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Vasily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff Yale University Press, 2019 Hardcover, 424 pagesStalingrad by Vasily Grossman is officially released today. While I’m waiting for my copy to arrive by mail, I wanted to share a little about this outstanding biography. Alexandra Popoff has written several literary biographies and is a former Moscow […]
“The Secret Oral History of Bennington: The 1980s’ Most Decadent College” by Lili Anolik, Esquire Fall, 1982. A new freshman class arrives at arty, louche, and expensive Bennington College. Among the druggies, rebels, heirs, and posers: future Gen X literary stars Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem. What happened over the next four […]
What to do with students in the summer? When they were younger, it was fairly easy. Take them to the pool. Get together with friends. Go to summer camps and amusement parks. Take them on trips. Wear them out, somehow. For school? If you wanted, you could do the summer “bridge” activities books, but of […]
My oldest expressed interest in seeing The Cold Blue tonight instead of waiting for it on HBO, and who was I to say no? So we’re excited about going tonight for the movie and the extra “making of” short. Plus I’m happy to see the score is provided by Richard Thompson. A good article on […]
In the Books section of each weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal is a list of “five best books” on a particular topic. I’ve found some good leads on books I’d like to read every now and then from this feature. This past weekend edition had a list from Alexandra Popoff, former Moscow journalist and […]
Picture from Old Maps, Expeditions, and Explorations blog The Voynich manuscript has been in the news off and on over the past few years. From Wikipedia: The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), […]
I’ve only read a few things by Karl Ove Knausgård, and it’s been hit or miss on what I like and what hasn’t connected. One thing I did enjoy is his recent conversation with Tyler Cowen, which I saw linked at Marginal Revolution. The wide-ranging interview starts with a discussion of mimesis and ends with […]
It’s been a while since I’ve fallen out of love with baseball, but I still enjoy a good baseball movie. Here are a couple of films I’ve watched recently that I can highly recommend. Picture sourceThe first is The Catcher Was a Spy, based on the 1994 biography The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious […]
I feel like I need to apologize for blog silence lately. I’ll pass on the enjoyable find I stumbled across today on Shout Factory TV: Graham Parker And The Rumour: This Is Live. “Filmed for a scene in Judd Apatow’s 2012 motion picture This Is 40, Graham Parker & The Rumour: This Is Live presents […]
I just noticed that Legend of the Holy Drinker, based on Joseph Roth’s novella, is available to view for free on Amazon Prime. I loved Roth’s story and found this movie version with Rutger Hauer very well done. In one of his letters, Joseph Roth wrote, “There are miracles in my life, poor little miracles, […]