After yet another series of terrorist attacks in Europe, a handful of commentators have dared to ask a frightening question: have holy wars returned to the old continent? Europe’s youth does not know – often because they have not been […]
Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club
by on June 18, 2017
Mary Karr has a talent for setting a scene, and The Liar’s Club, her first memoir, begins memorably: we are in her childhood bedroom in a small town in East Texas in the early 1960s. A doctor is inspecting her […]
Marshall Frady’s Martin Luther King, Jr.
by on June 12, 2017
As a journalist for Newsweek, and while still in his twenties, Marshall Frady witnessed history. He was sent into the American South in the 1960s to cover the Civil Rights Movement, and in that capacity he had the privilege to […]
Robert Sapolsky’s Behave
by on May 31, 2017
When I saw, earlier this month, that a new book by Robert Sapolsky had hit the shelves, I immediately ran off to purchase it, mentally reorganizing the month’s reading to accommodate this 800-page behemoth. Such is my admiration for Sapolsky, […]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel
by on May 25, 2017
By my lights, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is one of the most admirable human beings alive today, a walking, talking embodiment of the emancipatory powers of education and the courage and power of the individual. But large swaths of the modern […]
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic
by on May 24, 2017
After David Foster Wallace’s death in 2008, a large chunk of his personal library – together with his notes, manuscripts and correspondence – was purchased by the University of Texas, where it can still be perused. And among those volumes […]
Mark Forsyth’s The Etymologicon
by on May 22, 2017
What would you do if you had a burning passion for a subject that the wider world – in its infinite wisdom – regarded as irredeemably boring, utterly unworthy of time and attention, let alone expense? If you happen to […]
Bernard Lewis’ What Went Wrong?
by on May 15, 2017
Though it was only published in January of 2002, Bernard Lewis’ attempt to explain the historic and ongoing conflict between the Muslim world and the West was completed shortly before September 11, 2001, meaning he did not need the evidence of the […]
Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility Of An Island
by on May 11, 2017
Much of the criticism surrounding Michel Houellebecq’s work in general, and The Possibility Of An Island in particular, revolves around the unhappiness – we might even call it gloom – he generates in his readers. His characters are rarely very sympathetic; there is […]
Will Durant’s The Story Of Philosophy
by on April 30, 2017
One of the crown jewels of my father’s library is the 11-volume Story of Civilization, written by Will Durant and his wife Ariel over a period of forty years. The title proclaims the extent of their ambition, and its success – as […]