“Cogito ergo sum” – commonly translated from the Latin as “I think, therefore I am” – is probably the most-quoted, if also least-understood, fragment of philosophy in the history of Western civilization.
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“AS A critic,” declares Harold Bloom, “I have learned to rely upon [Emerson’s] apprehension that our prayers are diseases of the will and our creeds diseases of the intellect.”
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THREE years ago, we were invited to see the story of William Tecumseh Sherman’s march to the sea through the eyes of novelist
E.L. Doctorow in “The March,” a series of fictional (or fictionalized) vignettes.
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The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
A Novel
David Wroblewski
Ecco: 566 pp., $25.95
TO CALL “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” a tale of a boy and his dog would be accurate, but it is hardly sufficient.
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AT 166 pages, “The Book of Getting Even” is a mortar shot of a novel – the trajectory is steep, the narrative moves at tremendous velocity and the book ends with a bang.
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The Open Road
The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
Pico Iyer
Alfred
A. Knopf: 278 pp., $24
“THE pope?”
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The End of the Jews
A Novel
Adam Mansbach
Spiegel
& Grau: 310 pp., $23.95
TWO Tristans figure in “The End of the Jews,” one the grandfather of the other, both of them writers.
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To the list of clerical detectives in the mystery genre, ranging
from Father Brown to the rabbi who slept late on Friday, we must now
add the wimpled and robed figure of Sister Ria, the intrepid
Benedictine nun who serves as the heroine of “Souls of Angels” by
Thomas Eidson.
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Dragon Bone Hill, a site in the western hills outside Beijing, is
so named because prehistoric fossils found there were thought to be
the remains of dragons.
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WHEN Louis Auchincloss describes the fictional New England private
school that is the focus of his new book as “a stalwart fortress
against the creeping vulgarity of the day,” he might be describing
his own elevated rank in American letters.
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