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Category Archives: Social Comment
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 (Two slaves struggle mightily: one for her liberty, the other for his integrity.) This novel, the best selling book in the nineteenth century besides the Bible, is a remarkably forceful argument against the world’s most blatant form of widespread institutionalized violation of human rights. It is a collage of slave lives and […]
Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 1973 (Little do a frustrated writer and a troubled car dealer realize, that their impolite author is using their journey to meet each other as an excuse to mastermind a deconstruction of modern values!) Sort of The Temptation of St. Anthony, sort of by Rabo Karabekian, 1950. Sort of Sateen Dura-Luxe acrylic […]
Apology of Socrates
(Απολογια Σωκρατους) Plato 4th century BC (An innocent man delivers an inspiring speech to the court before he is executed.) Socrates is a bit of a mystery, if you insist on being a real evidentiary hardliner. He wrote nothing himself, so we have to rely on others’ characterizations of him. Xenophon paints him as the […]
A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold 1948 (An ecologist contemplates and celebrates the land, and recommends an expansion of our moral world.) In today’s courses on ecology, forestry, conservation, environmental philosophy or land use, three personalities are routinely introduced as the fathers of modern concern for nature, the three who first and most strongly urged us to enlarge our […]
Twain’s stories
February 9, 2015 / Leave a comment
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) 1865-1890 (A champion of common sense and nonsense casually delivers his colorful yarns, witty satires, and twisty dramas.) Sitting with Mark Twain when he’s in a storytelling mood, we get to know the man—or at least he leads us to believe we get to know him. He lets us in on […]
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