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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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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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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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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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‘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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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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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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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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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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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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Will Diversity Crusades Lead to More Banned Books?
The last week of September was National Banned Book Week in America, a celebratory campaign the American Library Association sponsors every year to highlight the freedom we have to read. The event also...
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Turn Off Your TV, Read A Book, Live Longer?
We live in a golden age of video content, whether it’s TV series funded by streaming networks like Amazon Prime and Netflix or indie Kickstarter-funded movies, of which there are more and more every...
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Why Character No Longer Counts in Presidential Biographies for Children
American documentarian Ken Burns has written a new book for children called Grover Cleveland, Again! The book is colorful and fun, and the title is taken from his own children’s lyrical recitation of...
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A Brief History of Summer Reading—It Wasn’t Always Beach Reads and Chick Lit
There was a time in America when summer reading was only for the “leisure class,” those who had the financial means to skip work, travel, and relax at a summer resort. Before the turn of the 20th...
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Does a New Novel Glorify the Manson Murders?
Has there ever been a generation in human history more devoted to self-mythology than the Baby Boomers? Casting themselves as idealistic revolutionaries, the privileged, largely white, college-educated...
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Stop Dumbing Down Books for Teens
During my senior year AP English class in high school, we read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. It was brutal. I thought I was a pretty good reader because I had worked my way through most of Jane...
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In Defense of the All-Male Book Club
Last week the Men’s Style section of The New York Times featured a piece, “Men Have Book Clubs, Too,” about the apparently growing phenomenon of men getting together to share literary interests and...
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What Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Jungle Book’ Gets Right About Rules
The latest issue of National Geographic arrived at our house with a dazzling cover story on Yellowstone National Park, full of images of grizzly bears, wolves, elk, and bison. Yellowstone is a wild...
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What a Reimagined ‘Pride and Prejudice’ Says About our Reality TV Addiction
Does a novel retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice have anything to teach us about our reality-TV-obsessed culture? Surprisingly, it does. (Please note: in case you haven’t found time to read...
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Why Are Schools Abandoning Literature?
I recently spent time with a class of fourteen-year-olds, talking about words, specifically words strung together to form speech. I started out by asking them whether they thought words could make...
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