Forgive the irreverent title (if it is in fact irreverent) and bear with me for a moment. It’s just another book that has got me under its spell. It will pass. Talk about an off-beat book! It was recommended to me almost a year ago, and it sounded perfectly horrible. It still may be a [...]
So said British historian Robert Payne of the United States of America in 1949. Now, over 60 years later, I wonder if this was written at the peak of our national power and that we’ve been declining ever since. What do you amateur historians think? What other societies or nations might be in competition for [...]
That’s what we were singing and dancing to in 1948, you will be amazed to know. It occurs to me that that year may have represented the apogee of American ascendancy on the world scene, which also may mean that we have generally been going downhill for the last 61 years. Anyone want to argue [...]
Mark Twain makes perfect reading taken in small snatches. Thanks to the Gutenberg Project, I have some 21,000 beBook pages of his writings. First up was Innocents Abroad, 1st edition, 1869, complete with strange spelling and usage. I’ve been following his account of a bunch of tourists taking a grand European tour with nary a [...]
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write – WSJ.com. Well, maybe. Or maybe I am showing my age. Granted, I am still using my BeBook, which everyone is telling me is just so passé. Since I spend most of my time at home these days, and do a lot of my [...]
Well, I did it again! I don’t really need yet another 750 page tome on my reading table, but that’s what I got. A “friend” at church, one whose reading tastes mirror mine, finished reading Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and casually waved his dog-eared copy before my eyes. I snatched [...]
“Is Google making us stupid?” asks reviewer Paul Boutin in his WSJ review of Neal Stephenson’s latest book. Good question, I thought to myself. Can it be true that there is a very dark side to the convenience of “googling” rather than researching the hard way? “The threat of digital dumb-down has prompted science-fiction author [...]
I commend to you a little book I am reading now: The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis, a series of essays based on talks given by Lewis during the 1940s. One of the essays is “Learning in Wartime,” a talk to Oxford students who were uncomfortable because they were in school while their contemporaries [...]
Written by David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Brightest, Ho, and others, The Powers That Be is another 740-pager that somehow found its way onto Mt. Toberead. I don’t know why friends keep giving me these big blockbuster books and expect me to read them. Maybe I really do.
Reading project #2 for the summer just past was WITNESS by Whittaker Chambers, 50th Anniversary Edition. I had some dim recollection of hearing about the microfilms hidden in a pumpkin and the Alger Hiss spy trials in the 1940s, but, after all, a 9-year-old can only be expected to remember so much. So I opened the 800 page paperback with anticipation. I was on a roll after finishing Victor Hugo’s 1500-word classic, Les Misérables.
