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The Everlasting Appeal of Natalie Babbitt
Whether they recognize her name or not, most elementary school students know Natalie Babbitt very well. They know her through the pages of her book, Tuck Everlasting, which seems like a typical...
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When Bad Words Are Said to Good Children
Should bad words be read to children? This question surfaced last week when children’s author Dan Gutman posted his response to a parent letter on Facebook asking whether it was appropriate to use the...
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A Really Tedious Book about “A Really Good Day”
It’s been more than a decade since lawyer and author Ayelet Waldman confessed, in an essay in the New York Times, that she loved her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, more than her kids, and enjoyed a...
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Why Critics Ignored This Novel’s Approach to Abortion
The forty-fourth annual March for Life takes place in Washington, D.C., tomorrow, and many of the marchers will be in a celebratory mood. It’s not only that one of President Trump’s top advisers will...
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Why Thomas Hardy, Not Jane Austen, Is a Better Guide to Love
Valentine’s Day is here, and with it, the usual slew of literary and pop culture reminders of what love does to us. Pick your poison—Jane Austen, Nicholas Sparks, the Brontes, Old Hollywood, 90s rom...
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‘Silence’ and the Challenges of Cultural Relativism
In Martin Scorsese’s Silence, a new movie based on Shusaku Endo’s novel of the same name, Jesuit priests try to smuggle Christianity into 17th-century Japan. It’s futile, say their opponents, because...
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The Perils of the Millennial Addiction Memoir
“One of the most striking characteristics of drug takers,” writes the psychiatrist and writer Theodore Dalrymple, “is their intense and tedious self-absorption; and their journeys into inner space are...
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Schooling Novelist Lucinda Rosenfeld About Public Education
Even the best satirists have blind spots. That’s the lesson from Lucinda Rosenfeld’s new novel, Class. The story of Karen Kipple, a white liberal Brooklyn mother whose principles are constantly being...
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Why More Juvenile Delinquents Should Read
It’s a modern cliché to say that reading books will make you a better person—a more empathetic person, a more intelligent person, even a happier person. Research does indeed suggest many benefits...
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Joan Didion’s Troubled, Prescient Look at a Forgotten America
One infernal afternoon, in the deep south town of Meridian, Mississippi, Joan Didion saw a man brandishing a shotgun in the center of the town square. “He had on a pink shirt and a golfing cap,” she...
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