Steve Jobs: The Opera
Steve Jobs was a cultural icon while still alive, and now he has been translated to the rarified realm of opera. He would probably wince and recoil from this portrayal…
Betty White: 100 Moments
The old adage in Hollywood is that to be a success you either have to ‘fight like Hell’ and claw your way to the top and/or sleep your way up.…
Hummingbird Tea Room marks 10 Years
For the finest English tea experience in Texas, one must travel to The Woodlands, close to a 3-hour drive from Austin. I recently had High Tea at the Driskill hotel…
Ancient Latin Poetry Books
What is a poem? That is the question Gabriel Macedo (University of Liège in Belgium) tackles at the outset of this book. While the ancient Romans left us few theoretical…
Achilles and the Black Cloud of Grief
In this book on the futility of longing for the dead, Professor Emily Austin of the University of Chicago explores the reaction of Achilles to the loss of his compatriot…
Jan. 6 and the Ancient Greek Poet Simonides
Proving that poetry is the path to eternity, we have here a large book on Simonides. While most of the leaders and military generals of that long ago time when…
Building Democracy
The built environment is something we often take for granted. For example, if you were born in London anytime in the last century, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace…
Diderot: Prose of the World
This book could have been subtitled The Many Faces of Diderot. Like the 1957 film Man of a Thousand Faces, even the world expert on Diderot, who authored this, can’t…
The Story of Undersea Cables
In lively prose that transforms an otherwise dull subject into an exciting adventure story, Dr Bruce Hunt of the University of Texas in Austin has written a book on how…
British Literature in 1,165 pages
There are several landmarks in the study of British/English literature. The latest of these is a 3-volume set published by Cambridge University Press. Covering the period 1557-1714 in an expansive…