“There are no other Everglades in the world.” With that sentence begins one of the greatest books in environmental history. Highly recommended by Professor Klingle, this book is largely credited with the creation of a national park dear to my heart. I am from Southwest Florida and live within half an hour’s drive from the …
I am currently in the midst of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It is fast-paced for such a fat book –and, therefore, it is hard to put down: it is often dialogue based and the dialogue is brisk. The opposite two protagonists dominate the text: the one, infinitely already developed and self-contained, …
This book, a New York Times #1 Bestseller, is a travel-lover’s dream. It lists and describes 1,000 different places around the world that are “the best the world has to offer.” This is a perfect book for those who need inspiration for travels over the summer, or for those who are stuck at home and …
Stone Butch Blues is one of those books that came out when I was in college that people talked about so much, I thought I had read it. This winter over lunch with a student I realized that I had confused it with another book and had indeed not read it. It was time. Over …
Antjie Krog is a South African poet and journalist who earned international renown for her coverage of South African’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as reported in her first book, Country of My Skull. In her new book, Begging to be Black, Krog combines fictional, philosophical and historical writing, a fascinating mixture of literary genres that …
“Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.” “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same …
A narrow and moralistic view of morals is responsible for the failure to recognize that all the aims and values which are desirable in education are themselves moral. Discipline, natural development, culture, social efficiency, are moral traits—marks of a person who is a worthy member of that society which it is the business of education …
“But now I see that I am trying to classify all the prisoners into categories; that, however, is not really possible. Reality is infinitely various when compared to the deductions of abstract thought, even those that are most cunning, and it will not tolerate rigid, hard-and-fast distinctions. Reality strives for diversification. We too had our …
“For a poem to coalesce…there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality that is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of the mind is needed – freedom…to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that …the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if …
When I read your call, I knew at once that I wanted to send in something. But I’ll be honest with you, I found it hard to choose just one book! There are so many I could have mentioned. But after thinking some more, I decided that it was Walden by Henry David Thoreau that …