Recommended reading from the New Yorker

This week's New Yorker has an Anthony Lane review of the new James Bond. Lane seems to have become the most consistently witty and amusing reviewer. For example, writing of star Daniel Craig:

I cannot prove it, but I suspect that God may have designed Craig during a slightly ham-fisted attempt at woodworking. His head is a rough cube, sawed and sanded, with the blue eyes hammered in like nail heads. He could beat a man’s brains out with his brow. That suits the Bond of “Casino Royale,” who has only lately acquired his license to kill, and, like a kid who’s just passed his driving test, is eager to step on the gas. He will slay anyone, if he so wishes, and the news is that he does so wish, and that he worries about the wishing—not enough to stop the killing, although at one point he tenders his resignation to M (Judi Dench), but enough to make him wonder if he’s fit for anything else.

(I like Mark Steyn's reviews too, but his actual taste in movies is perhaps a little different to mine.)

The book review/essay deals with Descartes. Interestingly, one of the author's claims that Descartes is quite misunderstood, and his idea of the dualism of mind and body is not as emphatic as it seemed. (Another explains how Pope John Paul II rather unfairly blames Descartes for starting philosophy's movement away from God.)

Descartes certainly appears to have had an odd and fairly unsettled life. He fathered one daughter to a maid, but she died at 5 of scarlet fever.

[As an aside, it interests me, reading such accounts, to understand how people coped with the death of a loved child in centuries past when child mortality was so high. In the modern world, the death of a child is often seen as one of the biggest challenges to faith for the religious. Certainly, from the a couple of examples I know of - Lincoln's wife (who plunged into depression after a favourite son died) and Darwin (whose loss of faith was apparently more to do with the death of a daughter) - by the 19th century such deaths could come as a big shock. But going back further, did high child mortality lead to low expectations of survival into adulthood, and therefore less trauma for many parents if at least one or two of their kids died? I have heard before that the Victorian era in England sort of romanticised childhood in a way it hadn't been before, and maybe that had some effect too? Or is it just one of those cases where it is hard to find much in the way of detailed records of bereavement feelings the further back you go?]

Anyway, Descartes died at 53 and then his body suffered this fate:

He was buried in Sweden under a simple wooden monument that was allowed to rot. Seventeen years later, his remains were exhumed and taken on a six-month journey to France, except for his right forefinger, which the French Ambassador to Sweden was allowed to keep, and his head, which was removed by a captain in the Swedish guards. In France, his body was exhumed and reburied three more times before coming to rest in a former Benedictine monastery in Saint-Germain-des-Près. The Musée de l’Homme, in the Palais de Chaillot, near the Eiffel Tower, claims to have Descartes’s skull, but the claim is weak. It seems that the great dualist’s head is still missing.

Fascinating.