March 27, 2000 (reported by Dr. Ralph Blair) The venue was the long, high ceilinged hall of the Harvard Club of New York City. The dark wood paneling reflected the glow of crimson shaded lamps throughout the room. Harvard and Oxford Alumni Associations sponsored the meeting. The speaker was Laurence Harwood, OBE, one of the Godsons of C. S. Lewis. Read More ›
In 1985 Vermont publisher Chelsea Green brought out the handsomely illustrated 80-page book The Man Who Planted Trees: The inspirational tale of a man who planted a forest, one acorn at a time by Jean Giono. It is so popular that it has been translated into a dozen languages; today the English version is available in hardcover, paperback, audiotape, and Read More ›
In mid-February 2000, President Clinton gave his first live online news interview a day ahead of a major White House meeting on computer security. Despite CNN’s screening of messages from the public, the following one slipped through, disguised to look as if it were a remark from President Clinton: “Personally, I would like to see more porn on the Internet.”A Read More ›
Edited by Joseph Pearce (Fount HarperCollins, 1999, 204 pp, pb) From “Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: An Interview with Walter Hooper” (Joseph Pearce, April 1998) When and where did you first meet Tolkien? I met Tolkien in the first or second week of January 1964. Before that, when I was with Lewis in his house, The Kilns, in the summer Read More ›
Paul Willis’s delightful article “The Wardrobe Wars” appeared in the Winter 1998-1999 Lamp-Post. (Willis is an English professor and writer at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA.) In his account of the friendly rivalry between Westmont and Wheaton about which one has the real wardrobe Lewis had in mind as the gateway to Narnia, he mentioned how Westmont was able Read More ›
When I recieved a gift copy of Looking Backward, the first thing I read was the claim on the back cover that it included the first study of Lewis’s “Ulster novel.” I wrote to the publisher, the Institute of Irish Studies, and requested the insertion of a note to correct that. After an exchange of correspondence, the following note was Read More ›
Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earthEdited by Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000) “The Lost Road, The Dark Tower, and The Notion Club Papers: Tolkien and Lewis’s Time Travel Triad”by John D. Rateliff According to John Rateliff, the genesis of The Dark Tower is recorded in a letter that J. R. R. Tolkien Read More ›
by Larry Gilman Larry Gilman has a doctorate in electrical engineering and a recent Master of Fine Arts degree. He says “I love Lewis, of course — he has always been a reliable spring of clean water, and when I was a teen he taught me almost single handedly what the words ‘intellectual honesty’ count for. I now re-read 4 Read More ›
C. S. Lewis: Essay Collection & Other Short Pieces HarperCollins, edited by Leslie Walmsley,894 pp, 135 selections, 25, about $39.25 U.S. The cover of this book shows the famous photo of C. S. Lewis with his cigarette erased. In her introduction Walmsley writes “For all this background information, as for so much else to do with the works of C. Read More ›
Anna and the King of Siam gave people the proper Victorian governesses and cruel Oriental potentates they wanted. This 1944 novel by Margaret Landon was promptly made into a film starring Rex Harrison and Irene Dunne. In 1951 the story opened on Broadway as a successful Rogers and Hammerstein musical comedy, and then it became a film starring Yul Brynner Read More ›