“Young, Rodger W., Private, 148th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division (the Ohio Buckeyes); born Tiffin, Ohio, 28 April 1918; died 31 July 1943, on the island of New Georgia, Solomons, South Pacific, while single-handedly attacking and destroying an enemy machine-gun pillbox. His platoon had been pinned down by intense fire from this pillbox; Private Young was […]
“‘Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage. ‘And that is the one practical difference.’ ‘He may fail in wisdom, he may lapse in civic virtue. But his average performance is enormously better […]
I already wish I could get back at least a portion of the many hours I spent wading through this novel, so I’m not going to waste much time reviewing it. Despite containing some moments of keen intellectual insight and a handful of endearing events and characters, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany is […]
“What could Marilyn Monroe’s death ever have to do with me? ‘IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US,’ said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. ‘SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY––NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER […]
“Joe said plaintively, ‘But what will I do here alone?’ Samuel was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘Joe, do you love me?’ ‘Why, sure.’ ‘If you heard I’d committed some great crime would you turn me over to the police?’ ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Would you?’ ‘No.’ ‘All right then. In my […]
“I don’t know how it will be in the years to come. There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. […]
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is an exceptional novel by a very smart author who doesn’t know when to shut up. Michael Chabon’s prose is densely literary, rife with cultural references, and brimming with insight and passion. Kavalier & Clay’s 600+ pages read like the internal monologue of the hyperactive lovechild of a […]
It’s been ten years since I first read The Grapes of Wrath, and I now realize that my seventeen-year-old self was incapable of internalizing even a fraction of the tragedy and grace contained in this overwhelming story. A decade on, what was once fodder for my sophomoric literary intellect has recast itself as a narrative […]
“Not one single history book is objective,” Jason Ripper writes in the final chapter of American Stories, Vol. II. “Merely choosing which topics to include and which to exclude indicates an author’s personal understanding of historical significance. Choice is bias” (260). I heartily agree. This admission of bias is in especially good taste given Ripper’s […]
Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics is a radical book penned with a lot of passion and the best of intentions. This treatise on alternative economics serves up some very worthy ideas that are compromised by a handful of the author’s less rigorous tendencies and intellectually insupportable positions. As a whole, the book had a decidedly divisive effect […]