Professor Libbrecht has braved many a winter day in the frozen countrysides of Wisconsin and Alaska and elsewhere, harvesting snowflakes on glass slides and photographing them under the microscope in what he describes as an unusual hobby. He also studies crystal formation professionally and explains quite clearly how snowflakes form, how the geometry of H2O … Read More
Granted it’s generally unwise to believe the hype, but everyone should make an exception to that rule for Toni Morrison, who is a master of prose fiction. Beloved is a remarkable contribution to world literature for many reasons: metaphor and a sense of human character on the level of Faulkner; total mastery of historical setting; … Read More
J.K. Rowling does so many things so well, it feels a shame to assign Harry Potter to the category of commercial fiction. The Dursleys who plague Harry at the beginning are not so much stereotypes as demonic annelids of the Roald Dahl variety. They represent bourgeois timidity and conventionality, sure, and crude consumerism too, but … Read More
Last week one of Newt Gingrich’s several wives told ABC news that in 1999 he asked her for an open marriage. Evidently, she didn’t possess the amphibian flexibility required for marriage to newts or salamanders, because she declined, and they divorced.
Newt Gingrich isn’t the first organism to propose an innovative mating arrangement. Banana slugs, for … Read More
In Lincoln-Douglas-style debates in high school, Locke and Rousseau used to be paired off against each other; Locke would be called in against some proposition meant to protect the public good, but deemed by the ‘negative’ side incompatible with vital individual liberties; and Rousseau would be called upon by the ‘affirmative’ side in support of … Read More
2011 marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, and it remains the finest English translation there is. “No other book has given more to the English-speaking world,” writes Adam Nicolson in the December 2011 issue of National Geographic. Robert Alter’s latest book, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King … Read More
Ah, the writer’s life! The insecurity! The unappreciated, unremunerated toil! The risk of failure! The torment! The passion! The syphilis!
And the devotion to ideals of Truth and Beauty. Flaubert says he’d rather beat himself to death with a table leg than write a socially conscious novel like Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He says, “The three finest … Read More
Of Vonnegut’s three most famous works, Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, and Breakfast of Champions, the last didn’t make the author as proud as did the first two, but Breakfast of Champions is one of his funniest. Vonnegut, who taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop (and supposedly had hell-raising parties in Iowa City), … Read More
I was asked by Moment Magazine to write about a book by a Jewish writer who had influenced me, and I chose Doctorow’s charming and cunningly straightforward World’s Fair, which won the National Book Award in 1986. Click here to read the article.
Harold Bloom has a valid gripe with the “School of Resentment” as he calls it–i.e. the group of academics who are actively destroying the notion of a canon of great works, of classics. The real virtue of this book, however, is in Bloom’s wise and warm-hearted discussions of the art of the great works themselves. … Read More
By a long shot, this is the funniest book I ever read about the blood libel.
Caveat: despite illustrations by Uri Shulevitz that look suited to children, this is not a children’s book. It’s about some gentiles who libel an innocent Jew for the murder of a child in 17th-century Prague. German folklore, of course, really … Read More
On June 15, 1917, a U.S. marshal and 12 New York City policemen entered the Lower East Side offices of the radical magazine Mother Earth and placed its editor under arrest. The U.S. was mobilizing to enter World War I, and the famous anarchist Emma Goldman had been charged with conspiracy to obstruct the draft … Read More
It somehow does not surprise me that T.S. Eliot was able to see the world so well through the eyes of a cat. His created cat personas are charming, especially their names:
Jellylorum
Munkustrap
Coricopat
The Old Gumbie Cat (a.k.a. Jennyanydots)
Growltiger
Grumbuskin
Tumblebrutus
Gilbert
The Rum Tum Tugger
Mungojerrie
Rumpelteazer
Old Deuteronomy
The Great Rumpuscat
Macavity the Mystery Cat
Gus the Theater Cat
Bustopher Jones
Skimbleshanks
…and more
I love that cat “Gilbert” … Read More
The Berlin Stories, upon which the musical Cabaret was based, pairs two novels by Christopher Isherwood. Both were inspired by his experiences as an English expatriate in Berlin in the early 1930s. The second ‘novel’ (if it really is a novel), Goodbye to Berlin, is in my view far superior to the first, The Last of Mr. Norris … Read More
No one but Jack London, perhaps, has ever written so convincingly from a dog’s point of view as has Beverly Cleary in Ribsy. Like most dogs, Ribsy seems charmingly brain damaged. His loyalties are permanent but also have a happy-go-lucky fluidity that embraces many; he forgets to be ashamed for very long; and forgets discouragement. … Read More