Photo: Pierre Loti’s house. Credit: Discover Poitou Charentes

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Elaine Sciolino’s new travel column Lumiere in the New York Times takes a look at the house museum of Pierre Loti.

Sciolino says: “On an unremarkable street in the unremarkable town, the Loti house museum — two attached bourgeois houses, really — is an alternate world where wildly divergent cultures and epochs are thrown together. Loti was an eccentric of his era, and would be considered eccentric even today.”



Astoria N.Y.’s Museum of the Moving Image is opening an exhibit on the Muppets titled “Jim Henson’s Fantastic World.” Franz Oz tells Steve Dollar of the Wall Street Journal: “He was not warm and fuzzy. If you look at his early commercials, there’s explosions. That’s a refreshing thing. Because puppets are often thought of as sweet and soft. Jim blew that away completely. Jim was a very rebellious genius. He didn’t like maudlin stuff very much.”


Noam Cohen, in the New York Times’ Media Decoder, writes about an upcoming book from John Wiley & Sons that will examine “Star Wars and History.”

According to Cohen, Nancy Reagin of Pace University and Janice Liedl of Laurentian University in Ontario are asking their peers to explore parallels between historic events and “Star Wars.”

Cohen says: Emilie Nicks, a spokeswoman for Lucasfilm, wrote in an e-mail that the books would really be an exploration of the historical events that influenced Mr. Lucas.

”Indeed, this is not about historians guessing or inferring what went into Star Wars, this is a book based on Lucas’s notes and input about what patterns of history actually did go into Star Wars or influence his thinking,” she wrote in response to questions. ”The idea is that though the saga takes place in a galaxy far, far away, it is based on real things that have happened and that are happening in the real world.”


BOOKS

Andrew Roberts, writing in the Wall Street Journal, reviews Wilson D. Miscamble’s ” The Most Controversial Decision.”

Roberts says: Father Miscamble is a history professor at the University of Notre Dame and thus is at home with the theological and moral aspects surrounding the decision to unleash the world’s first atomic bombs. He is also familiar with the political and military exigencies of the decision. He takes the reader carefully through the genesis of the bomb-building Manhattan Project, as planned by Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt originally for the bomb’s use against Nazi Germany, and through the calculations of the key Allied decision makers, including Gen. George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army chief of staff, and Adm. William Leahy, the head of the Joint Chiefs.

$80.38 (!) hardcover, $24.99 paper, $9.99 Kindle on Amazon.

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