It’s actually one of the most autobiographical works that Bellow wrote. Not only in the sense of being based on the facts of his life, but in that he really draws on his own childhood, on his own use of Yiddish. Bellow was one of the best Yiddish speakers I ever met in my life...
There are a handful of books on this list that I picked up when I thought I was going to Russia and this was the first that I chose to read. It’s a short novel that highlights life in Leningrad during WWII, I’m glad I read it even in that trip got diverted to Portugal. Russka...
InThink Like a Freak, Levitt and Dubner wrote of several reasons why some incentives or schemes, even by smart and well-meaning people, backfire so badly. Their second reason was that “It’s easy to envision you’d change the behavior of people who think just like you, but the people ...
"The reason I wrote the book—which is called Providence Lost: The Rise and Fall of Cromwell’s Protectorate—is because the period has relatively little purchase with the wider public unlike, say, the Tudors or the Victorians or the Normans. That situation is particularly puzzling because there...
“I have information that by March 5 there won’t be any Jews left in Berlin!” According to “My Underground Life in Berlin,” a memoir she wrote with the help of her daughter, Ida Gassenheimer was advised by a sympathetic Aryan doctor to take the name of an Aryan German woman he ...
Yet there were some who could see exactly what was happening and going to happen. Joseph Roth, whoseRadetzkymarschison my list of the Ten Greatest German Novels, got on the next train to Paris as soon as he heard the news that Hitler was the newReichskanzler. As he wrote to his his ...
As Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy later wrote in his book The Unnatural History of the Nanny,“She manages to create, out of what must have been numerically a tiny proportion of her childhood months, the illusion that she had a perfect, radiant, sunny Edwardian girlhood.” A bit of Dorothy Julia...
‘The explosion knocked Hemingway unconscious, killed an Italian soldier and blew the legs off another. What happened next has been debated for some time.' In a letter to Hemingway's father, Ted Brumback, one of Ernest's fellow ambulance drivers, wrote that despite over 200 pieces of ...
“I didn’t, and I don’t, believe Daisy Ashford in spite of Swinnerton’s testimony and that of other ‘witnesses.’” he once wrote. But Lardner did more than express his doubts about The Young Visiters, he rewrote it. Or rather, he wrote a parody of it, called The Young Immi...
wrote Chesterton, he discovers that the Church is much larger inside than it is outside. Perhaps a more humble Time Lord might just come to acknowledge the Lord of Time and Eternity. Or at least not jeer. “The universe is,” after all, “big. It’s vast and complicated, and ridiculou...