Book Reviews

‘I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just ...

The more ambitious student of How to Read a Novel could use it as a guide and primer to these many authors and their works, and attain thereby a truly profound understanding of literature.

Recently I watched—for the umpteenth time—the great 1955 Chuck Jones cartoon, “One Froggy Evening”. Like “One Froggy Evening”, Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman” is as hilarious as it is dismal.

Though it might all sound depressing, I found The Diving Bell to be inspiring. Many topics are explored, though two themes have struck me with special force.

Again, this is a painful read; and also lengthy. But for anyone who wants to know the whole story of the Holocaust—insofar as that is obtainable to mere readers of history—Martin Gilbert’s work is invaluable.

And while I do not pooh-pooh such things, they do not prompt me to damn the memory of Lincoln, a la “cancel culture”; especially when I take into account his struggle against a form of racism that was a thousand times more oppressive and evil.

This is the sort of book that a person could hold onto indefinitely, delve into repeatedly, and emerge with an arsenal of life- and sanity-saving insights.

Published in 1962, A Clockwork Orange might soon have been forgotten had it not been made into a celebrated and notorious Stanley Kubrick movie.

The gist of the ‘rime’ is the old man’s recollection of the guilty and fateful part he played in a doomed sea voyage.

Readers should not expect realism from this book. The Soviet and Nazi regimes served only as raw material for a work that is in large part fantastical.