Him: How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a light bulb? Me: I don’t know. Him: You know why don’t know? Me: No, why? Him: ‘CAUSE YOU…
Category:
BOOK REVIEWS
In my old Seminar in Planning Theory I used to give my students a series of small writing assignments. “In one I would task them as follows: A director of…
“Some years ago, my father came home with a carton of old letters that time and humidity had compacted into wads of barely legible paper. He announced that he had…
Maybe you noticed already, but I should point it out anyway—the title above is not The Odyssey, just Odyssey. I was misled when I found this book on a shelf at the…
Hitler’s Niece (2009), by Ron Hansen, and Eva (1984), by Ib Melchior Monsters fascinate us, I think, because their very perverse twisted natures provide an insight into our own elusive normalcy. The twisted,…
Last night, on TCM, I found myself watching––again––The Song of Bernadette, the 1943 movie about the little peasant girl of Lourdes who started seeing “a lady in white” in a…
Jesuit missionaries seeking eternal paradise in all the wrong places and all the worse ways. A review Saints of the American Wilderness by John A. O’Brien (2011) Who hasn’t been preached the…
Gustave Flaubert might not have been the first, but he was perhaps the most successful novelist at expressing an oppressive monotony of mid-19th C French provincial life. While France was…
If anybody paid attention to what I write about religion they might wonder why I seem to have a persistent interest in evangelism, particularly as practiced by missionaries who target…
When Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth in 1931 China was still such terra incognita to virtually all Occidentals that when casting was done for the movie version in 1936 the lead…