Books in Little
Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin, by Nicholas Ostler (Walker & Company, 382 pp., 2007) Writing in the seventh century, St. Isidore of Seville observed that “peoples have arisen from languages, not languages from peoples.” The history of the Latin language, as...Donald Davidson and the South’s Conservatism
From The Politics of Prudence Leviathan is a Hebrew word signifying “that which gathers itself in folds.” In the Old Testament, Leviathan is the great sea-beast: “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?” In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes—whom T.S. Eliot calls...
Hill’s Country
Contrary Country: A Chronicle of Vermont By Ralph Nading Hill. Rinehart & Company cloth, 1950 As a Vermont patriot first and academic second, I begin any professional volume by consulting the index. Is Vermont listed? When I first read Arnold Toynbee’s classic A...
Dire Straits
Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies by Ginger Strand. Simon & Schuster (New York) 303 pp., $25.00 cloth, 2008 I was in the City of Niagara Falls twice in recent months, both times on business, but I was only lost the first time. It was a wintry night with...
I couldn't help but to think of some figures on X when I read this:
"Moreover, it is possible that Somer was, as Shakespeare’s Hamlet himself, both mad and acting mad—both a (semi-) natural fool as well as someone who constructed the exterior personality of a fool.
Jesse Russell…