Category: Book Reviews

  • Culture Corner

    —

    by

    Book Review: A Manuscript of Ashes, by Antonio Muñoz Molina By Bernie Langs When the book A Manuscript of Ashes by Antonio Muñoz Molina arrived in the mail in a glorious hardcover edition, I knew that this unexpected present from my brother would become a special read. After all, my brother has the best literary…

  • Culture Corner

    —

    by

    Book Review: My Struggle Book 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard By Bernie Langs For several months I had heard chatter about an extraordinary set of books written by an eccentric Norwegian chronicling his life in the minutest detail. There was even one nighttime commute home on New Jersey Transit where I sat and watched a…

  • The Pursuit of Vocation

    —

    by

    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

    —

    by

    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

    —

    by

    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

    —

    by

    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

    —

    by

    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

    —

    by

    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

    —

    by

    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)

    —

    by

    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…