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Articles
Russian Brahmin
Laurusby eugene vodolazkintranslated by lisa haydenoneworld, 384 pages, $24.99 Eugene Vodolazkin’s novel Laurus has been much praised, especially by Christians, and rightly so. It is a fine novel. But...
Lena Dunham’s Inviolable Self
In an episode from the first season of HBO’s series Girls, Hannah Horvath—played by the show’s creator and chief writer, Lena Dunham—is having sex with her occasional lover Adam...
Against Stupidity
I have been thinking a lot about stupidity lately, largely, I suppose, because I spend a good deal of time online. I define stupidity as “remediable but unremedied ignorance,”...
A Prophet Wrongly Honored
Terry Eagleton made his name in the 1980s by demonstrating that it is possible to write wittily and even elegantly about literary theory. At the time this was something...
On the Works of Kahlil Gibran
Alan Jacobs reviewed the great twentieth-century poet’s complete oeuvre, and found it verse than expected. From the November 2007 issue. n I n Expansive and yet vacuous is the...
Beyond the Wild Wood
The Annotated Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, edited by Annie Gauger. W.W. Norton, 480 pages, $39.95 The Wind in the Willows: An Annotated Edition by Kenneth Grahame,...
Pedantic Park
Worlds Made of Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West by Anthony Grafton Harvard, 432 pages, $29.95 Alas, poor Casaubon! Your name, thanks to George Eliot, has become...
Blessed Are the Green of Heart
Some years ago I was leading a summer study tour in Oxford, England, during which as a matter of course—we were from Wheaton College, after all—we paid a visit...
The Way, the Truth, and Philip Jenkins
Woody Allen used to joke that he had been kicked out of college for cheating on an exam in his metaphysics class: He looked into the soul of the...
A Religion for Atheists
Alain de Botton has been engaged for many years now in an intriguing project”to get people to think of philosophy not as an abstruse academic discipline but rather as...
A Classic Case
History Lesson: A Race Odyssey by Mary Lefkowitz Yale University Press, 208 pages, $25 In History Lesson Mary Lefkowitz tells a story that has three distinct themes. The story...
Reading, Writing, and Reformation
Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents by James Simpson Harvard University, Press368 pages, $27.95 The past twenty years have brought major changes to university presses. Decreasing...
Amis Amiss
Long, long ago, in the years just preceding the Second World War”as Germany was overrunning Czechoslovakia and annexing Austria, and as Neville Chamberlain was preparing to travel to Munich...
A Commonplace Book
Awhile back, I started keeping a commonplace book. Commonplace book is an odd phrase, perhaps, because what you are supposed to record in such a book is, from one...
On the Recent Publication of Kahlil Gibran’s COLLECTED WORKS
I Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran, And weary grows the mind doomed to read it. The hours of my penance lengthen, The penance established...
