In his new short story collection T C Boyle has gone a step further than William Butler Yeats who conveyed in his poem ldquo The Second Coming rdquo the alienation and disconnectedness of 20th-century life with the memorable image ldquo the falcon cannot hear the falconer rdquo Boyle descr
Books
It’s in Our Blood
Reviewed in our pages in 2006, ‘One Nation Under God,’ offers a vivid portrait of public prayer in American history.
What to Tell the Kids?
In 1935 a 26-year-old Viennese Jew with a Ph D in art history but no job hastily penned Eine kurze Weltgeschichte f r junge Leser as part of a series called Knowledge for Children before fleeing to England where in time he became director of the Warburg Institute and the celebrated author of
City on Screen
Mel Brooks once said that the toughest and most interesting thing about making a movie was ldquo cutting out each of those tiny sprocket holes on the film strip so that the scenes don rsquo t jerk all over the place rdquo Pace Mr Brooks it is enlightening as well as comforting when a reader lear
Shared Authority
In Active Liberty Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer offers an alternative to Justice Antonin Scalia rsquo s advocacy of text-focused statutory interpretation and a constitutional jurisprudence that takes its bearings from original intent Instead Breyer argues statutory interpretation should lo
A Life Changed
Two scenes leap off the pages of Nobel prize-winning author J M Coetzee rsquo s latest novel Slow Man the in medias res opener in which protagonist Paul Rayment is accidentally knocked off his bicycle by young driver Wayne Blight and loses a leg and the penultimate scene in which the Jokic fam
Let It Be
An anthology of poems is usually a guaranteed pleasure After all a judicious editor is spreading out his or her favorites which is bound to yield the reader a handful of authentic finds The judicious editor in this case is Peggy Rosenthal teacher and author of The Poet rsquo s Jesus Oxford Uni
Specialist to the World
It was not my first visit to Kevin Cahill M D a tropical medicine specialist based in New York but it was probably the most memorable Returning from Africa to recuperate from both hepatitis-A and food poisoning I had to be driven to his Fifth Avenue office too weak to go on my own by public t
The Political Is Personal
Always try to do too much must be taken as one of Salman Rushdie’s mantras and he certainly lives up to it here This sprawling story flashes back and forth from pre-World War II Strasbourg to present-day Los Angeles touchesat least fleetinglyon every major world crisis from the Holocaust to
In Widow’s Weeds
Joan Didion has been writing books for more than 40 years. Her newest and most unforgettable book is “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
