It goes without saying that the greatest pleasure of books is in the reading of them. The reader who has learned to appreciate the exhilaration and heartbreak of Charles Dickens; the vibrancy of life and sweeping human vision of Leo Tolstoy; the human drama and poetic insight of Shakespeare; the whimsical humor of P. G. […]
Memories of graduate school flood my mind these days. Those four years of coursework at the University of North Carolina marked the beginning of my life as a scholar. I had painfully figured out how to study as an undergraduate, but the fervid quest to learn, the burning desire to piece together difficult or obscure […]
Amidst the gushing river of popular culture, the turbulent climate of politics, media bias, and misinformation, the tornadic winds of modern educational theories, and the volcanic eruption of screens and technology, a pertinent set of questions exists: Why read literature? Of what value is literature? It is helpful to think about the role of literature […]
History must be constantly corrected and moderated by the seeing and handling of things. —Hilaire Belloc There are many reasons to collect books: admiration of an author, fascination with a subject or time period, love of the physical beauty of specially-printed or what are called “press books,” beautiful bindings, illustrations, even because it was a […]
Here, between the shelves, I escape everything worrisome, petty, mundane. In late afternoon, as the weak winter sun begins its slide, pale yellow light washes through the west-side window of my office in Fairhope, Alabama, and something like magic floods the room. I sit in a big, soft chair, and the words that are bound […]
There are some questions we ask of science that it is ill-equipped to answer. The question of how human beings are different from animals is one. I thought about this when I read Kevin Laland’s article in a recent issue of Scientific American. “[H]ard scientific data have been amassed across fields ranging from ecology to […]
Why should the student learn Greek? No shortage of pragmatic reasons comes to mind, and parents and teachers will delight to know that Greek has utilitarian value, although it seems uncouth to speak of it as such. While usually a hybrid of Greek and Latin influence, most existing English words come from the Greco-Roman vocabulary. […]
In 1929, children’s book author Anne Parrish was visiting Paris. She left her husband at a cafe to visit one of the city’s many bookstores. There she found a copy of Helen Wood’s Jack Frost and Other Stories, a favorite of hers from childhood. She returned to the cafe, sat down, and showed her husband […]