Individuals, not governments, should shape Internet’s future The two traits that have always distinguished the American character are a fierce insistence on personal liberty and “Yankee ingenuity.” Both live on brightly in the Internet, the winning future of communications and commerce. Forget Al Gore’s industrial era image of “the information superhighway,” conjuring up visions of interactive televisions and a big 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 ›
Walter Hooper’s 1991 essay “C.S. Lewis: The Man and His Thought” is largely a collection of Hooper’s anecdotes old and new. “…I became ‘The Soldier Who Had Heard from C.S. Lewis’ ….” After ringing the doorbell of the Kilns, “My heart was beating so hard I had to lean against the wall.” “It was this joke [concerning Lewis’s bathroom], as Read More ›
More on Lewis on Dante On 22 November 1931 C.S. Lewis wrote to Warren: “Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Hardie (another English don] comes and reads Dante with me, and every second Monday when the college literary society meets.” (Lewis also expressed his opinion of writers like Dante: “To read histories of literature, one would Read More ›