A couple days ago, the New York Times ran a piece with the self-explanatory title, “In Tough Times, the Humanities Must Justify Their Worth.”
Though throughout my life I’ve been told that the study of humanities was in trouble, during my college time (late 80s-early 90s), I had the feeling that here was an overabundance of people, like [...]

It’s often said that Hollywood stars experience death long before its physical onset. How often do we hear that some great star of the golden age has died, only to be surprised that they had been alive all this time.
It can apply to other fields, of course, and it’s particularly striking when the person [...]

As we’re halfway through Advent, I have something of a Yuletide puzzle for you. Christmas has an enormous cultural impact on society, one that’s far from limited to those who’ve been brought up in the Christian tradition, and I was thinking recently about the ways in which that cultural impact manifests itself.
Music has always [...]

Over at Booklist’s Likely Stories, Keir Graff looks into the sadly declining link between booze and writers by checking out a NY Post article by Justin Rocket Silverman on the subject. Says Keir,
For answers, [Silverman] asks a bunch of people that I don’t really want answering the question, with the exception of Ernest Hemingway’s grandson, [...]

Catch 11 was one of the many titles considered by Joseph Heller for the book that eventually introduced the phrase Catch 22 into the English language (I wonder, what phrase was used previously for a lose-lose situation?). Catch 11 was dropped because of its similarity to the film, Ocean’s 11, which had just been [...]

The BBC showed a documentary last night about the Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami. It wasn’t a great film and didn’t do much to convey why Murakami’s writing is so popular around the world. But it did tell me something I didn’t know about Murakami and that’s how reclusive he is. Perhaps reclusive [...]

News that Vladimir Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, plans to publish his dad’s last novel (unfinished before the great man’s death) raises for me the question: Given how hard it is to publish while alive, should one publish when dead?
According to the Guardian, Dmitri Nabokov has wrestled with the pros and cons of releasing his father’s unfinished [...]

In between diapers, I ran across an interesting Yahoo news piece on the results of a poll to learn the most favorite book(s) in America. Unsurprisingly, number one among all demographic groups was the Bible, but it’s when we get to number two that things become more complicated:
Men chose J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and [...]

Charleston Heston’s death at 85 has brought a flood of plaudits for his movie roles as Moses, Michelangelo, and Ben-Hur. There was something about Heston’s manner or his era that made him well-suited to play icons. His lesser known historical roles included Andrew Jackson (twice) in ‘The President’s Lady’ and ‘The Buccaneer’, and Rodrigo Diaz de [...]

I just had a brief email exchange with Tina Davis, the owner of independent Oregon bookstore, Camalli Book Company. Camalli has its own blog, which you’ll find HERE and they were kind enough to mention Who is Conrad Hirst? in their Spring news. As Tina rightly pointed out, “we indies are in quite [...]

My review of Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 has just gone up over at Writers Are Readers - you can read it HERE. The book doesn’t come out in the US until the end of April so for those who don’t know, it’s a massively hyped debut (huge deals, great publisher excitement, etc.) about [...]

My apologies for turning this blog into a mutual admiration society, so I’ll be brief, and simply say that I’ve just read an advanced copy of Olen’s The Tourist, and consider it one of his best books to date. (Although I am a big fan of The Confession.) Well done, Olen. It is clear why [...]

The danger of writing lists is that you upset people with both what you include and what you don’t (as The Daily Telegraph discovered the other week with it’s 50 crime writers to read before you die). But I like the fact that lists also encourage us to think, and hopefully spur on a [...]

A very unfortunate PS to the post on Brad Renfro below. I’m sure everyone will have heard about the death of Heath Ledger at the age of 28.
Of course, Ledger’s most famous role to date was in Brokeback Mountain but you had a real sense that this was an actor whose most interesting work [...]

Here is my question for 2008: Is Western society becoming more violent?
In the aftermath of 9/11, with wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, and amid the security concerns that haunt us in airport check-in line-ups and even on the London underground, are we losing restraint, and are “official” acts of violence becoming acceptable and commonplace?
I [...]