Category: Review
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Existentialism / Biography / Being in the World
By Walter Cummins Review of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (New York: Other Press, 2016) One reason Sarah Bakewell’s The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails is such an engaging read was her decision to organize her examination of philosophy around the lives of the central…
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Americans’ Anger / Poetry / Trump / Furies
Review of H.L. Hix, American Anger: An Evidentiary (Etruscan Press, 2016). “I’ve got a family to feed, a neighborhood to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, a principle to defend.” “I’ve got a family to feed, my honor to defend.” — H.L. Hix, American Anger These lines taken from separate poems in…
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Genesis Interpretation After Auerbach
Twenty-Three Ways (and Counting) of Looking at the Bible By Martin Green Review of Reading Genesis: Beginnings, edited by Beth Kissileff (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark, 2016) Beth Kissileff’s recent anthology Reading Genesis: Beginnings presents twenty-three ways of looking at the first book of the Hebrew Bible. Well, perhaps not twenty-three distinct ways of reading Scripture, but…
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Hélène Cixous’s Tomb(e)
Review of Tomb(e) by Hélène Cixous, translated by Laurent Milesi (Seagull Books, 2014). Distributed by The University of Chicago Press. By Walter Cummins What are we to make of prose like this? Never did I love so powerfully but for dreaming still and dreaming the Dream of Dreams, as if Love killed me in order…
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Not all books deserve review
By Theana Kastens and William Eaton {Click for pdf} At times book reviewers receive books that should not be reviewed at all because even bad publicity may prove “better” than no publicity. A reviewer might return such a book, largely unread, to the editor, saying, “Send me another. Leave this one alone.” But sometimes…
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The Future of Communication
The Visual Humanities and the Future of Communication By Maggie Sattler Review of Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production by Johanna Drucker (Harvard University Press, 2014) [print_link] [email_link] In “How E-Reading Threatens Learning in the Humanities,” a July 2014 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Naomi S. Baron, a professor of linguistics whose…
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Of Courtesans, Concubines, and Exemplary Women
Men’s ideas for women in another time and place By William Eaton, in conjunction with Heather Luciano Review of Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity: Gender and Social Change in China, 1000-1400 by Beverly Bossler (Harvard University Press, 2012) [print_link][email_link] “This book, the Introduction explains, “traces changing gender relations in China between the tenth and fourteenth…
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What Is Permitted—To People and Bonobos
The Sources of Morality By Walter Cummins Review of The Bonobo and the Atheist by Frans de Waal (W. W. Norton, 2013) [print_link] [email_link] Primatologist Frans de Waal in his book The Atheist and the Bonobo (W. W. Norton, 2013) uses bonobos to take on God, or more precisely those people who are convinced moral standards would not exist…
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All I Want is a Job!
By Moorel Bey Review of All I Want Is A Job! Unemployed Women Navigating the Public Workforce System by Mary Gatta (Stanford University Press, 2014) [print_link] [email_link] The Great Recession that began in 2007 has also been referred to as the “Great Mancession” due to the fact job loss was predominantly in male-dominated fields such…
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Porn in the Web
? What categorizes some things as art or marketing and others as pornography? What if we went beyond the “purely pornographic” and viewed marketing as a manipulation machine, seeking to both please and coerce consumers?
ZETEO 