A review of Christ Stopped at Eboli, by Carlo Levi, and some thoughts. Eboli is not the disease, it’s a little village in southern Italy. In that part of the world at mid-20th century, they would say Christ stopped at the next village south, Eboli (pronounced probably A-boll-e), as a way of saying civilization did […]
Read more...Category: Book Review
Station Eleven
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel What I liked: the writing. The writing, the writing, the writing. So this book was especially meaningful to me, because I write, too. She jumps back and forth through time but you don’t have to work at it to keep up. You know, there’s some art to misdirection; […]
Read more...Empress of Blandings
I just finished reading P.G. Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning, one of the Blandings Castle books. As usual for Wodehouse it’s a romantic comedy with the emphasis on comedy, especially of the eye-rolling ironic kind. How can you go wrong with a story in which the plot tension rests on a pig-napping of the porcine pride of […]
Read more...Looking Down
A Review of The Good Earth, by Pearl Buck This was a great read so as I went along I tried to make mental notes about what the author was trying to do and why I found the book so engaging. The story is the lifetime from early adulthood to old age of a Chinese […]
Read more...Epidemic Irrationality
A review of Explaining Postmodernism, Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, by Stephen R.C. Hicks “Explaining” What is postmodernism? We hear the word all the time, but unless we really make a study of it, it’s just a word to describe a way of thinking that somehow follows modernism. Of course, “modernism” is itself […]
Read more...Tortured Intellectual
This is a review of A Confession, by Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy lived through the latter half of the 19th century. He came to the end of his life before the Russian Revolution of 1917. You know of him as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karennina, among many other works, including the one […]
Read more...Total Reality
A review of The Story of Reality, by Gregory Koukl The Big Picture Koukl’s book is subtitled “How the world began, how it ends, and everything important that happens in between.” I have to admit that this kind of over-the-top title is off-putting, to me. It makes me think there’s nothing of substance inside. I […]
Read more...Mind = Brain?
A review of I Am Not a Brain, by Markus Gabriel Freedom I begin this review where Gabriel ends his book: on the subject of freedom. Quoting Friedrich Schelling, Gabriel observes that “the alpha and omega of all philosophy is freedom.” By “freedom,” Gabriel does not refer merely to unbridled subjective autonomy, nor political freedom […]
Read more...Heart of Darkness
This is a review of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. What presumption, to review at this date a classic like Heart of Darkness. Not only am I going ahead with a review, but I have the audacity to tell you I didn’t like it and why I can’t join the horde telling us how great […]
Read more...The Chosen
A review of The Chosen, by Chaim Potok I’ve long been a reader of literary fiction, and had it in mind that I would be a natural as a writer because of it. I was wrong. You learn a lot by reading, obviously, and it’s certainly true that writing will come easier if your reading […]
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