Scott Esposito has a good post (including the subsequent conversation) about the reasons for reading at his blog, Conversational Reading: “Perhaps the best way to get at this is to talk about approach. I approach these books for my pleasure, not my improvement. However, the […]
Adam Gopnik has a good essay in this week’s New Yorker about why reading Shakespeare is still essential, as he reviews Stephen Greenblatt’s new book “Will in the World.” “Greenblatt’s book is startlingly good—the most complexly intelligent and sophisticated, and yet the most keenly enthusiastic, […]
How do we talk to one another in such a market driven democracy? How are ideas discussed in an atmosphere so polarized by the current presidential campaign? What is the nature of our public debate? These are questions on Cornel West’s mind as well. West […]
“Our everyday life is much stranger than we imagine, and rests on fragile foundations.” This is the intriguing first sentence of an intriguing new book about economics, and much else besides: “The Company of Strangersâ€, by Paul Seabright, a professor of economics at the University […]
How preschool children experience picture books is affected by their mothers’ education level and by who is reading to them, says Jane Torr, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Early Childhood at Macquarie University, in Australia. According to Torr’s article in the August issue […]
Samuel Huntington has an essay about his book “Who Are We?” that has been posted on the American Enterprise Institute’s Web site. “America’s core culture has primarily been the culture of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers who founded our nation,” he writes. “The central elements […]
The National Endowment for the Arts report on the nation’s reading habits seems to have some legs. This weekend’s New York Times magazine contained an essay on the subject by Mark Edmundson, the Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia. His new […]
I have never done this before, but I will admit it was kind of fun. Nearly every weekend, as part of the weekend programming for Book TV, C-SPAN features a live in-depth, three hour discussion with an author. Today’s discussion was with Simon Winchester, an […]