A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin & Faith by John Rawls

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A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin & Faith by John Rawls

John Rawls, author of A Theory of Justice, was perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.  As an undergraduate at Princeton in 1942, he submitted A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An Interpretation Based on the Concept of Community as his senior thesis. Decades later, Professor Eric Gregory of the Princeton religion department found this thesis in the Princeton Library, and now New York University Law professor Thomas Nagel has edited it into a book.

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Byron in Love by Edna O'Brien

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Byron in Love by Edna O'Brien

When Dr. Ireland, Dean of Westminster Abbey, was asked by the late poet’s friends about the possibility of Lord Byron taking up a place in Poet’s Corner, they were sternly told, “Carry the body away and say as little about it as possible.” If all would-by Byron biographers had followed that sound advice since his death in 1824, the world would have been spared a great quivering mass of twaddle. . .

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Before I Lose My Style by Mike Kaspar

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Before I Lose My Style by Mike Kaspar

Contemporary gay fiction can be so much of a type that readers searching for quality are naturally skittish.  A half-naked male body on the cover? The elevation of senseless bed-hopping into a lifestyle? The Devil Wears Product Placement gone amok? The slightest thing can send us fleeing back to Edmund White.

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An Innocent Client  by Scott Pratt

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An Innocent Client  by Scott Pratt

The incredible profusion in the last fifteen years of TV shows, movies, and books about lawyers has not, miraculously, glutted the market;  readers’ fascination with the American legal system seems bottomless, which is certainly good news for anybody trying to break into that market.

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Black and White and Dead All Over by John Darnton

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Black and White and Dead All Over by John Darnton

Fairly ominous, when a book’s very title is a cliché, a pun, or a play on words. More ominous still when it’s all three, as in John Darnton’s new novel Black and White and Dead All Over, in which the ailing print newspaper trade forms the backdrop for a series of murders. In the newsroom of the New York Globe, an editor is found dead, and Smart, Ambitious Female Detective and Crusty, Righteous Guy Reporter team up to find the killer. 

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A Buffalo in the House, The Extraordinary story of Charlie and His Family by R. D. Rosen

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A Buffalo in the House, The Extraordinary story of Charlie and His Family by R. D. Rosen

R.D. Rosen’s entertaining and enormously moving A Buffalo in the House, the story of how Veryl Goodnight and her husband Roger Brooks adopted a buffalo calf, named him Charlie, and made him a member of their bustling Santa Fe home. Charlie grows up (very quickly – two pounds a day!) to display a quiet good humor that is neither human nor canine nor feline but distinctly his own. . .

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Absent Friends: It wasn't what he wanted

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Absent Friends: It wasn't what he wanted

As Charles Homer Haskins pointed out in his humbly durable masterpiece The Renaissance of the 12th Century, the Dark Ages weren’t dark at all. Fiercely cold most of the time (due to a bout of climate change), but not dark in the sense of shuttered. Beknighted, but not benighted.

The great scholar John Addington Symonds (whose absence from bookstore shelves bloody well qualifies him for honoring here in Absent Friends, somewhere down the line) put it very prettily when he observed that any age without Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael must necessarily seem dark. The ostentatious showboating of the Italian Renaissance is the problem in a nutshell when it comes to thinking about the innocent ages that come before.

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A Tiny and Swattable Mind

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A Tiny and Swattable Mind

In Thornton Wilder’s powerful and subversive masterpiece Our Town, Mrs. Gibbs of provincial little Grover’s Corners holds forth on the wider world: “It seems to me,” she says, “once in your life, before you die, you ought to see a country where they don‘t speak any English and they don‘t even want to.” The line is delivered with just the slightest undertone of incredulity, of disbelief that such a place could really exist.         
 
If she could get past the dozens of entirely spurious mathematical equations and the apparently requisite acid-trip visuals, Mrs. Gibbs would feel right at home in Douglas Hofstadter’s new book, I Am a Strange Loop. Certainly the book’s tone of unquestioning self-satisfaction would help her along.

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Childe Harold's Children

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Childe Harold's Children

F. Scott Fitzgerald could never quite get over his youth. He had managed so fully to take part in its opportunities that everything in adulthood savored of anticlimax. From his first days at Princeton—“the best country club in the world”—to the success of his first novel, This Side of Paradise, he experienced everything that custom entitles young people to experience, no matter how stupid or ridiculous it may be.  

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The Poison Tree

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The Poison Tree

The hardest thing about watching Norman Mailer reprise his public role as a loudmouthed buffoon is seeing the damage his performance has done to his newest novel, The Castle in the Forest. Mailer has been taking the stage in this part for, it is hard to believe, sixty years, since the publication of The Naked and the Dead in 1948. For sixty years he’s been bullying his way to the front of the proscenium and bellowing forth one self-indulgent diatribe after another. For sixty years he’s been picking fights and manufacturing front-page vendettas, refusing to allow a single cultural phenomenon to pass without weighing in, in terms sufficiently coarse and supercilious to somehow make every spectacle in part about him—and rather conveniently timing these irruptions to coincide with the publication of a new book.

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Absent Friends: Nicholas Monsarrat

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Absent Friends: Nicholas Monsarrat

A debatably wise man once said that the best-seller was a gilded tomb for a mediocre talent. As with all easy aphorisms, it’s only 90 percent true. 
 
The riddle is solved one of two ways: either the writer of the best-seller stumbled blindly upon a winning formula that one time only, or the writer always knew what they were doing and some combination of chance and synergy caused that one book to take flight.         

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Shall we in that great night rejoice?

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Shall we in that great night rejoice?

‘But hush, for I have lost the theme. . .'

A party of young people takes advantage of a beautiful blue-sky spring afternoon to have a picnic. The men are all trim and waistcoated, the women wear their hair in shapely turrets, with long white gloves on their hands. Baskets of fruit, an ice-bucket filled with bottles of sweet wine, and platters of coldcuts weight the picnic blanket. The air is clear and the nearby trees are gently swaying. The talk is quicksilver, invigorating.

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