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Category Archives: book reviews
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger: then and now
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger My rating: 5 of 5 stars I was younger than Holden Caulfield when I first read this book; now I’m several multiples of his age. It’s still a brilliant and thought-provoking work, … Continue reading
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Tagged J.D. Slainger, Odyssey of Homer, The Catcher in the Rye
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Cosmos, Chaos and the Word to Come by Norman Cohn: the cosmic carrot on the stick
Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith by Norman Cohn My rating: 5 of 5 stars A dense, authoritative survey of the development of the myth of the millennium and a future paradise. Awaiters … Continue reading
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Tagged ancient history, apocalypses, Jehovah's Witnesses, millenarianism, Norman Cohn, Religion
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Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, volume 1: making the perfect human
Paideia 1: The Ideals of Greek Culture: Archaic Greece: The Mind of Athens by Werner Wilhelm Jaeger My rating: 5 of 5 stars An impassioned, authoritative, and in-depth account of how the character-shaping ideas of education and culture developed in … Continue reading
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Tagged ancient Greece, culture, Education, Homer, Mortimer J. Adler, paideia, Poetry, Thucydides, Werner Jaeger
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The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek: liberals of the world, unite!
The Road To Serfdom by Friedrich A. Hayek My rating: 5 of 5 stars A passionately felt and forcefully argued—and prescient—defence of liberalism, the doctrine of individual freedom that is opposed by all collectivists, whether of the left or right. … Continue reading
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Tagged collectivism, communism, F.A. Hayek, liberalism, Liberty, Nazism, socialism
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Journeys out of the Body by Robert A. Monroe: shuffling off the mortal coil
Journeys Out Of The Body by Robert A. Monroe My rating: 4 of 5 stars A persuasive and thought-provoking account of one man’s experiences and experiments with traveling outside his own body. My earliest memory of hearing about out-of-body experiences … Continue reading
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Tagged astral travel, Betty Eadie, ghosts, Life & Death, materialism, OOBEs, Raymond Moody, Robert A. Monroe
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the Iliad of Homer: first epic of the West
The Iliad by Homer My rating: 5 of 5 stars Western literature kicks off with the clash of civilizations. Crafting an epic of my own, I got the idea of exploring the great epics of Western literature in more detail. … Continue reading
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Tagged East vs. West, epic, Homer, Iliad, Robert Fagles, the Great Books
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Pursued by Furies by Gordon Bowker: portrait of the artist as a drunk
Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry by Gordon Bowker My rating: 4 of 5 stars This biography contains a wealth of detail—but is it worth it? I first heard the name “Malcolm Lowry” in about 1968, when I … Continue reading
Justine by the Marquis de Sade: birth of the philosopher-pornographer
Justine by Marquis de Sade My rating: 3 of 5 stars The struggle between virtue and vice is portrayed in the starkest possible way. I was reminded of this book when I read The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell … Continue reading
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Tagged de Sade, Duty, erotica, morality, sadism, Virtue & Vice
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Watership Down by Richard Adams: the rabbit Aeneid
Watership Down by Richard Adams My rating: 5 of 5 stars Two square miles of English countryside become a zone of adventure, combat, and statecraft for a band of refugee rabbits. My path to this book was via The Seven … Continue reading
The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker: the templates for personal growth
The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker My rating: 4 of 5 stars This massive, in-depth work presents a unified theory of the art of storytelling based on Jungian psychology. As I recall, this was another … Continue reading
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Tagged Christopher Booker, Jung, literary theory, literature, plot, storytelling
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