Here are the 2018 National Book Award winners. They were announced at a ceremony in New York yesterday, which offered the winners an opportunity to share a few platitudes about the power of literature to “heal … hatred” and bring people together.
James C. Howell reviews two new translations of the Old Testament. They “could not be more different from one another in style, results, packaging, purpose, and intended use.”
Kyle Smith reviews the “certified Oscar™-brand feel-good” movie of the holiday season: Green Book. “Widely regarded as one of the more embarrassing Best Picture choices in Academy Awards history, Driving Miss Daisy has been reconfigured for 2018 tastes: Green Book is a leading contender to win Best Picture next winter despite being even more trite, didactic, corny, and obvious than its 1989 isotope. Co-written and directed in oleaginous style by Peter Farrelly (yes, the Dumb and Dumber auteur), the movie combines Hallmark Channel-style humor with a homily about racial tolerance carefully designed to appeal to awards-show voters, to whom no message movie can be too blunt as long as it is sending one of the five or so messages of which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences never tires.”
A 19-mile wide crater has been discovered in Greenland.
In The Walrus, André Forget reviews Randy Boyagoda’s “deeply Catholic and deeply funny” novel.
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is one of a thousand books that have been banned at a Kuwaiti literature festival: “The information ministry has blacklisted more than 4,000 books over the past five years, including Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez.”
Essay of the Day:
Earlier this year, Kevin Vanhoozer wrote a “Letter to an Aspiring Theologian” for First Things. This month, Theodore Dalrymple writes a “Letter to an Aspiring Doctor.” As with Vanhoozer’s letter, there is much in Dalrymple’s that applies to all vocations:
“You will have to tolerate the folly of patients while striving to promote their well-being. You will discover that the varieties of human self-destruction are infinite, ranging from persistence in the most obviously harmful habits despite stern warnings to the most absurd beliefs about diet—such absurdity being by no means confined to the ignorant and uneducated. Superstition springs eternal, and you must remember that an age of information is also an age of misinformation. Many of your patients will be cranks who believe that fish oil or guava juice is the elixir of life, or that wearing a crystal round their necks or living on a healing chakra of the earth is the secret of health. They will have all kinds of unfounded beliefs, some harmless and some harmful, and you will not be able to dissuade them.
“Other patients will be outright unpleasant, unreasonably demanding, and even threatening. They may try to blackmail you: For example, patients have told me that they would kill someone or themselves if I did not prescribe them what they wanted. I refused, advising them to refrain from killing anyone, including themselves, but I could never be quite sure that they wouldn’t carry out the threat.
“Whatever your inner state of turmoil when confronted by the immense showcase of human folly or unpleasantness, you must retain your outer equanimity, which does not come naturally and at first will take a mental toll on you. But habit will become character, and eventually you will learn to accept people as they are—even if they don’t deserve it.”
Photos: Oregon
List: 32 Views from a Hammock
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