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Recent Posts
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Category Archives: Tolstoy’s War and Peace
“White River Crossing”: Ian McGuire’s Terrific New Novel
I usually wince when a book comes out that is compared to any of Cormac McCarthy’s novels: It’s a literary Kiss of Death. He’s just too hard of an act to follow. But with The North Water, and now White River Crossing, Ian McGuire pulls it off. Continue reading
In the Country of "No Country for Old Men" and On the Trail of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian": What I Did for My Summer Vacation
So late July found me (and my family) in (mythical) Cormac McCarthy country, at the Three River Petroglyph site near Three Rivers, New Mexico, which is a cool (and hot) place to be. We camped there for three days, watching … Continue reading
O Gulag, My Gulag: On Daniel Beer's "The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars"
So I’m a sucker for Russian literature, and while I was recently reading a biography of Leo Tolstoy written by his daughter—Alexandra Tolstoy’s The Life of My Father (1953)—I had to set it down when I heard about this just-out … Continue reading
"The Americans": A New Reality TV Show Starring Melania and Donald
So FX has a series titled The Americans, now in Season Five, in which a pair of Soviet spies are masquerading as a married American couple. I’ve always liked the female lead, Keri Russell, who was in the charming indie … Continue reading
On Tolstoy's "War and Peace" and J.J. Abrams's "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," Or a Journey from the Sublime to the Ridiculous
So over the holidays I was holed up on a mountainside in Colorado reading Leo Tolstoy’s epic War and Peace (1869), which, at 1224 pages, is an undertaking. I felt compelled to read it as quickly as possible, lest the … Continue reading