Category: Book Reviews

  • Quarantine Reads

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    Emma Garst Quarantine is a wonderful time to get caught up on your “to be read” stack. However, some of us have felt culturally adrift since the shutdown in New York, wanting to take the opportunity to engage with good stories but feeling dissatisfied with what’s on the shelf. Here, I go through some book…

  • Quarantine Don’t Reads

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    Jennifer Einstein My brother, apparently, has become a baker. The girl who sat two rows behind me in second grade just planted her first veggie garden. The first alto in my high school Concert Choir now makes soap. And Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine. What, exactly, is wrong with just curling up with…

  • Review: Mama’s Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves

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    Frans de Waal W.W. Norton and Company, March 12, 2019 326 pages Hardback, $15.00   Yuriria Vazquez Can you imagine your human life without emotions? In other words, can you imagine yourself not feeling any joy, sadness, fear, anger, empathy, pleasure, or excitement? Most likely, our social world would vanish, and we might not survive…

  • Review: Einstein’s Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable

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    Seth Fletcher Ecco/HarperCollins, October 9, 2018 288 pages Hardback, $27.00   Emma Garst   What if the speed of light was 25 miles per hour? What if we lived in “Flatland”, a world of two dimensions? What if you fell into a black hole? There is a whole genre of books dedicated to probing these…

  • Book Review – Eye of the Shoal: A Fishwatcher’s Guide to Life, the Ocean and Everything

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    Emma Garst Eye of the Shoal: A Fishwatcher’s Guide to Life, the Ocean and Everything Helen Scales Bloomsbury Sigma, 2018 320 pages Hardback, $27.00 Consider the Barreleye, a deep-sea fish named for its two long, cylindrical eyes pointed directly upwards towards the water’s surface. These googly eyes are covered by a clear, membranous dome, giving…

  • Culture Corner – The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

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      Bernie Langs The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Julian Jaynes Houghton Mifflin, 1990; originally published in 1976 491 pages Paperback, $15.00     Two cylinder seals with modern impressions; top: Weather god on a lion dragon, Northern Mesopotamia, Mitannian period, mid-2nd millennium B.C.; bottom: Worshiper and a god with…

  • Culture Corner

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    Bernie Langs “Truth” in Painting Getting to a ‘core essence’ in a mystic or revelatory sense can be as elusive as tracing the path of an electron or photon, famously described as both particle and wave. The arts can be utilized as a conduit to higher states of consciousness. In music, the drone of an…

  • Culture Corner

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    Landscape Into Art: Thoughts on the book Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (by Christopher S. Wood), and the film The Revenant (directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu) Bernie Langs Caution: spoilers ahead! The inspired ideas and emotions one experiences when taking in the sights of nature, reading about the subject, or seeing a film…

  • Culture Corner

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    Book Review: Sudden Death: A Novel, by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer By Bernie Langs I often view the study of European history as a lesson in arbitrarily defined epochs populated by individuals lost in a haze of their own coping mechanisms, against the ingrained, systematic, and what they felt at the time to…

  • CULTURE CORNER

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    Learning Lessons from Multi-Volume Series By Bernie Langs There is no challenge in reading more rigorous than the study, over several years, of a series of books by a single author on one subject. From about 1983 through the late 1990s, I read four series, two of which I did not complete and two of…