Prunier, Wullschlager, Brent

I read the latest issues of Vanity Fair, the Utne Reader and The Economist, along with an issue of Eclectic Reading. I also read Gerard Prunier's Darfur, which I didn't find profound but rather factual. I thought the argument about whether this qualified as a genocide under any other definition but the UN's 1948 one was not interesting. I also read Jonathan Brent's Inside the Stalin Archives, which is really the story of one man's research trip to a country where he doesn't speak the language. This would be more interesting to someone who hadn't ever been on a research trip. I also read Jackie Wullshlager's Chagall, primarily to figure out if Chagall's main work was inspired by Russia. It was. I thought the man had a hard life, overall, out of the shtetl to Europe and then back, caught by World War I starving and freezing in Moscow, displaced first the Russian Revolution and then by World War II. I saw his stained glass chapel in Vence, and I liked it better than most of his paintings, not that this is an educated judgement about art, but more about my personal taste. I am now reading a second issue of The Economist and a book about Shakespeare and modern culture. I have with me to take on a research trip a compendium of XVIIth century plays and the complete works of Nathalie Sarraute. The latter I'm really itching to get into.