Prose

A few years ago, curious as to exactly how closely we are related to our ancestors, and seeking a way to show what I thought would be a close relationship, I picked an arbitrary date of 4,000 years BCE, thinking that might be around the time of Hammurabi. I was wrong – he was much later, i.e., around 1750 BCE. Nevertheless, I ploughed ahead, and assumed a possible lifetime of 60 years. Hammurabi himself lived to about age 60. So now I was set, and I made a fantastic discovery. Read more about This Is Us

Read more about Vacation Destinations of Tomorrow

Celeborn the Wise, husband of Galadriel, is given short shrift both in Tolkien’s original text and in Peter Jackson’s movie. Even worse, Marton Csokas’ Celeborn, of the movie, intones his line/s like a stone statue and appears about as interesting as a bowl of vanilla pudding. Moviedom’s version of “wise,” I suppose. Read more about Celeborn

Galileo’s Dream, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a story inside of a biography inside of a science fiction novel. There are times where you never really know exactly when you are or why, but the view is only slightly less amazing than the conversations. For me, the real story takes place in 17th century Italy, following Galileo Galilei from Padua to Venice to Florence to Rome. Read more about A Glimpse of Galileo

The Tyranny of Merit, subtitled Can We Find the Common Good? was something of a disappointment to me. The writer, Michael J. Sandel, a philosophy professor at Harvard, put one of his classes on ethics online; I watched the entirety of it and enjoyed it very much, so was predisposed to like this little book. Read more about A Couple More Books

In his preface to 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, Eric H. Read more about Back to the Future

Having just finished nearly all of the John Le Carré novels, I thought I would turn to something just as dystopian (Le Carré's are not in that genre, even though sometimes they feel that way) but more fun. The future inundation of the planet sounded like a good time. Read more about Reading the Summer Away

A Fairy Tale
Barbara Stoner Read more about Tricky Dick and the Dragon Lady

You might not buy the thesis of Dominion: How the Christion Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland (A galloping tour of Christianity’s influence across the last 2,000 years, NYT Read more about Dominion