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Tom Wolfe A decade ago, Tom Wolfe exploded on the scene with his spellbinding Bonfire of the Vanities, which defined an era on Wall Street and gave us memorable insights into the business, minds and lives of bond dealers and financial wizards of many stripes. His plots were fascinating, his characters full and vivid, his […]
Annaping Chin Our libraries give us only snippets of Confucius. One must dig deep to unearth his wisdom. I re-read The Analects of Confucius (Analects) and read Annaping Chin’s The Authentic Confucius side-by-side. Due to their common subject, I address both in these book notes. Chin (a Yale history professor) attempts to trace Confucius’ life […]
Chad Harbach The Art of Fielding (“Fielding”), by Chad Harbach, is a novel built around a college baseball team and the faculty of the college, but, in reality, it is a thinly veiled promotion of homosexuality. Despite this, it has virtues: The author’s command of English is admirable; his metaphors and epithets are superb, endless […]
James Allen As A Man Thinketh (AMT), which stems from the biblical proverb (As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he), is among the best-selling motivational and self-help books ever written. Credited as a primary source by Norman Vincente Peale, Dale Carneigie, Earl Nightengale, Tony Robbins, to name a few. It can be […]
The Baron in the Trees Italo Calvino (1923-84) The Baron in the Trees (BIT) is a popular fantasy that should delight young readers. It is the story of a young nobleman, Cosimo, in the 18th Century, who rebels against authority by abandoning his family and turning to a life confined entirely to the trees. As […]
Sebastian Faulks Kiril Sokoloff, with whom I have exchanged book notes now and then, is the renowned writer of “13D”, a widely-respected monthly analysis of world financial trends, and one of the most and prodigious readers and laconic writers on our planet, and a fellow-devotee of Roberts’ modern classic, Shantaram. Kiril was kind enough to […]
An Autobiography by Reinaldo Arenas When I picked up this book I found on its cover the arrestingly handsome face of Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990), who looked much like the actor, Antonio Bandaras. Arenas was born and raised in Cuba. He was a conscripted participant in Castro’s Revolution and lived to regret it; he was betrayed […]
Voltaire Candide (“C”), a triumph of satire and alternately comedy and tragedy so brutal as to defy credulity, was written by Marie Louis Arouet, known to the world by his nome de plume, Voltaire, who was France’s greatest philosopher, the dominant force in The Age of Enlightenment, who was also an accomplished playwright, novelist, investor […]
Geofrey Chaucer (1343-1400) Translation by Burton Raffel The Canterbury Tales (CT) is modeled after Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Arabic Thousand and One Nights. CT covers a pilgrimage in which 30 travelers must tell two stories each. As Chaucer finished only 24 stories, CT is considered to be unfinished. The tales are satirical and cover the […]
Joseph Heller This 20th Century 1961 classic-fictional account of WWII up close will always be timely, because it deals with a universally timeless subject: war. It was written by Joseph Heller, a Jewish-American born in Brooklyn, a bombardier in WWII (who flew over 60 missions), a Fulbright scholar at Oxford, and a sometimes English teacher […]