As someone who didn’t know many of the details of the battles and wars between Israel and the Palestinian people over the past century and more, I came to Rashid [...]
Yoga is devil-worship — that’s what some American Christian leaders say, such as Mark Driscoll, an evangelical pastor who, in a 2010 sermon, told his congregation: “Yoga is demonic. If [...]
He hasn’t been canonized, but I think of Michelangelo as a sort of saint. William Shakespeare, too. And Emily Dickinson, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Frank Sinatra, Beethoven, Aretha Franklin and Chaucer. I [...]
What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History, published in 2004, is, as its subtitle suggests, a serious work of counterfactual speculation. Which isn’t to say [...]
About halfway through Shadows on the Rock, Willa Cather’s 1931 novel, Cecile, the 12-year-old daughter of Quebec apothecary Euclide Auclair, hears the story of a miracle that has happened in [...]
Ed McBain’s 1954 novel Killer’s Wedge, the eighth book in his 87th Precinct series, opens with a short poetic rhapsody to autumn in the city: Outside the grilled windows of [...]
In the opening scene of Robert van Gulik’s 1967 Judge Dee mystery Necklace and Calabash, the judge is on his way to a quick fishing vacation in Rivertown but has [...]
I’m not sure if Anne Kraatz’s 2006 Solstiss: The Seduction of Lace was a book commissioned by the Solstiss company. In 1989, Kraatz wrote the delightfully erudite Lace: History and [...]
There are two major characters in Philip Gefter’s Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage and the Making of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” One is the four-actor play Who’s [...]
A strikingly drawn and boldly colored map, attributed to the Jesuit priest and explorer Jean de Brebeuf, is the image used on the cover of Mirela Altic’s Encounters in the [...]
