Search Results: roberta silman

Literary Appreciation: D. H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” at 100

September 18, 2020
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I hope this centennial will inspire readers to immerse themselves in this enormously important, rich, and vibrant work.

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Book Review: The Resilient Wisdom of Tony Judt – For the Ages

August 15, 2015
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Tony Judt is an American treasure, in time he may prove as great to our country as George Orwell and Albert Camus are to theirs.

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Book Review: A Brilliant “Homeland Elegies” — Indispensable Witness

November 5, 2020
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What Ayad Akhtar reveals, with stunning detail and a passion and an urgency rarely seen in American fiction, is that his is a story marked by a loneliness similar to that found in Melville, Dreiser, and T.S. Eliot, among others, and that puts him squarely in their company.

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Book Review: “The Menorah” and “The Book of Aron”

December 22, 2016
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Two books — one nonfiction, the other fiction — that deal with Jewish history.

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Author Appreciation: The Fiction of Kent Haruf — Surviving Ordinary Life with Grace

August 5, 2016
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Kent Haruf’s novels remind us that even in the hardest lives, there is joy, often delicate and evanescent, but joy, nevertheless.

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Fuse Commentary: Borne Back Ceaselessly into the Kitsch? A Glimpse of Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby

May 26, 2012
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Judging by the trailer for The Great Gatsby, it looks as if director Baz Luhrmann’s habitual excess will overwhelm the lyrical beauty and subtle power of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose.

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Fuse Commentary: Letter from the Hinterland — Cheering on Children and the Arts

June 22, 2013
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What is perhaps most astonishing is that families of every economic stripe, even those for whom it is a great sacrifice, are seeing to it that their children experience these pleasures, despite the sad fact that schools all over the country are cutting back on arts programs.

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Book Review: “The Planter of Modern Life” — A Biography of an Agricultural Visionary

May 6, 2020
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Here is a splendid biography from which you will learn things you never suspected, a book that will renew your faith in passion and what Louis Bromfield called those peculiarly American traits: integrity and idealism.

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Book Review: Edith Wharton and Michelle Obama — Breaking New Ground for Women

January 2, 2019
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What impressed me most about these two different women is they were both products of an America which values determination and wit and intelligence, as well as opportunity.

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Book Review: Colum McCann’s “Apeirogon” — Showing a Path Forward

December 21, 2020
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Although some of Apeirogon is painful, this novel can inspire you to think differently and even to act, which is surely welcome after this horrible year in which we have all felt so helpless.

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