Kazuo Ishiguro is ruining me as a writer. He precisely balances the need for tension to drive the story line, on the one hand, with a slow reveal of plot through an unreliable narrator, on the other. It’s difficult to pull off, but he does it magnificently. The trouble is, I like it so much […]
Read more...Author: Albert
Copperhead
Copperhead is a movie on Amazon Prime. I stumbled across it, and found it to be a gem. It’s set during the Civil War, and that made me skeptical at first. Am I going to get a long condescending lecture on how slavery is bad? But I quickly saw that there would be more […]
Read more...Modern Philosophy
A review of Modern Philosophy (Penguin 1994) by Roger Scruton. This book is, as subtitled, “an introduction and survey,” but there is also an underlying thesis in Scruton’s arrangement of subjects. By “modern philosophy” he means not merely recent developments in philosophy, but an emphasis on philosophers since Descartes who are “modernists” – committed to […]
Read more...Asher Lev
A review of My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok. This book is narrated in the first person by the fictional title character, who grows up as a Hasidic Jew. The author invented this particular Hasidic community in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, but we can take it as an accurate picture of Hasidic life. The […]
Read more...Rebellion
We’ve come to think of teen rebelliousness as a natural rite of passage, wherein a young man or woman chafes against family restraints on freedom. It seems to be an inevitable result of every person’s desire to be free. Is it inevitable? Yes and no. Yes On the one hand, there is a kind of […]
Read more...People of the Book
A Review of People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooke I was not familiar with the author, but I picked this book thinking it might have all the elements of a good bit of fiction. It’s a combination mystery, history, and treatise, promising to instruct on matters of medieval Jewish practice and religious custom with […]
Read more...Conspiracy Theory
I recently toured the latest and greatest on conspiracy theories about the government. I think it’s interesting that the very phrase, “conspiracy theory,” carries with it the implication that it’s a product of paranoia rather than reality. In that way, it can be dismissed. But wait! Isn’t that what the government wants? My view is […]
Read more...Another Dangerous Idea
The Conflict of Ideas This post is a review of C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, by Victor Reppert, and a discussion of the ideas in it. Victor Reppert wrote this book in 2003. My impression is that the title is primarily a marketing decision. It is intended to call to mind the title of Daniel Dennett’s […]
Read more...But If Not
I looked forward to seeing the movie “Dunkirk.” I even went to see it at a movie theater; unusual for me. It seemed to start off weird, though, and never quite recovered. It was almost as if they were trying to minimize the heroic stuff. It also felt a bit like they were trying to drag […]
Read more...The Runway
In a peculiar way, those days before a person’s inevitable end to this life have a particular heft, so to speak. A feeling of particular consequence. We look at life from a higher vantage point, and better distinguish what is important and real, from what is silly and illusory. What happens next? How can we not […]
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