Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Nancy MacLean, _Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America_; Michelle Alexander, _The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness_

›
MacLEAN"S TITLE STRUCK me as melodramatic, but even a few dozen pages in, it began to feel like a good fit. Here's the thing. The...
Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Questions of Canon Slippage: Anthony Powell again

›
THAT MARXIST HISTORIAN and mainstay of the New Left Review Perry Anderson is an ardent advocate for A Dance to the Music of Time may not b...
Sunday, July 15, 2018

Mark Williams, _Ireland's Immortal: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth_ (2)

›
THE SECOND HALF of Williams's book is about how Irish mythology was revived and in some ways re-fashioned in the later 19th and early 20...
Thursday, July 12, 2018

Questions of Canon Slippage: Jonathan Franzen

›
SO, DID JONATHAN Franzen know, when the New York Times Magazine approached him about doing a cover story, that the story's angle was go...
Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Questions of Canon Slippage: Anthony Powell

›
I LIKED DANCE to the Music of Time when I read in the middle years of the eighties, and I knew at least a few other people who read and like...
Tuesday, July 10, 2018

Mark Williams, _Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth_ (1)

›
MAYBE NOT EXACTLY what the cover (shamrock green with Celtic curlicues) would lead some to expect--that is, an Edith Hamilton-esque retellin...
Monday, July 9, 2018

Mihail Sebastian, _For Two Thousand Years_, trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh

›
CLASSIFIED AS A novel, but "similar in style and tone" to Sebastian's published journal for 1935-44 (which I have not read, bu...