The meeting of Bob and Charlotte is the meeting of two people, straying, despondent, groping in the desert of an existence, and disoriented by the foreignness of a culture emphasizing that they are adrift. Tokyo as the setting of the story brings out the loneliness of Bob and Charlotte, a swirling storm distilling its center, which is both the characters and the hotel refuge above the city; accentuating their loneliness and ennui, the culture shock of the characters lays bare what many travelers have experienced: that foreign cultures expose the contingency and existential arbitrariness of our own, revealing the hollowness of the unquestioned safeguards of meaning and purpose. Foreign cultures…
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The number of books in the world is staggering, absorbing countless reams of paper bearing tiny black marks like a gargantuan wading ice floe covered with gnats. One could say that every year—an arbitrary but serviceable interval of time—most of this congeries of bound paper (totaling almost 130 million books as of 2010) is shuffled toward what littérateur and Everyman alike designate as oblivion. The vast majority of books are, of necessity, hurtling meteorites striking the earth of a readership somewhere in the desert, where none will discover them; a minority of these books that have struck the earth are rarities containing jewels, wonderful discoveries for those who are intellectuals…
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In his snarky and incisive polemic satirizing the American class system, Class, Paul Fussell provides a tour-de-force panorama of what most Americans, especially those marinating in our current postmodern zeitgeist, would never acknowledge in polite company: that although all citizens in this Western democracy are equal under the law, possessing rights to life, liberty, and property, they are nonetheless different and thus unequal, inferior and superior as determined by the myriad attributes that humans can exhibit. Each of us has attributes constituting our strengths and weaknesses, and we all know this; but the exigencies of postmodernism are such that digressing from a philosophy of egalitarianism containing no nuance is tantamount…
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In the wintry world of the Klondike, located in the Yukon territory of northwestern Canada, an influx of prospectors searching for gold brought timeless fame to what was to become the mecca of many pioneers: The Klondike Gold Rush. Competing for immeasurable riches, pioneers and prospectors alike embodied the dueling instincts of avarice and survival, living on the border of fabulous riches and utter squalor. Deriving its setting and incidents from the Klondike Gold Rush and the Donner Party, The Gold Rush chronicles the challenges of The Lone Prospector—The Tramp in his northern form—as he weathers snowstorms and endures starvation in the cabin of a wanted homicide, sidestepping a burly…
