Clint Eastwood: Il mito, le donne, la frontiera
20/03/2024
Recensione della biografia “Spettri di Clint, ovvero L’America del mito nell’opera di Eastwood”, di Mariuccia Ciotta e Roberto Silvestri
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Book reviews
The West and the Permanent Enemy: Elena Basile’s Book is in Tune with the Pope’s Stance
14/03/2024
Elena Basile’s book critiques Western handling of global conflicts, urging peace and insight into the dynamics of a multipolar world.
African Dreaming: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple | by Richard Grenier
07/12/2023
Richard Grenier reviews Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” probing historical inaccuracies, political views, and the controversial depiction of Africa
Slavery was the gold of Rome
03/12/2023
Luciano Canfora’s new book shows how war was used by ancient societies to secure resources.
Mary McCarthy on Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism”
08/03/2023
Dear Hannah: I’ve read your book The Origins of Totalitarianism, absorbed, for the past two weeks. It seems to me a truly extraordinary piece of work, an advance in human thought of, at the very least, a decade, and also engrossing and fascinating in the way that a novel is.
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
11/01/2021
America, John Perkins tells us, is a land of innocents, and all we must do to reclaim our purity is to buy a hybrid or write our Congressman. Perkins’s account is neither honest, nor a sound analysis of global world order.
The Name of the Rose: Murders in a Medieval Monastery
06/01/2021
Eco’s novel is not only an entertaining narrative of a murder investigation in a monastery in 1327. It is also a chronicle of the 14th century’s religious wars, a history of monastic orders and a compendium of heretical movements.
Guido Morselli: Dissipatio H.G.
29/12/2020
The protagonist of this prophetic last work of Guido Morselli is the sole survivor of the human race (H.G. of the title, which is taken from a Latin translation of the neo-Platonic philosopher Iamblichus, stands for humani generis) who ironically has returned to the world after attempting an elaborate mode of suicide in a subterranean lake inside a mountain.
Walter Tevis: The Queen’s Gambit
28/12/2020
“The Queen’s Gambit” by Walter Tevis is an inspirational novel for intellectuals. It concerns the ever-more-successful career of Beth Harmon, from her early days in the Methuen Home orphanage, an institution as garishly oppressive as Dotheboys Hall in Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby,” to her still-youthful triumph over the Russian grandmaster of chess, Vasily Borgov.
Pauline Kael: The Citizen Kane Book
04/12/2020
Miss Kael’s view of Citizen Kane is in keeping with what she has written before. It is, she says, a ‘shallow masterpiece’. That is to say, she concedes what is undeniable, the power of the film, but denies it profundity because its psychology is unconvincing.
BOOK REVIEW: “THE GOOD SHEPHERD” BY C. S. FORESTER
10/07/2020
C. S. Forester has two skills which are admirably blended in “The Good Shepherd,” a first-rate novel of World War II. He is able to make us identify ourselves with the tensions and the loneliness of man, this time a man in command of many men. He also is able to make us see and hear and feel action, especially when writing of ships and the sea, so vividly that a powerful sense of participation is inevitable.
Book Review: The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror
27/06/2020
This great writer of horror presents a philosophy to curl your hair. It should force you to re-examine the roots of everything that you believe and offer you a freedom you are not likely to find anywhere else.
Bertrand Russell: Symptoms of George Orwell’s 1984
14/12/2019
Having soothed themselves with these comfortable falsehoods, people proceeded on their way to make Orwell’s prognostications come true. Bit by bit, and step by step, the world has been marching toward the realization of Orwell’s nightmares; but because the march has been gradual, people have not realized how far it has taken them on this fatal road.
Joseph Stiglitz: Globalization and its Discontents
11/01/2017
Joseph Stiglitz’s Globalization and its Discontents has sparked a major critical response since its publication in that it appears to encapsulate widespread doubts about globalization processes and their governance.
George Orwell’s Review of “WE” by E. I. Zamyatin
26/09/2016
The first thing anyone would notice about “We” is the fact – never pointed out, I believe – that Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” must be partly derived from it.
Protected: Anthony Burgess Reviews Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”
20/07/2016
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.