As much as I love my New York Football Giants and enjoy NFL Football, I have to concede that this wonderful North American sport is not football, it is something else. Yes, there are punters and kickers in American football, but punts and kicks are secondary to throwing and catching and running the ball, and blocking and tackling your opponent. The vast majority of the players don’t ever touch the ball with their feet. In…
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What is it that really matters to us? Of course the particulars differ from person to person. But I’m inclined to believe we are more alike than different. There are commonalities among all persons, despite the fact we are perpetually at each other’s throats, and despite our diverse upbringings, during which we are forced to swallow cultural, political, and religious lies from Day 1. I have nothing against culture, politics, or religion. I am talking…
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BIG name for a book: The Return. Victoria Hislop’s second novel, following her popular debut, The Island. Books titled The Return share with The Iliad, Divine Comedy, and War and Peace a BIG thematic title that promises a BIG delivery. Such works are must-reads for any serious Book Being. Victoria Hislop was thinking BIG. Give her credit for that, but you also have to wonder what she was thinking… I do try to avoid clumsy…
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Love the song. Big hit by the American alternative rock band, REM, from their 1991 album, Out of Time. May seem strange coming from a man of faith, this love, someone who lost, then found his religion. I don’t mean “religion,” as in being “religious” in the way assorted self-described “spiritual” folks interpret it (as being a stultifying, perfunctory, impersonal, shallow, superstitious, law-driven, misguided, self-serving, man-made approach to faith), but in the true original sense…
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No, I didn’t come up with that title. Wish I had, though. David Shenk spent three years researching and writing The Genius in All of Us, and under different circumstances he may very well have listed me on his Acknowledgments page. But no… Shenk calculated that his book was composed at the feverish pace of eight words per hour. Shenk is no Kerouac (Jack, whose mercurial writing rendered On the Road in a smattering of…
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I’ve never been a big fan of the writing style of Joyce Carol Oates. At times her writing seems to me awkward, a bit uneven and unfinished. But her widely acclaimed 2004 novel, The Falls, has a strange, muscular power that drew me in and caused me to lose myself in the very mist rising from those rampaging waters. Niagara Falls has been known over the years to have a remarkable power to entrance, beguile,…
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One way to make friends with the very rich is to show everyone else that the very rich are victims. The way to accomplish this is by withholding pertinent information and by misleading those that are not very rich. In fiction, withholding necessary information from the reader and misleading him is self-destructive behavior by any author. Such an approach announces to the world that the author is a) grossly incompetent; b) a phony; c) a…
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Fyodor Dostoevsky wanted to write a story about a perfect man and show how that perfection jarred with the world. He created Prince Myshkin, a somewhat Christ-like figure, and placed him with less perfect persons in a complicated scenario populated by Russian aristocrats. You couldn’t help but love the gentle and humble prince, or hate him. Were you a truer person in his presence, or were you threatened by his purity? He graciously accepted being…
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The Kindle Wireless Reading Device, or eReader (also known as the Amazon Kindle), has undergone a rapid transformation in a short period of time. A Kindle eReader comparison will help those interested in this reading tool to distinguish between the various versions of this product. It seems that eReaders have been around for some time, but the original Kindle Wireless Reading Device was made available to the public as recently as November 2007. Apparently, Amazon…
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Ereaders? Where was I when the Areaders, Breaders, Creaders, and Dreaders of the world raised their ugly little heads? I have to admit I’ve become increasingly fond of technology, insofar as it allows me to see, understand, and know more of life and, consequently, how little of it I do see, understand, and know… the realization of which just makes me teeter like a happy drunk before the awesome Mystery and Bigness of Creation. But…
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