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Földényi’s The Glance of the Medusa: The Physiognomy of Mysticism is a book I have on my Christmas list, so I hope to read more of it soon. Hungarian Literature Online has an excerpt from the book’s second chapter: For this reason, the moment of love is not only about finding oneself but also about […]
Found at Air Mail, an excerpt/adaptation from The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin, by Douglas Smith, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux today. An engrossing read (no pun intended). The stories began to appear in the Soviet press in the autumn of 1921, each one more […]
God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves Edited by Clifton H. Johnson, with a new introduction by Albert J. Rabateau The William Bradford Collection from The Pilgrim Press, 1993 (2nd edition) Paperback, 204 pages The reissue of a rare volume of ex-slave narratives is as timely now as it was when it first appeared in […]
Vladimir Bukovsky passed away this past weekend at the age of 76. Before he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1976, Bukovsky spent 12 years in prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and labor camps. Vladimir Nabokov said of Bukovsky, “Bukovsky’s heroic speech to the court in defense of freedom, and his five years of martyrdom in […]
We’re caught in this round of power outages in California. Posting will resume when we have power again.
The documentary film Rosenwald tells the inspiring story of Julius Rosenwald, an immigrant’s son who became CEO of Sears, Roebuck & Company and used his wealth to support equal rights for African Americans during the Jim Crow era. His support of education, the arts, and housing for middle-class African Americans left a legacy that influenced […]
In 1864 during the American Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman began his famous march to the sea. With an army of 60,000 men he swept into the South, destroying Atlanta, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, and dozens of smaller towns. His troops plundered homes, destroyed livestock, burned buildings, and left a path of destruction […]
As I’ve noted in several posts, I love seeing books used as props in movies or shows, especially when it’s clear some thought went into what book was going to be in the frame. Here’s an interesting story on how an unpublished book was used as a prop in Avengers: Endgame. When the man who […]
Another semi-recent article I should mention is Address Unknown: the great, forgotten anti-Nazi book everyone must read at The Guardian. There has been numerous blog reviews on the book over the years, and despite positive notes on the book I had never read it. The article title may be a bit overblown, but it did […]
A grab bag of articles I’ve recently enjoyed: “The Puzzles of Thermopylae” by Chris Carey The story is well known and easily told. But the battle throws up a number of lasting puzzles. We have no contemporary account. Our earliest source, Herodotus, began his research perhaps 30 years or more after the event. He had […]