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Academic Insights for the Thinking World
In The New York Times today, Michael Frank reviews the New York Public Library exhibit “I Am With You” commemorating the 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass. Frank writes: Drawing on the library’s extensive holdings, Mr. Gewirtz [the exhibition curator] has put on display at least one copy of every authorized American edition of “Leaves,” […]
The Wall Street Journal features a review of Terrors of the Table by Walter Gratzer today (Normally, WSJ Online is by subscription only, but it is open to anyone this week, so enjoy!). Gratzer’s book comes on a swell of anti-diet-faddism and gives the long view of how things like the Atkins and South Beach […]
by Gary Giddins, author of Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century and the forthcoming Intelligent Design The waters that in the first days of September drowned New Orleans are the waters that established the incomparable city as a key port before the railroad replaced shipping as the primary vehicle of trade. […]
David S. Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman in the Lives and Legacies series, responded to J.M. Coetzee in the “Letters” section of the New York Review of Books this week: J.M. Coetzee concludes his review of my new book Walt Whitman [NYR, September 22] with what is evidently meant as a criticism. He writes, “Reynolds’s […]
Philip Pullman took a breather from the ‘Narnia-gate’ media frenzy yesterday to respond to the other big literature-goes-to-Hollywood story of last week: Paradise Lost will be coming to a theatre near you in 2007! “There have been rumours about a film of Paradise Lost for a long time,” Pullman says. “There was even talk of […]
I wonder what Milton would say to the news today that Paradise Lost is going to Hollywood. For those of you who want to experience the original before the movie comes out, Philip Pullman wrote the introduction to our most recent edition. We posted a short excerpt from Pullman’s introduction HERE. LINK to article (via […]
The question, “Where should my story begin?’ is, as every storyteller knows, both immensely important and immensely difficult to answer. ‘Once upon a time’, as the fairy-tale formula has it; but once upon a time there was – what? The opening governs the way you tell everything that follows, not only in terms of the […]
This is the last of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK The economic change that I have outlined was an extraordinary one. What we observe at the end of the Roman world is not a ‘recession’ or – to […]
Simon Blackburn appeared on “Talk of the Nation” today to discuss his book Truth: A Guide. The discussion ranges from the battle between relativism and absolute truth to contemporary theology, censorship, and James Baldwin’s thoughts on the role of education. It is a smorgasbord of philosophical tastiness not to be missed. LINK
Ted Steinberg author of Acts of God: An Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America has been commenting in recent press stories on the root causes of Katrina. In a story in the Wall Street Journal exploring how our efforts to control and populate the coastline has exacerbated the suffering, Steinberg says: “This is an […]
This is the third of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK In the post-Roman West, almost all this material sophistication disappeared. Specialized production and all but the most local distribution became rare, unless for luxury goods; and the impressive […]
There have been some very interesting reviews of The Fall of Rome zipping about the ether lately. Some of it spurred by our excerpt series which began HERE From across the pond, Alun reacts to our post… Troels, a graduate student in the Department of Classical Archaeology at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, gives his […]
This is the second of four excerpts from The Fall of Rome by Bryan Ward-Perkins. The first excerpt, “The Disappearance of Comfort,” can be found here: LINK “Monte Testaccio” When considering quantities, we would ideally like to have some estimates for overall production from particular potteries, and for overall consumption at specific settlements. Unfortunately, it […]
The Disappearance of Comfort It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially […]
Glowing coverage of Simon Blackburn’s Truth continues apace! This week, a review in Salon.com! A choice paragraph from Andrew O’Hehir’s review: By now you may be nodding sagely, or you may be flinging your half-decaf latte across the room in a white-hot rage. But whichever side you’re on, and even if your impulse is to […]
“The Source of the Singing” Marilyn Nelson Waniek Under everything, everything a movement, slow as hair growth, as the subtle click of cells turning into other cells, the life in us that grows as mountains grow. Under everything this movement, stars and wind circle around the smaller circles of the grass, and the birds caged […]