Books
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I thought we had discussed this book here once, although I have not read it, but I can't find any mention of it. Anyway, here is an interesting discussion of it by Francesca Murphy at Public Discourse. She says it is a liminal secular-religious book. It is on the border between the two, broad enough on…
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Donald Trump probably deserves a bit of the credit for this book's popularity. It was published in 2016 when the Great Trump Freakout was well under way, and was often described as providing an explanation for some of Trump's support. There's this New York Times review, for instance: "In ‘Hillbilly Elegy,’ a Tough Love Analysis…
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I suppose anyone who's interested has heard that the cause for G.K. Chesterton's canonization has been shut down, at least for now. Here's a brief notice about it in the Catholic Herald UK. Sounds somewhat disgruntled, or at any rate gives significant space to a disgruntled voice. I must say that I'm more in agreement…
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I don't care. But apparently a lot of people do. Apparently J.K. Rowling is "a major voice in world affairs". I've missed that development. The piece I linked to there is from 2017, and maybe she is not speaking out as much as she was then. I looked at her Twitter account and there is…
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A few days ago on Facebook a friend remarked, apropos Independence Day, that "We're doomed because of Ayn Rand." Then earlier today my friend Stu left a comment on this post from 2014 saying he had given up on reading Atlas Shrugged with 300 pages still to go. He mentioned that he hadn't been able…
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I've often wondered, when listening to or reading someone who seems to be a really hardened anti-Christian, what it would take to crack that shell. I say "seems" because of course one can never tell from the outside what's going on inside a person. And I say "anti-Christian" rather than "anti-religious" or "anti-theist" because for…
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"Again" because I was talking about it last week in this post, when I had only read 60 or 70 pages. Now I've finished it. I'm still not sure that it's right to expose other people so very intimately to the world, but I gather that the main characters apart from herself who are still…
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I'm reading Mary Karr's memoir The Liars' Club. It's very good, but I realized fairly quickly that some part of me wants to dislike it. At first I didn't want to admit that to myself, keeping a keen eye out for faults while not quite consciously wanting to find them. Then, when it got difficult to…
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I knew I should have let that notice that I posted last week sit for a day or two before posting it. I generally do that with anything that's more than a paragraph or two, in case I think of something else I want to say or change the way I said it. So, addenda:…
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When I wrote that notice of Dawn Eden Goldstein's book with that title, it didn't occur to me that anyone reading this blog would not know that it's taken from a 1967 hit song. But that's the assumption of someone who not only heard the song on the radio a thousand or so times when…
Light On Dark Water 