Is freedom to be feared? What a cruel irony it would be, if the centuries-long process of human emancipation – from tyranny, from god, even from privation – resulted not in our ultimate happiness but in our ultimate isolation. How […]
Anthony Burgess’ One Man’s Chorus
by on January 9, 2019
I recently came across Milton’s famous lines, from “Areopagitica,” about a good book being “the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.” Neither time nor overly enthusiastic quotation of those […]
Frank Dikötter’s The Cultural Revolution
by on December 31, 2018
Fittingly, the third and final work in historian Frank Dikötter’s trilogy of history books on modern china, The Cultural Revolution, was released exactly 50 years after Mao set the Cultural Revolution in motion, inaugurating a miniature civil war that would […]
John Williams’ Stoner
by on December 30, 2018
How does a literary masterpiece pass into obscurity? Blame the critics, the times, the society that had the good fortune to receive it first but lacked the judgment to cherish and champion it. In hindsight, it’s understandable – though no […]
John McPhee’s Draft No. 4
by on December 28, 2018
I know of no profession more demanding of reassurance than writing. Bricklayers, doctors, taxi drivers and taxidermists do not generally torment themselves about their crafts, or suffer long periods of sterility, or treat a bad day on the job as […]
Jeffrey Burton Russell’s The Devil
by on December 25, 2018
What has the devil done to merit a five-volume biography? If you had asked me just a few years ago, I would have scoffed, but lately I am not so sure. Perhaps the subtitle – Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity […]
Adam Zagajewski’s Another Beauty
by on December 19, 2018
It was a stroke of genius, on behalf of the New Yorker, to run Polish poet’s Adam Zagajewski’s “Try To Praise The Mutilated World” in the week following the collapse of the Twin Towers, when America – and indeed the […]
Cynthia Ozick’s Quarrel & Quandary
by on December 16, 2018
Asked to name America’s best living novelist, the late David Foster Wallace skipped over the usual heavy-hitters – Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and even Thomas Pynchon – in favor of a celebrated but far less widely-read author: Cynthia […]
Richard Pipes’ Communism: A History
by on December 11, 2018
As a young boy, Richard Pipes personally witnessed Adolf Hitler’s victory parade through Warsaw, following the Nazi invasion of Poland. His family – more fortunate by far than most Jewish Poles – fled for the United States shortly after. That […]
Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero
by on December 7, 2018
Bret Easton Ellis’ first novel, Less Than Zero, was published while he was just 21 years old, an undergraduate student at Bennington College. It was allegedly assembled from journal entries, dating from his early adolescence, which accounts for its plotless […]