Musket Before the Ax: Howells and Ohio
Stories of Ohio by William Dean Howells. Belt Publishing, 2019. Paperback, 256 pages, $14.95. Reviewed by Jacob A. Bruggeman The year 1860 was a predictably good one for William Dean Howells, an up-and-coming man of letters from Ohio. In the four years prior, Howells...
An Elegy for Place and Time
On Homesickness: A Plea by Jesse Donaldson. Vandalia Press / West Virginia University Press, 2017. Paperback, 250 pages, $18. Reviewed by Jacob A. Bruggeman Robert Frost once wrote of a poem’s beginnings as “a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a...
The Doctor’s Mask, Removed
Counting Backwards: A Doctor’s Notes on Anesthesia by Henry Jay Przybylo, MD. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2017. Hardcover, 256 pages, $26. Reviewed by Jacob A. Bruggeman On occasion, one can come upon good books by coincidence. An offhand recommendation from a...
Surviving the Robot-Barons
The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines by Jay W. Richards. Crown Forum, 2018. Hardcover, 209 pages, $23. Reviewed by Jacob Bruggeman College graduates, young professionals, and people making mid-career transitions to other...
There are metaphorical hills on which I would be willing to die. The Oxford comma is one of them.
So easy to forget that the best way to educate yourself is to read great works of literature and philosophy, then talk about them. Bring back the salon!