Open any form of news media and there are sacred texts everywhere. Republican frontrunners quote Bible verses, pundits debate the role of the Quran in Middle Eastern politics, and in the arts and entertainment section, one book always hovers over the Harry Potters and John Grishams as the number one
At first glance, being a sixteenth-century lord doesn’t sound half bad—live in a castle, commission vast paintings and sculptures, and occasionally cast a vote to elect a Holy Roman Emperor. Easy, right? Wrong. In The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation, historian Steven Ozment
What does it mean to be a prophet? In his new biography Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet, Donald Weinstein gives us one answer to this question, tracing the story of religious visionary Girolamo Savonarola from his early loss of faith in society to his later attempts
Sarah Underwood— ABC’s series Pan Am, which premiered last fall, follows several beautiful airline stewardesses from the 1960s whose careers are filled with enough to drama to crash a plane. The stewardesses’ lives, which have repeatedly been called “glamorous” by reviewers, create a good platform for addressing contemporary social issues.
Following his “Eminent Biography” post on his new book, Mary I: England’s Catholic Queen, presenting a striking re-characterization of this often misunderstood monarch, John Edwards now writes on his own research experiences and how he came to carefully retell her life. John Edwards— Anyone who tackles a biography of
Follow @yaleSCIbooks In his television series Cosmos, whose Emmy-award winning co-creator served as one of the directors of the new film Journey of the Universe, astronomer Carl Sagan declared, “We are all stardust.” The sentiment was already a familiar one, for in Joni Mitchell’s famous 1970 song “Woodstock,” she too
Follow @yaleSCIbooks The newest 3@2 Interview brings Terry Lecturers Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel R. Primack, authors of The New Universe and the Human Future, to discuss the new scientific picture of the universe and its meaning for our lives, societies, and long-term future as a species. Yale University
On November 17, 1558, Queen Mary I of England died in the midst of her restoration of Catholicism. The glorious reign of her succeeding half-sister Elizabeth and the permanent installation of Protestantism as the religion of the Church of England has left this first reigning English queen with a certain
Speaking of all the revolutionary action going around—Trotsky, anarchy, Wall Street—Emma Goldman seems to have a found a perfect moment to surface as she does in Vivian Gornick’s new Jewish Lives biography, Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life. A book-based essay that Gornick has written for The Jewish