Law enforcement authorities in a number of American cities, including New York and Seattle, decided in the early 90’s to throw a half century of relativist theory out the window and try some common sense and practical experience for a change. Guess what they found? If you make law breakers responsible for their actions they will behave more responsibly. Most Read More ›
A recent press conference held by the NAACP and a group of angry white, female Army personnel at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland was a public relations breaktrhough. It had the intended effect of showing that over-zealous Army brass had pressured the women to make unfounded rape charges against a group of black male soldiers. But it also demonstrated how Read More ›
Oaxaca, Mexico–It is a distortion of politics that establishes separate categories for domestic and international affairs. In fact, the categories repeatedly merge. A good example is the current economic plight of Mexico and, concurrently, the legislation before Congress to restrict illegal and legal immigration. The interaction is profound. Mexico, like the United States and Canada (and several other countries, for Read More ›
This little book is intended to correct the popular impression that “progress and increasing complexity” are characteristics of life’s course on Earth. Progress has, in the twentieth century, already been punched silly; but paleontologists seem genuinely more complex than paramecia, a point that Gould concedes, if only for reasons of professional pride. His doubts arise whenever the twig of a trend Read More ›
In C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, released by Harper Collins in the fall of 1996, Walter Hooper abruptly reverses his claim that Lewis’s Grief Observed is fiction. (See pp. 194-201.) Without any explanation, he includes Grief in his autobiography section and vouches for its historical accuracy. Until now Hooper has always insisted that Grief is strictly imaginative and that Read More ›
Jane Langton is the successful author of a dozen breezy detective novels featuring an American academic named Homer Kelly. She illustrates them with her excellent drawings. The Dante Game (1991) tells about a new American School for Florentine Studies, where Kelly is teaching Dante. “Boston’s detective-turned-Harvard-professor is hard at work in Dante’s divine but deadly Florence.” Langton quotes frequently from Read More ›
In C.S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, careful readers find a few surprising inclusions and omissions. For example, Hooper tells about the Miramar Hotel in Boomemouth where the Tolkiens stayed on vacations, and lists it in his index -although it has nothing to do with Lewis. He gives an entire paragraph to the life of Fritz Gasch who married Lewis’s illustrator Read More ›
6. Rehabilitations and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). Essays on literature and education. Long unavailable except from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. In Xerographic edition. Contents:”Shelley, Dryden and Mr. Eliot,” ‘William Morris.” “The Idea of an ‘English School,”‘ “Our English Syllabus,” “High and Low Brows,” “The Alliterative Metre,” “Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A Semantic Nightmare,” “Variations In Shakespeare and Others.” Read More ›
Gordon Monson, The Los Angeles Times, 8 December 1992 Psychiatrists say compulsive liars one researcher estimates they account for up to 5% of the population suffer from a personality disorder that leads them not just to tell lies but to try to live those lies as well. “A lot of these people try to rewrite their personal history,” says Bryan Read More ›