If humans contain Whitman’s multitudes, novels also have the possibility to contain multitudes, and they should. —Gabrielle Zevin, “Cloud Atlas at 20: What makes a novel tattoo-worthy
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Organized pressure groups have used their power—and long lists of titles—to wage an aggressive campaign to empty library shelves of all books they deem inappropriate instead of allowing people to decide for themselves what they and their children read. These groups have redirected their aim from schools to public libraries, which saw a 92% increase
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The Dinner Party That Started the Harlem Renaissance “A century ago, a dinner party in New York set in motion one of the most influential cultural movements of the 20th century.” Staff members of The New York Times have “explored archival material and have reconstructed much of” what happened on March 21, 1924, at a
For this month’s starting point we were told to look on our shelves for a travel guide. I have a bunch of badly outdated travel guides, but the most recent one added to the shelf is Lonely Planet’s Pocket Rome: Top Experiences – Local Life. There’s a reason why this book is on the shelf:
6 Degrees of Separation: Rome Through the Centuries Read More »
The Forgotten Women Who Shaped the Roman Empire Kudos to Atlas Obscura for their series She Was There, in which female scholars participate in “writing long-forgotten women back into history.” I find the movement to give voice to marginalized people who have been erased from history one of the most interesting and vital elements within
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For most of my life, my mother and I could safely talk about two subjects: the weather and baseball. Thanks to my mother’s influence, I grew up a baseball fan. We lived in Connecticut, just about half way between Boston and New York, so the fierce rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees runs
“A Nation of Lunatics.” What Oscar Wilde Thought About America “Rob Marland on the Irish Writer’s Grand Tour of the Gilded Age United States” This article caught my eye because I had just finished catching up on the second season of the HBO series The Gilded Age, which includes a trip to the opera by
Related Posts: #6 The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton © 1998 Date read: 2/24/2000 This book would not have the same effect on me if I read it now for the first time as it did when I read it more than 20 years ago. Some issues that we now take for
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Betty Smith enchanted a generation of readers with ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ − even as she groused that she hoped Williamsburg would be flattened Rachel Gordan, assistant professor of religion and Jewish studies at the University of Florida, discloses that Betty Smith herself had a different experience of life in Brooklyn than does the
Set in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, Long Bright River humanizes the problems U.S. cities and their residents struggle with. Formerly a center of business and industry, Kensington is now home to abandoned and decaying former warehouses and factories, remnants of an earlier era when commerce and industry flourished. As the novel opens, a police
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