Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a 170 year-old romance novel in which the protagonists are beautiful only on the inside, their outward unattractiveness being dunned into the reader’s poor brain at every opportunity. I have read only one other author’s romance novels heretofore — by accident (thinking they were mysteries) — and though I should …
Category Archives: Reviews
Monday Book Report: Doomsday: The End of the World–A View Through Time
“I Read It So You Don’t Have To” Department Doomsday: The End of the World–A View Through Time by Russell Chandler is a meandering, badly held together set of essays about human ideas and experiences with the end of all things. The book is strongest when it dives into modern Christian apocalyptic thought and history. …
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Monday Book Report: Caligula For President
The Truth Won’t Set You Free Department I follow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dictum to not read books less than a year old for two reasons, and the second is not laziness. Caligula For President proved (in both senses) the second reason, because reading this book now convulses and repulses in a way it could not …
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Monday Book Report: Bound For Murder
“I Read It So You Don’t Have To” Department I learned many things from Bound For Murder, the 3rd scrapbooking mystery in the series by the pseudonymous Laura Childs. In the end section devoted to scrapbooking tips and recipes I discovered that you can mix mango, cilantro, olive oil with red and green peppers and …
Contra ApologetiX
[an old article, finally published; broken links have been noted] The Problem And no one pours the new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the Wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins. And no one …
Little Science, Less Life
The Science of Life, by Alfred Adler (1929: Garden City, NY) I approached The Science of Life with admittedly high expectations. I have read with pleasure the writings of the other two-thirds of the psychoanalytic triumvirate of Freud, Jung, and Adler, and this was my first exposure to the works of Adler. Thus I was …
The Poetry of Ignorance
Why do we willingly watch bad art? What pleasure possibly obtained from viewing William Hung’s savage evisceration of what little musicality remained in Ricky Martin’s opus major? Not once, but dozens and hundreds of viewings as the fabled excrescence was replayed across the land, revisited in American Idol retrospectives, and finally brought to life repeatedly …
Letters From Hell
I have just finished reading The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud, and they have left me very sad, sad for days, in fact, as I trudged through the final, banal, exhausting, bourgeois two thirds of the book. Such a waste! I could gather some telling quotations from the letters of his post-poetic existence, could mine the …
I See Nobody
Ah, crafty, wily, quick-tongued Odysseus! Was there ever such a hero before, relying upon his wits rather than his brute strength? A fighter, too, and brave beyond all reckoning, willing to test himself against the siren’s song, though only after espying the loophole in their magic and challenging their beckoning music with prior restraint. Tennyson’s …
A Desperate Tale
The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71by Alistair Horne Alistair Horne’s study of the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune which followed is a remarkable history “from the inside”, as it were: “inside” in this case being within Paris, first during the Prussian investment and then amidst the follies and fury …