Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
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Life and Fate – Vasily Grossman
09 Jun 2021If Vasily Grossman‘s great novel, Life and Fate (1980) lacks many millions of readers to catch Tolstoy’s War and Peace…
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The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science
06 May 2021The Romantic period of Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly in England and of others around Europe is not normally thought of…
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Despised and Rejected by A.T. Fitzroy
27 Mar 2021Despised and Rejected by A.T. Fitzroy (the pseudonym for Rose Allatini) was not only one of the first novels to…
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Macho! by Victor Villaseñor
11 Mar 2021Macho! by Victor Villaseñor, (1973) was written almost fifty years ago, but many of its pages, could be drawn from…
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James Baldwin: Going to Meet the Man
26 Aug 2020For many, James Baldwin will be most recently familiar from the 2016 documentary by Raoul Peck, “I Am Not Your…
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Mottled Dawn – Stories and Sketches of the Partition of India
23 Jul 2020There are wars known, and wars unknown –except to those who lost loved ones, homes and futures. The two world…
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Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History
09 Jul 2020During a long quarantine such as we are now undergoing it’s a good time for stories, as the locked-up Florentines…
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Reading the Classics: Zora Neale Hurston
06 Jul 2020The fight over what are the “essential” books to read in the world-as-it-is-becoming, is at least several generations old. The…
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The Iron Heel – Jack London’s Oligarchic Rule
18 Jan 2020The name Jack London will ring up associations in most American readers from “To Build a Fire,” his enduringly…
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The Milkman — Civilians in a War Zone
08 Jan 2020In the summer of 1972 I spent a month, with my then dearest friend, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in…
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The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge
19 Dec 2019One winter afternoon Comrade Tulayev, an important Party official, is shot dead. By the time The Case of Comrade…
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The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World by Andrea Wulf
25 Oct 2019One of the most important scientists of the western tradition, and about whom we in America know little, is…
