I am embarrassingly late to the works of Zadie Smith, having associated her with a younger generation of writers the literati seemed overly eager to promote. But then I read her essay on Kafka for the New York Review of Books, […]
Category » Book Reviews
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
-Alexander Pope
Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe From Nothing
by on February 27, 2013
Nothing induces humility quite like grappling with theoretical physics. Richard Dawkins and some of his contemporaries in the fields of biology and evolutionary psychology posit that our brains evolved to contemplate numbers on a much smaller scale than is required for […]
Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve
by on February 23, 2013
Stephen Greenblatt is a professor of literature at Harvard University, bestselling author of the fictionalized biography of Shakespeare Will in the World, and one of the founders of New Historicism – something for which I have yet to forgive him. But […]
Plato’s The Last Days of Socrates
by on February 20, 2013
In the darker days of my youth, when every aspect of life was infused with undue urgency, I found consolation in a quotation from Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” It became a kind of personal mantra, something […]
Franz Kafka’s The Trial
by on February 12, 2013
George Steiner, at 83 still one of our best literary critics, articulates my primary difficulty in writing this post in the very first sentence of his Introduction: “The thought that there is anything fresh to be said of Franz Kafka’s The […]
P.G. Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters
by on February 7, 2013
It is to Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry and Christopher Hitchens – my beloved British triumvirate – that I owe my newfound love of P.G. Wodehouse. The Code of the Woosters, published in late 1938 mere months before the beginning of World […]
Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein
by on January 31, 2013
This is my first (long overdue) foray into Bellow’s works, and as such is something of an odd starting point: Ravelstein is less a work of fiction than a memoir, a small glimpse into Bellow’s friendship with renowned scholar and philosopher Allan […]
Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel
by on January 30, 2013
A quick glance at Jared Diamond’s fields of expertise will give you some idea of what you are in store for when you read him: physiology, biology, ornithology, environmentalism, history, ecology, geography and anthropology. And a good thing, too, that his […]
Christina Hoff Sommers’ Who Stole Feminism?
by on January 25, 2013
The more I read and learn about academic feminism, the stronger my conviction grows that no greater or more pernicious fraud has been perpetrated on Western thought in the last 50 years. Partisan hackery masquerading as scholarship, vast echo chambers […]
Albert Camus’ The Outsider
by on January 22, 2013
Albert Camus was a French Algerian writer and philosopher whose political career is perhaps best described as polarizing. He began World War II as a pacifist and ended it as a member of the French resistance group Combat, which published […]
P.G. Wodehouse’s Thank You, Jeeves
by on January 21, 2013
In interviews with Stephen Fry and Richard Dawkins, when both men were asked to reflect on their friendship with Christopher Hitchens, they cited a mutual love for the works of P.G. Wodehouse that expedited their friendship and gave them something […]
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia
by on January 21, 2013
Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, is justifiably praised as the finest political writer in the English language. Few escape high school without encountering one or both of Animal Farm and 1984, his unmatched fictive treatises on the […]
Chris Hedges’ Death of the Liberal Class
by on January 7, 2013
I was first exposed to Chris Hedges in high school, by one of the small handful of teachers who have shaped my character and thought. That first assigned book was War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), a partly political, […]
Joshua Cohen’s Four New Messages
by on January 6, 2013
Joshua Cohen is the soon-to-be-widely-known author of seven published works, including an 800-page novel and three short story collections. His writings have appeared in Harpers, The New York Times, The London Review of Books and The Paris Review – pretty much every publication or periodical that […]
Camille Paglia’s Sex, Art and American Culture
by on January 3, 2013
Camille Paglia defies simple categorization. She is a feminist whose career and popularity has been built on criticizing feminism and a classicist who reveres pop culture and its heroines, particularly Madonna. The blurb appended to my copy of Sex, Art and […]