Books
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Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Felipe Alou, My Baseball Journey; Guy de la Bedoyere, Gladius, the World of the Roman Soldier; Gordon Dee Alcorn, Owls; Martin H. Levinson, Brooklyn Boomer; J.N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language; Sybille Haynes, Etruscan Civilization, a Cultural History; Philip Freeman, Julian, Rome's Last…
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After struggling through a run of mysterious and puzzling works, I’m cheered to discover a book written by Cornell English faculty member that I could read with pleasure from beginning to end. And understand. And which alerted me to books and poems with which I was not familiar. No theory, no pretentious jargon; just honest…
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As a rule, I keep my distance from live performances of a Shakespeare play because I seldom enjoy the experience and regularly find it misleading. This has not always been the case. A few versions, notably the lucid Scofield Coriolanus at Stratford in 1962, are still vivid in my brain. What has happened? Somewhere along…
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I read Felipe Alou's autobiography, My Baseball Journey (2018). It's not a literary masterpiece, but nevertheless a solid book that "does the job." It's particularly valuable for its story of the brutalities faced by a black Dominican pioneer coming to segregated America in the early '50s. A good reminder of a part of our ugly…
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Ian McEwan, Black Dogs; Ian McEwan, Saturday; Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time; Ian McEwan, Amsterdam; Marcia Davenport, East Side, West Side; Thomas Halliday, Otherlands; Joseph Sassoon, The Sassoons; Jane Austen, Persuasion; Jane Austen, Mansfield Park; Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles; Jonathan Raban, Bad Land; David Thomson, Sleeping with Strangers; Michael North, The Baltic; Niall Williams, This…
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The singer and composer Barry Manilow writes that he took three arduous years to produce his rather thin memoir (Sweet Life, Adventures on the Way to Paradise, 1987). I'm skeptical of his claim because his book has all the outward indications of the celebrity genre that might justly be called the "as-told-to's. It's written as…
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Half of Pete Hamill's memoir sometimes seems to have dropped down from another universe or more precisely from an alternative civilization, while the other half depicts events and ideas that are as familiar to me (as they say) as the back of my hand. Although Pete and I are both Brooklynites and near-contemporaries (he was…
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Both partisans and skeptics of Jane Austen's Emma will remember Harriet Smith, the young woman who becomes the object of Emma Woodhouse's officious matchmaking. Harriet's ancestry is explained by JA; she is "the natural daughter of someone" — that is, she is an illegitimate child of obscure origin. Harriet's patronizing friend Emma imagines, without a…
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My first visit in four months to the new acquisitions shelf of the Boulder Public Library turned out to be fruitful, for I discovered J. H. Stiehm's 2023 biography of Janet Reno: Janet Reno, A Life (Gainesville, Fl). Janet was a classmate ('60) at Cornell and also proceeded with me to Harvard, where she was…
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"Roux" is word that everyone seems to know but me. To the best of my recollection, "roux" had never crossed my personal threshold until last week — perhaps because I have never taken any special interest in fine cuisine. I've now enlightened myself, but at the cost of blundering into a bewildering etymological thicket. "Roux,"…