The title of Koren’s book is a doozy because it contains three words — musings, curious, aesthete — the meanings of which we all more or less think we know and yet which are also slippery and paradoxical, tending to drift away from us the harder we try to pin them down.
Ryan deftly portrays a number of serious challenges women faced during these troubling times, not just the rationing, but the billeting of strangers in their homes, the terrible problems unwed mothers faced, among others. The women discover a comradeship and the strength of female friendships in this heartwarming, delightful story of overcoming challenges in a wartime English village.
In science, Gifty notes, the hard part is trying to work out what the question is, asking something sufficiently interesting and different. Transcendent Kingdom is full of exactly those kinds of questions.
This book could have been as unsurprising as the privileged life Smith left behind. Man is bored, does hard thing, emerges with lessons. What makes Smith’s book matter is the wealth of world-building detail, as well as the journey through pain both physical and psychological.
This magnificent new book by Philip Hoare takes its title from that tale, but only as a point of departure. The narrative soon turns into a trip of another kind entirely, a captivating journey through art and life, nature and human nature, biography and personal memoir. Giants walk the earth: Dürer and Martin Luther, Shakespeare and Blake, Thomas Mann, Marianne Moore, WH Auden, David Bowie. Hoare summons them like Prospero, his writing the animating magic that brings the people of the past directly into our present and unleashes spectacular visions along the way.