“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” Bradbury wrote the novel “Fahrenheit 451” about a world that systematically burned books. In late December, I resolved to try to read more books than those I review for…
Book Review: ‘A Voluntary Crucifixion’
“I am an uneasy man, severe with myself, like all solitaries.” — Blaise Cendrars David J. MacKinnon’s “A Voluntary Crucifixion” is a book about memory and the elusive task of capturing in prose the people, places, and events that have gone into making an eventful life. MacKinnon is a lawyer qualified in both common law…
Inspector De Luca: Fighting for Truth Amid Madness
In corrupt or brutal regimes, the truth is often a crime. The Inspector De Luca detective novels of Carlo Lucarelli (born in 1960) serve as a reminder of this fact. Although fun and stylish examples of the police procedural genre, these slim books are fictional examples of the eternal morality of justice and how often…
How a Lost Manuscript Revealed the First Poets of Italian Literature
Imagine a world where we knew the name of Homer, but the poetry of “The Odyssey” was lost to us. That was the world of the early Italian Renaissance during the second half of the 15th century. Many people knew the names of some early poets of Italian literature—those who were active during the 13th…
The Journey to Understand Love Can Begin Young
“We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey,” wrote American educator and businessman Stephen Covey. There cannot be a more important lesson to teach our children. First, of course, children need to understand the power of love. One of Aesop’s Fables makes this very point: The…
A Looking Glass for Our Time: Lessons From the 200-Year-Old Novel ‘Ivanhoe’
Late last year, in separate conversations with three friends, I realized how slack I had grown in the reading of books. I read more than the average person. I’ve written weekly book reviews for the Smoky Mountain News for over 20 years, and I daily speed through a dozen or more articles online. But compared…
Landscapes, Legends, and Literature
A sense of place affects us throughout our lives—or at least it should. Think of walking on a sunny warm day, vivid in its optimism, and then seeing someone skulking down an alley—furtive darkness amongst the light. Does a story begin to form in the recesses of your mind? Or were you so engrossed in…
Never Say Die: Lessons From Michael Walsh’s ‘Last Stands’
Throughout history, men with their backs to the wall have time and again fought against overwhelming odds rather than surrender to their enemies. Why do they die battling to the last? What force drives them to fight on with rocks and fists after the blades of their swords are broken or their rifles are empty…
Book Review: ‘Mob Rule’: Is This Our Future?
“The two most dangerous things in the world today are sincere ignorance and conscious stupidity,” Dr. Martin Luther King once said. This statement has never been truer. As I write this article, Americans are facing an overwhelming flood of Marxist ideas and policies in our country, which is now a shell of what it once…
More Dante Now, Please! (Part 4): The Road of Repentance
This is the fourth and final article in this particular Dante series. We remember that we read Dante because he addresses the big questions of truth and reality, and we saw how in Hell the issue of free will is of paramount importance. Subsequently, we discovered that although Purgatory and Hell seem similar in that…
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