Wednesday January 27, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Wednesday January 27, 2010)
(1)- AMERICAN BIOETHICS -- Whether bioethics has achieved its goal is the urgent question at the core of this useful book, co-authored by Renée C. Fox, a highly distinguished sociologist, and Judith P. Swazey, a respected historian of medicine.

(2)- ORWELL'S DIARIES -- Handsomely produced, illustrated with Orwell’s own pencil sketches and footnoted with Davison’s customary élan, this latest wave in the repackager’s tide invites two questions. Why did Orwell write diaries?

(3)- FRAGMENTED NOVEL -- Following the international success of Lolita that made him financially independent, Vladimir Nabokov gave up his professorial post at Cornell and settled in Montreux, Switzerland, where he wrote his later novels.

(4)- JOAN OF ARC -- While it was not altogether uncommon for teenage peasant girls in the late Middle Ages to have religious visions, it was rather more unusual for them to advise kings and lead armies into battle.

(5)- POLITICS IN INDIA -- The pluralism and diversity that has defined spiritual life on the Indian subcontinent for centuries continues to transcend the divisive politics of religion and preserve the possibilities of coexistence.

(6)- INTELLIGENCE?? -- The members of our intelligence community will protest that simplifying the structure of the intelligence community is impossible—echoing the protests of auto workers, until bankruptcy forced their hand.

(7)- LANGUAGE -- We know what’s considered “good writing” in our own country. We grow up immersed in the cadences and sentence structure of language we were born into, so we think, “That’s probably what every country considers good writing.”

(8)- VAN GOGH – Vincent Van Gogh produced about 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings and sketches. He often painted quickly, almost feverishly, once writing that "the emotions are so strong that one works without knowing one works."

(9)- NEW BOOK -- The Professor is newly published and I’m not sure which is more surprising: the candid disclosures about the author's love life or the sparkling and witty prose, which one does not expect from a professor of literature.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

ENDIT