The Book of Genesis Lay in Ruins
When I first saw the title of this book, Impossible Monsters, I thought it was about members of a certain state legislature whose prime purpose for existence appears to be…
SHOW WINDOW OF THE KINGDOM: The Islands of Orkney
Peter Marshall won the 2018 Wolfson history prize for Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation. He is also Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Thus,…
Maxims for a Fulfilling Life
A combination of adages, maxims, aphorisms and plain old common sense, this book embodies a host of life-long truisms. And while value of the quote depends on each individual person…
Tangled Paths: A Life of Aby Warburg
Review by Professor Marion Dolan Tangled Paths: A Life of Aby Warburg surveys the difficult and troubled story of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), a major figure in the area of intellectual…
THE EYES OF TEXAS: The Shocking truth
“I knew that the song was strangely creepy,” said University of Texas Austin Professor Alberto Martinez in his book talk at Livra Books this week. He was referring to the…
SIGNS OF VIRILE MASCULINITY: Peacocks and the Pope’s Beard
This fascinating historical study of representations of masculinity is edited by Konrad Eisenbichler, a professor in the department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. He has received numerous…
THE PRISM OF BEAUTY: Ancient Greeks and the Gods
Image: A Classical sculpture in Florence “It is beautiful; it has no meaning,” the French Nobel laureate André Gide remarked on Aristide Malliol’s sculpture The Mediterranean when it was shown…
The Truth about Machiavelli
This fascinating book represents the distillation of a lifetime of scholarly thought on Machiavelli. The author is Prof. Harvey C. Mansfield of Harvard University, the pre-eminent American political philosopher of…
Beautiful, Wonderful, Deep Mathematics
Image: Eratosthenes teaching in Alexandria “I would plead for more attention to the history of mathematics. It seems to me to be extremely desirable, if not actually indispensable, for entering…
When MONSTROSITY DEFINED HUMANITY
While this is a fine synthesis of the ancient Greek experience, it must be said that there is little ‘new’ in this book by Jennifer Roberts. The target audience is…