“[G]reat power involves great responsibility.” Sounds like something from Spiderman, but it’s part of a line from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s undelivered Jefferson Day Speech. Coincidentally, Jefferson Day was officially recognized by FDR beginning in 1938. Anyway…the speech can be found at The American Presidency Project. Roosevelt died in Warm Springs, Georgia the day before this […]
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I wanted to pass on a few of the books and movies the boys and I read and watched this semester for school (6th and 8th grades). My goal was to tie in reading with our U.S. history class as much as I could. This isn’t all we covered, but a few of these were […]
I’m happy to report my wife’s book has been translated into Polish! Which is funny since she gives me grief about the books I read from Central European authors. I’ve proposed a book tour of Poland, but I doubt our budget can handle it at the moment. You can dream, right? Since I’m talking about […]
Contra Mundum Press has made available some excerpts from the forthcoming book Black Renaissance by Miklós Szentkuthy, the second volume in his St. Orpheus Breviary series. The samples can be found at this link. Needless to say, I’m excited and looking forward to the release. The sample contains the beginning of the introductory essay by […]
I have yet to read Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, but I fully intend to soon. In the meantime I have been keeping up with her Twitter account @EmilyRCWilson, where she selects passages from the poem and compares various translations and explains why she chose the words/phrases she did for these selections. It’s a […]
The Minutemen: Mike Watt, D. Boon, George Hurley I owe a debt of gratitude to Dangerous Minds for their post Minutemen Unplugged: Punk Legends’ Rollicking Acoustic Jam on Cable Access TV, 1985. Their post covers the important points of the short performance, although when I saw them in Dallas earlier that year (1985) their set […]
I received a nice note from a teacher in Zimbabwe (“somewhat isolated from the academic world,” as they put it) commenting that my posts on Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War has helped them and it has paid off for their students. That note, along with other nice comments from students reading the book and finding help […]
The other day I was changing channels on Sirius XM and landed on BYU Radio, which I had no idea even existed. I was getting ready to change the channel when I realized the conversation was on Moby Dick, and I ended up listening to the remainder of the show. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and […]
The Disappearance of Émile Zola: Love, Literature, and the Dreyfus Case by Michael RosenPegasus Books, 2017 I have to admit I’ve never really connected with Zola’s books. I find things I appreciate and like in his writing, but its more in fits and starts than for a sustained reading. What interested me in […]
If I see something interesting—post, video, etc.—that ties in well with a book I’ve posted about on the blog, I’ll go back to the original post and update it with the link to the new item. I realize not everyone will go back to something they have already seen, so I thought an occasional “Update” […]