballet impresario René Blum and the fact that Blum was the younger brother of the great wartime prime minister Léon, observed, “I find it extraordinary that in the milieu of early twentieth-century century French politics leaders could spring from families of intellectuals. Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré’s cousin was the legendary mathematician Henri Poincaré. Somehow I can’t imagine that happening in the U.S. these days.” (I have pedantically added the accents aigus.)

Roy receives a copy of Nextbook Press’s Benjamin Disraeli, in whose subject the political leader and the intellectual were joined. Plus, its author is Adam Kirsch.

Ballet Master [Tablet Magazine]
Benjamin Disraeli [Nextbook Press]

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.