In the search for truth, no fact is ever truly useless. Obtaining fact, not factoid, is crucial, because the public usually only hears one tiny facet of any major issue, Timothy Garton Ash argues in Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name.
Joan of Arc and Odysseus have more in common than one might think. Not only that, but since the former conversed with saints and the latter with goddesses, today would today recommend them to a shrink. According to Charles Hill’s Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, both figures exist in literary works that capably demonstrate statecraft.
Leading Proust scholar William C. Carter has started a website “devoted to studying and celebrating the life and works of Marcel Proust” that offers both a wealth of literary resources and an online course. Along with University of Alabama at Birmingham student Nicolas D. Drogoul, Carter has launched Proust Ink
If a group of a scientist’s colleagues started an entire website to warn the world, especially the scientific community, about “the flaws in his work” before the scientist even published a book, you might be at least a little skeptical when his book was finally published. Howard Friel has finally done what should have been done a decade ago, as he points out, in the publishing house: fact-checking. In The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming, all Friel has to do is comb through the endnotes and compare them with their sources to find gaping holes more terrifying than a velociraptor.
The importance of translation in bringing new books and ideas into English is crucial. Although no one has declared a universal language since Louis XIV, the dominance of English in international commerce, media, and even academia is impossible to ignore. Yet merely an estimated three percent of the hundreds of
Ali Ahmad Said Esber is better known to the Arabic world as Adonis, though he is only beginning his entrance into the Anglo world. Syrian-born and currently living in Paris, Adonis is, and has been for decades, one of the most popular modern poets writing in Arabic. His twenty volumes
If you drive down a certain series of winding roads in Bethany, CT, you will come upon a classic mailbox stamped with very Bauhausian numerals, marking the entrance to 88 Beacon Road, the home of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Housed in a quietly beautiful building designed by architect
Without meaning to, Rika Lesser has assumed the title of sole English translator of Göran Sonnevi’s poetry. She was not even interested in the work until she heard the poems from his own mouth, noting, “[H]earing Sonnevi read aloud utterly changed my view of his work. I would not have
Dr. Richard Frank— I recently met a patient who asked me to be his oncologist, requesting a change from his present oncologist. I knew that his oncologist was a skilled and kind physician so I wondered why. “Why would you like me to be your doctor now?” I asked. “Because
Yesterday on NPR’s Morning Edition, Susan Stamberg interviewed Sarah Greenough on her new book of letter correspondence: My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915-1933. Unlike new 21st-century ways of sending love notes such as texts and Facebook messages, which seem only to escalate