In the Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus takes a trip to Hades where he encounters many of his former comrades from the Trojan War, including Achilles who asks him: “How could you [...]
Daniel Okrent’s newly published The Guarded Gate is about immigration. But, much more, its subject is racism. Not black/white racism although that does rear its ugly head in Okrent’s rigorously [...]
As a world leader, Empress Dowager Cixi hasn’t had good press, nothing like, say, Queen Elizabeth I or Queen Victoria. In terms of historical reputation, those women had their gender [...]
The best books of 2019 Moby Dick by Herman Melville Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt The [...]
Mostly Harmless — the 5th and sort-of final installment in the series of books by Douglas Adams that he started with A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — is mostly [...]
Emma, this book review is for you, but don’t tell your Mom and Dad. They’d probably get all worried that a book like P is for Pterodactyl will ruin your [...]
The odds are that you don’t have a copy of the Jewish War by Josephus in your book collection. You may never have heard of it. It was written around [...]
Sonja Livingston’s mother led an irregular life, giving birth to seven children, often without a husband, but she still attended Corpus Christi Catholic Church with her kids, striding up [...]
In 1962, John Steinbeck was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the committee that chose him described his novel The Grapes of Wrath as “a great work” [...]
I know the title of Edward L. Greenstein’s Job, just published by Yale University Press, indicates that it’s a new translation of the biblical book composed about 2,600 years ago. [...]
