Contributions by:
John G. Rodwan, Jr
Review of Graham Greene: A Life in Letters, edited by Richard Greene, W.W. Norton & Company, 2008 Graham Greene’s life was not half over when he summed it up as “useless and sometimes miserable, but bizarre and on the whole not boring.” As an officer in the British Secret Intelligence Service, he offered that account…
Read Full Article...George Orwell’s conviction that prose should be as clear as a window pane would have made no sense to many earlier political writers. So Ralph Lerner suggests in Playing the Fool: Subversive Laughter in Troubled Times. Several prominent authors of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries intentionally opted for opacity and complexity instead of clarity…
Read Full Article...Arthur Koestler, Individualist Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic New York: Random House, 2009. Arthur Koestler authored dozens of books but one in particular provides the main reason to pay attention to him. Even if he cannot be seen as a reliably prescient and stalwart opponent of the twentieth…
Read Full Article...Christopher Hitchens publicly courted posterity’s verdict and repeatedly stated the standard by which he sought to be judged. Introducing Arguably, the essay collection that appeared a few months before his death in December 2011, he notes that in a 1988 book, Prepared for the Worst, he’d “annexed a thought of Nadine Gordimer’s, to the effect…
Read Full Article...Books Reviewed in this Essay: Gregory D. Summer, Unstuck in Time: A Journey through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels (Seven Stories Press, 2011). Charles J. Shields, And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Henry Holt and Company, 2011). Tom McCartan, Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (Melville House, 2011). “What are…
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