Denver Post (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
Reggie Jackson: "When I stepped into the box, I felt the at-bat belonged to me. Everybody else was there for my convenience. The pitcher was there to throw me a ball to hit. The catcher was there to throw it back to him if he didn't give me what I wanted the first time. And the umpire was lucky that he was close enough to watch.
Denver Post (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
At nine o'clock on Monday morning, October 15,1894, a French artillery officer serving as a trainee with the army's General Staff reported to the Ministry of War building on rue Saint-Dominique, in the aristocratic faubourg Saint-Germain of Paris, obeying an order delivered to his apartment the preceding Saturday.
My Right Word (Free subscription) | 10/01/2009
From a review by Adam Gopnik on “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters” by Louis Begley: ...in the fall of 1894, Dreyfus became the accidental victim of a stupid plot, which was not, in its origins, anti-Semitic. The French Section de Statistique—the Army’s intelligence service—had an agent within the German Embassy: a cleaning woman who every night emptied the wastebaskets of...
Tzvee's Talmudic Blog (Free subscription) | 09/23/2009
BOOKS Adam Gopnik: Revisiting the Dreyfus affair. The Dreyfus affair never goes away. It shows that hatred and bigotry are not a vestige of the superstitious past but a living fire… Gopnick reviews and praises the new book by novelist and lawyer Louis Begley, “Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters.” He calls it, "Brave because Begley wants to use the occasion not for French-bashing,...
The Best American Poetry (Free subscription) | 09/17/2009
Louis Begley writes well and is a good guide to one of modern history's great tragic causes celebres, the court-martial of French artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus [left] on trumped-up charges of treason in 1894. The evidence was fabricated, the trial...
The One-Line Review (Free subscription) | 08/27/2009
USA Feature Film Director: Alexander Payne Writers: Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor, Louis Begley Cinematographer: James Glennon Composer: Rolfe Kent Cast: Jack Nicholson, Kathy Bates, Hope Davis, Dermot Mulroney A couple of sentimental moments aside, this melancholically funny road movie - in which Nicholson’s recently retired, recently widowed former insurance executive sets off for his daughter’s...
The Truth Will Set You Free (Free subscription) | 08/15/2009
By Dr. Ludwig Watzal It's all over town. Only the Obama administration does not want to hear it. The people responsible for the moral decay of U.S. foreign policy were the 'Bush-worriers': Vice President Dick Cheney and his President George W. Bush and all the other cronies. Why will Eric Holder investigate the poor CIA subordinates who just followed orders? The torture memos and all the other unconstitutional...
Atlantic Review (Free subscription) | 07/02/2009
I always found the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung's feuilleton to be weird compared to the rest of the paper, but this book review (in German) by Edo Reents is beyond weird, i.e. it is outrageous. The book tries to explain why the Dreyfus Affair matters today and is written by the US novelist Louis Begley. The reviewer claims: ". the Bush government, which, inasmuch as it illegally...
Conversational Reading (Free subscription) | 05/01/2009
Writing on Franz Kafka: The Office Writings in The New Republic, Louis Begley makes Kafka criticism sound a little, well, Kafkaesque: Thus was constituted the trove of Kafka's painfully personal papers that has since been ransacked by scholars looking for the sources of his inspiration, for the materials that he put to use in his fiction. They have battened by preference on scraps of paper: unconnected...
Later On (Free subscription) | 04/30/2009
Interesting review: Franz Kafka: The Office Writings by Franz Kafka A review by Louis Begley Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into an assimilated German-speaking middleclass Jewish family. He died of tuberculosis of the larynx in 1924, just short of his forty-first birthday, in Kierling, a small resort north of Vienna. Except for six months at [...]
The Plank (Free subscription) | 04/25/2009
The Case For Patience: The People Who Made Torture An American Policy Deserve Punishment--But Not From The Federal Government. And Not Now. by John B. Judis How Did Kafka’s Day Jobs Influence His Writing? by Louis Begley From The Archives: The Abolition Of Torture , by Andrew Sullivan Dispatches From Durban II: A Week Of Israel-Haters, Human Rights Abusers, And Other UN Shenanigans , by Zvika...
sans everything (Free subscription) | 02/22/2009
John Updike has long been a bountiful boon to the Begley family. In the early 1950s, Updike and Louis Begley were classmates together at Harvard, both studying English. Updike, of course, went on to become a famous writer. Begley had a long career as a lawyer but took up fiction late in life, starting to publish his first [...]
This Space (Free subscription) | 02/17/2009
"What is the Kafkaesque?" asks Alexander Provan in his piercing discussion of Kafka via five recent books, including Mark Harman's new translation of Amerika ." It is , as Walter Benjamin wrote, the form which things assume in oblivion. " It is surprising that Louis Begley believes the sword in Liberty's hand seen by Karl Rossmann at the entrance to New York harbour is "a slip...
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