http://viningsnaturalhealthcentre.co.uk/open-evening-beat-the-winter-blues-20th-october/index.php?profile=dove MOYERS: So the old story, so long known and transmitted through the generations, isn’t functioning, and we have not yet learned a new one? CAMPBELL: The story that we have in the West, so far as it is based on the Bible, is based on a view of the universe that belongs to the first […]
Category Archives: Reviews of Books
Star Maker.
25-Nov-09Helen Luke and Dante.
15-Oct-09Saint-Nazaire Time spent among people reveals just how difficult it is, even for the most worthy and competent, to be capable of real love and relationship. Developing this capacity is in truth the sole bifocal commandment of the Christian religion, all others being mere ancillae; and it is also the goal of Jung’s school of psychoanalysis, […]
Helen Luke’s Way of Discrimination.
26-Aug-09“Seems, madame? Nay it is; I know not seems.” – Hamlet Helen Luke is not one of the easier writers to write about. She appeared as a guide in my life when I began to feel the difference between exterior and interior, fact and meaning, appearance and reality. These distinctions are not for everyone nor […]
It is a remarkable fact that before the 20th Century there were no allusive titles. Titles were simpler then, like “Daniel Defoe” or “David Copperfield.” St. Bernard did not call his commentary on the Song of Songs “The Kiss of His Mouth” and Shakespeare did not call Julius Caesar “Scatter the Proud.” Crime and Punishment […]
A.J. Liebling and the Gret Stet.
08-Apr-09In writing there are only two things, matter and treatment. In Abbott Joseph Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana we have matter so interesting that it still holds the attention fifty years later in itself, and treatment so virtuosic one is tempted to proclaim Liebling a literary figure rather than a journalist. As far as matter […]
Edward Said’s Orientalism.
24-Mar-09There are many things which I have long held at arm’s length because of a general suspicion that I will not like them or profit by them. I have from time to time been reproved by others (and myself) for not having sure and certain knowledge of them. “How can you know you’ll dislike something […]
Rising Tide, by John M. Barry.
18-Mar-09When I heard that many in New Orleans (especially blacks) believed that the Army Corps of Engineers had dynamited the levees protecting the city’s black neighborhoods just after Hurricane Katrina hit, I dismissed the notion as yet another conspiracy theory. These seem to proliferate wherever the powers of the human mind languish unfertilized by action […]
Dan Baum’s Nine Lives.
07-Mar-09Dan Baum came to New Orleans two days after Hurricane Katrina as a reporter for The New Yorker. The encounter changed his life, and New Orleans became one of his fascinations, for good and ill, as with most fascinations. As he says, “I think part of my being ejected from The New Yorker was that […]
The Sexual Evolution.
07-Dec-08My 1989 copy of Samuel Hynes’ Flights of Passage has a quotation on its front cover from Paul Fussell, a man not known to this writer but sufficiently respected in 1989 to need no further identification, which describes the book as “A war memoir which will become a classic.” I believe we may conclude […]
John McCain’s Faith of My Fathers.
29-Oct-08The most striking thing about John McCain’s book Faith of My Fathers is how different it is from other political books, such as the works of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. In fact, it is not really a political book at all. There is no engagement with political issues. There is no Orwellian talk […]