Category: Book Reviews

  • The Pursuit of Vocation

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    By Peng Kate Gao Work is love made visible. −Kahlil Gibran Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his brilliantly written book The Happiness Hypothesis, summarized three ways that people generally view their work: a job, a career, or a calling. A job is what people do to earn money and to support their families. A career is…

  • Leaving the Lab, but Still Thinking Science

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    By Mayla Hsu Barbara Ehrenreich graduated from The Rockefeller University (RU), Class of 1968, but never worked as a scientist. Instead, she became a journalist, best known for Nickel and Dimed, in which she documented the hardship of life working at a series of low-wage jobs. She has written nineteen books and numerous articles, on…

  • Culture Corner

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    An Interview with Richard Torregrossa, Author of Terminal Life: A Suited Hero Novel and Cary Grant: A Celebration of Style By Bernie Langs  Several years ago, I was checking the blurbs of recommended articles and reviews indexed by the Arts & Letters Daily web site as I do every day. The site recommended a review…

  • Culture Corner – The “Exotic Foreign” of Wes Anderson and Haruki Murakami

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    By Bernie Langs There is much made in some classical and modern philosophies of the concept and ambiguity of what is termed “the other.” In addition, one can find obscure musings on the idea of “the stranger” from the pens of philosophers as far afield in time and thinking as Plato and Camus. I’ve been…

  • Culture Corner: book review “Seiobo There Below” by László Krasznahorkai

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    By Bernie Langs I would bet that it is safe to say that anyone reading these pages is more than busy in this life and that many of you who continue to read for pleasure are overwhelmed by the truth that there are “so many books and so little time.” You may also feel, as…

  • An interview with White Out: The secret life of Heroin author, Michael W. Clune, Ph.D

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    By Bernie Langs I did not know what to expect when I procured a copy of Michael W. Clune’s memoir, White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, after reading a blog review about the book in the New Yorker. I very quickly became engrossed in White Out, consumed by its tale of the author’s life…

  • Scientists Invade the Comics

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    By Jason Rothhauser This holiday season, two comic books that share one thing hard to find in today’s popular fiction: scientists are the stars of the show. One comic proposes an outrageous alternate history in which a cabal of real-world scientists use their public research as a cover for far more bizarre experiments, and the…

  • CULTURE DESK — Book reviews: Inferno, by Dan Brown & The Inferno of Dante (translated by Robert Pinsky)

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    by Bernie Langs When I heard that best-selling author Dan Brown had written a book centering around a mystery involving Dante’s Inferno, I came up with a scheme to read the original Inferno section of Dante Alighieri’s famous poem, Commedia (which later became known as “The Divine Comedy”), and compare the two works for Natural…

  • Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

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    by Jerry Melchor Read these two scenarios and note how you would answer the questions: 1) The Linda experiment: Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations. Which alternative…

  • Culture Desk Exhibition and Book Review The Artful Recluse: Painting, Poetry, and Politics in Seventeenth-Century China (at The Asia Society through June 2, 2013) Confucius: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning & The Doctrine of the Mean (translated with notes by James Legge)

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    by Bernie Langs When reading certain philosophers that are difficult to understand, those of us who were never formerly trained as students of the genre often ask, “Why am I putting myself through this?” But in the case of reading Confucius, I know why I put myself through the hard task of reading his works.…

  • In Our Good Books

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    The reading suggestions have been kindly provided by staff members of the downtown bookstore McNally Jackson. Fated by S.G. Browne From the acclaimed author of Breathers—an irreverent novel about fate, destiny, and the karmic consequences of getting involved with humans. Over the past few thousand years, Fabio has come to hate his job. As Fate,…

  • Culture Desk Book review: The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai Interview: George Szirtes (translator of The Melancholy of Resistance)

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    by Bernie Langs After years of feasting on nonfiction books, I find myself binging on works of fiction these days, and most recently, of all things, Hungarian prose. Having read the German W.G. Sebald and the Austrian Thomas Bernhard, who both write with no paragraph breaks, I was not taken aback when I realized that…