“That a man can take pleasure in marching in formation to the strains of a band is enough to make me despise him.” —Albert Einstein Joseph Heller published his epochal novel sixteen years after the end of World War II, having afforded himself a humane interval during which all the…
The director of such films as My Dinner with Andre and Au Revoir les Enfants, Louis Malle coaxes from his provocative film, Lacombe, Lucien, what was absent from the others: an enigma of a primary character that remains inscrutable and hollow until the epilogue of the last scene revealing that…
A cult classic that has only ripened since its release in 1998, a loony Chandler-noir featuring cannabis, White Russians, and a surfeit of bowling imagery, The Big Lebowski is an unforgettable comedy whose parts are greater than the whole (which is a whirling mishmash of action, absurdity, and subterfuge). These…
“One day, when in the opinion of the world one has long been educated, one discovers oneself: that is where the task of the thinker begins; now the time has come to invoke his aid—not as an educator but as one who has educated himself and thus has experience.” –Friedrich…
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…
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…
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…
A young man emerging into the world and undertaking the burdens and trials of his looming adulthood undergoes two phases of linguistic development, of earnest cognitive growth. The first is adolescence and his early university years, when philosophy and literature—a fair bit of heavy reading—begin to interest him, filling his…
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…
As an unprecedented success overtaking Titanic at the Japanese box office and becoming the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, winning worldwide acclaim and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Spirited Away has since solidified its stature as the preeminent Japanese animated film—an amalgam of dreamlike Japanese myth that has…
