Reviews and News:
The architectural sacking of Paris: “Proposed developments in the French capital will continue the ongoing ruination of its classical beauty.”
Flannery O’Connor’s book reviews: The novelist was “conversant in the Christian Humanism of her day, not only analyzing and commenting on it, but promoting it wherever she could, mostly in her diocesan newspapers, The Bulletin and The Southern Cross.”
Why do publishers still issue books in hardcover? “The hardback is a mark of quality and a demonstration of intent on behalf of the publisher: it shows booksellers and reviewers that this is a book worth paying attention to.”
Ross Douthat reviews Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: “His book is at once a salutary reminder of the material progress modern science and commerce have delivered and a propagandistic treatment of the past. Pinker defends a selectively edited Enlightenment that conforms neatly to his style of liberal politics (stridently secular, mildly libertarian, anti-P.C.), and absolves his idealized version of the modern project of all imperial and eugenic and centralizing cruelties, and all the genocides and persecutions justified in Reason’s name.”
In praise of learning Latin the old way: “Like students of today, Greeks who lived within the Roman Empire often toiled under real threats from their schoolmasters as they learned Latin. But unlike today, these ancient Greeks were not drilled in word endings in the hope of being able to translate the most famous works of Latin literature. Quite the opposite, actually: these Greeks memorized bilingual dialogues to learn to speak Latin in the marketplace, in the law courts, in the army, and in their business dealings.”
Anthony Cummins reviews Samantha Harvey’s The Western Wind: “That Samantha Harvey’s new novel should present itself as a medieval detective mystery might seem something of a U-turn for a writer who once spoke of having renounced ‘the impulse to put something more marketable’ in her work. Previously she has explored dementia (The Wilderness), the idea of how a modern-day Socrates would fare (All Is Song) and – before everyone went mad for Elena Ferrante – a female friendship gone vengefully sour (Dear Thief). But while ostensibly a change of tack, The Western Wind, about a priest who purports to investigate the drowning of a wealthy landowner, sticks to her abiding theme of how easily memory – a matter of belief – can lapse into self-deception.”
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times, Ratha Tep takes us on a trip to Virginia Woolf’s Cornwall:
“Virginia Woolf wasn’t always the radical we imagine today. Before the debates on truth and beauty with her circle of early 20th-century artists, intellectuals and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group; before the polemic feminist lectures at Cambridge; and before the ever-constant push to experiment with new forms of fiction, there was the impressionable young girl, born Adeline Virginia Stephen, who spent seaside summers in Cornwall, on England’s rugged southwestern tip.”
Photo: Tree
Poem: Countee Cullen, “The Bright Chimeric Beast”
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