February 5, 2007 – 12:53 pm
Being a latecomer to the sport of hockey (not surprising as I’ve only been on ice skates once in my life), I occasionally try to learn more about the sport through a primary obsession — reading. Not surprisingly, hockey books don’t really rise to the level of great literature. Still, they’re often worth [...]
January 31, 2007 – 12:15 pm
What impression does Norman Mailer’s first novel in more than a decade leave? It’s probably irony. Promoted as an exploration of the struggle between good and evil, The Castle in the Forest comes off making Adolf Hitler, a poster child of evil, little more than relatively commonplace. In addition, while Mailer writes as [...]
January 25, 2007 – 12:27 pm
We all know or have encountered at least one of them. The people who always see the glass as half full or, even more irritating, more than half full. The people with a bright outlook on life and the future. The people who always see the up side of things.
I used to [...]
January 4, 2007 – 9:53 am
Biographers of musicians face a tough balancing act. In addition to exploring an artist’s life, they have to provide sufficient explanation of the music to satisfy those who know music well as well as the average listener who could care less about whether what they hear is a glissando or arpeggio. The task is even [...]
December 30, 2006 – 8:26 pm
Every kid has (or ought to have) heroes. For me, Johnny Unitas was one of the first. Unitas first achieved fame as the quarterback for the NFL’s Baltimore Colts when I was too young to know football was, helping lead the Colts to the 1958 NFL championship in a game that is still called “The [...]
December 29, 2006 – 4:12 pm
While others may not see it, those of us who live on the Great Plains — whether southern or northern — find a certain inherent beauty in the prairie. In fact, even though I have never lived anywhere but in a town or city, the five acres of land filled with prairie grasses that [...]
December 4, 2006 – 7:23 am
It seems like it’s always this time of year where I find myself compelled to do somewhat condensed book reviews rather than full ones. It may have something to do with the fact that I’m not obligated to anyone to do a full review of the particular book or it could just be I [...]
November 27, 2006 – 7:45 am
Many freely admit they are addicted. I am one of them. We can’t go through a day without listening to music on the radio, a stereo or MP3 player. Purchase of concert tickets or a new release by a favorite artist ranks among the necessities of life. Snippets of songs heard [...]
November 14, 2006 – 7:49 am
Virtually no one disputes Gary Webb died in 2004 of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Yet the question “What killed Gary Webb?” still exists.
Was it that his August 1996 “Dark Alliance” series in the San Jose Mercury News regarding how some Nicaraguan “contra” rebels backed by the CIA received funds from crack cocaine traffickers was seriously [...]
November 11, 2006 – 9:57 am
It might be unfair to include William Hopper’s The Heathen’s Guide to World Religions with reviews of works by Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. That’s because Hopper’s work is a Marxist manifesto. Marx as in Groucho Marx.
Yet that may be what is ultimately required when it comes to advocating atheism. Religious faith [...]
November 10, 2006 – 8:07 am
With two books on the bestseller list raising questions about the validity of belief in God, some observers see a movement they call the New Atheism. If they are right, Richard Dawkins is to New Atheism what Bertrand Russell was to what is now apparently “Old Atheism.”
Yet there is a fundamental and significant difference [...]
November 9, 2006 – 7:48 am
Is atheism “in”? Multi-page expositions in national news weeklies and two books advocating an atheist viewpoint on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for a month. If atheism is in, it is thanks in no small part to Sam Harris, the author of one of those bestselling books, Letter to a Christian [...]
November 8, 2006 – 12:55 pm
It seems somehow sadly fitting that Air America: The Playbook hit the bookshelves less than four weeks before Air America Radio filed for bankruptcy. Just as the radio network’s financial problems seem to display some degree of a lack of planning and execution, the playbook also suffers a lack of focus and goals. [...]
October 21, 2006 – 9:03 am
In moving away from the recent concentration on politics, I have to start with an admission. Until this month, I’d never read anything by Cormac McCarthy. As a result, I can’t tell you how his latest novel, The Road, compares to what he’s written before, whether in style, mood or anything. I [...]
October 6, 2006 – 7:52 am
Run a Google search for “the historical Jesus” and you end up with more than 650,000 results. But the search for a historical Jesus itself isn’t anything new. In fact, not only did it start in the 18th Century, but Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer published his classic work, The Quest of [...]
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