By Lynn O’Rourke Hayes From FamilyTravel.com A good book can transport us to magical places. Here are five ideas from the literary world that may inspire your own adventures. 1. A.A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh,” Winnipeg, Manitoba A century ago, a Canadian soldier launched a literary legacy when he adopted a black bear cub and named…
Book Review: ‘If a Poem Could Live and Breathe: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt’s First Love’
Author of “Dear George, Dear Mary: A Novel of George Washington’s First Love,” Mary Calvi offers readers another fascinating fictional novel crafted from primary source material. “If a Poem Could Live and Breathe,” which was released earlier this year, is at once a historical novel and a romance novel centered on young Theodore Roosevelt and…
Book Review: ‘100 Greatest Battles’
What are history’s greatest battles? Angus Konstam, author of more than 100 history books, tackles that question with his latest book, “100 Greatest Battles.” The author begins his selection in the fifth century B.C. with the battles of the Greco-Persian Wars, then moves through the next 2,500 years to the battles that made up the…
The Knight in the ‘Canterbury Tales’: An Idealized Medieval Figure
A masterwork of poetic prose and one of the first-ever books written in English, the “Canterbury Tales” displays English cultural history, giving modern readers an insight into medieval society. And what better character to represent the ideal values of 14th-century England than a knight in shining armor? Written by Geoffrey Chaucer from 1387 until his…
The Stars Are Still Shining: Book Life, Education, Culture, and Ideas That Endure
April 11, 2023
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Out of print. Can there be three sadder words for a living author? In 1975, Farrar Straus & Giroux published Larry Woiwode’s “Beyond the Bedroom Wall.” Here was an extraordinary novel over 600 pages long, a tale of heartbreaking beauty written by a young man about a mid-20th-century American family. Novelist John Gardner, a writer who…
The Dandelion as a Symbol of Hope: O. Henry’s Short Story ‘Springtime a la Carte’
Many of us, when we see dandelions, see them as simply weeds. Yet the dandelion is one of the first hopeful signs of spring and one of the most persevering and resilient plants ever. This plant grows almost anywhere. Even in the most desolate places, this little plant seems to grow and flourish. Henry conveys…
Righteous Determination Forges a Pathway to God’s Kingdom
Our environment is filled with things that test our character. Sometimes, we successfully overcome these things, and other times, we fall short and fail. Yet failure isn’t necessarily the end of the road; through determination, we can still find ourselves favorable to God. We continue our story of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Raphael has finished…
Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Sonnet: ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’
When we look at a landscape, we probably aren’t thinking about it as a clamorous system of self-proclamations. Gerard Manley Hopkins saw it that way. For Hopkins, each thing in creation is continually proclaiming itself just by being. In the unconscious flutter of wings is the dramatic force of a being dealing out its inmost…
Silence, a Place for the Priceless
Is silence just the absence of sound, of speech, just as some thinkers say that evil is just the absence of good? Actually, silence may open up unexpected horizons filled with heights too high to ever climb to the top of, and depths too deep to ever wholly fathom. More Than an Absence “Silence is…
A Poetic Voice, a Tragic Life: André Chénier and the French Revolution
From Luciano Pavarotti to Jonas Kaufmann, talented tenors have vied to interpret the much beloved role of André Chénier—the French poet of the revolutionary generation, memorialized in the musical repertoire by Umberto Giordano’s popular 1896 opera. With a succession of passionate arias, the composer charts the tragic story of the talented poet, whose life was…
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