-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Davina, BookBrowse editor
A couple of people have emailed recently to ask whether The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is based on, or at least inspired by, Andrew Sean Greer's 2004 novel
The
Confessions of Max Tivoli, and if so, why the movie title was changed?
Kim Kovacs, BookBrowse reviewer
Once again I begin my New Year's resolutions with the promise, "I will not buy more books than I can read" (followed by the corollary, "I will buy just one book at a time"). Once again, I suspect I'll fail.
Ever since the fourth grade (don't ask), books have been a refuge for me. Each one represents a new world or adventure, my own little escape pod from the traumas of the day. Books call to me as I stroll the bookstore aisles, unable to resist their alluring covers and captivating premises. How can I possibly leave one of these unexplored worlds sitting, unread, on a shelf at my bookstore?
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
Each year, as the holiday season comes around and news becomes thin on the ground, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past .....
Literary highlights (from a modern perspective) published in 1908, one hundred years ago, include
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame;
War of the Classes
and
The Iron Heel by Jack London;
Anne of Green Gables
by Lucy Maud Montgomery; The Tale of
Jemima Puddle-Duck by Beatrix Potter;
A Modern Utopia and The War
in the Air by H G Wells;
My Double Life by Sarah Bernhardt;
The Man Who Was Thursday and
All Things Considered by G K Chesterton;
A Room With a View by E M Forster;
Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum; and the births of Ian
Fleming and Louis L'Amour. The Nobel Prize for Literature was won by
German philosopher
Rudolf
Christoph Eucken.
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
Each year, as the holiday season comes around and news becomes thin on the ground, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past. This time we travel to 1808:
In the USA, the Theatre
St Philip opened in New Orleans. In Germany, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe published the first part of
Faust. In Britain, the
first
Royal Opera House in Covent Garden was destroyed by fire and Sir Walter
Scott published Marmion,
an epic poem about the Battle of Flodden Field. In France,
Francois Marie Charles
Fourier (credited by modern scholars with originating the word feminisme)
argued in his
Theory of the Four Movements that the extension of the liberty of women
was the general principle of all social progress, though he disdained 'equal
rights'. Followers of Fourier would go on to establish about 30 socialist
colonies based on his principles in various parts of the USA.
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
Each year, as the holiday season comes around and news becomes thin on the ground, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past .....
1708 was a rather dull year for literature, at least from the perspective of modern-day readers looking for works by authors still well known today, but it was an important year for three historians who used their retirement to produce
notable works:
The first volume of Theologian Joseph Bingham's 10 volume Antiquities of the Christian Church was published; on its completion in 1722 it provided an exhaustive and methodical account of the antiquities of the Christian Church.
Theater critic and theologian Jeremy Collier published the first volume of his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain - which, while controversial, became widely used.
Davina Morgan-Witts, BookBrowse editor
Each year, as the holiday season comes around and the news stories start to dry up, we look back into history for a snapshot of the news in centuries past. This year, we start in 1608 ....
While the early settlers at Jamestown struggled for survival, London was a hive of dramatic endeavor:
Ben Jonson's The Masque of Beauty
and The Hue and Cry After Cupid were both published and performed for the first time. Thomas Heywood published The Rape of Lucrece; Thomas Middleton published The Family of Love, A Mad World, My Masters and A Trick to Catch the Old One; and William Shakespeare
published King Lear - to name but a few.
Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, Thomas Dekker, was also in fine voice, publishing two tracts: The Dead Term and The Bellman of London; and considering that he claimed credit for 240 plays during his 60-year lifetime, it seems likely that he turned out a few plays as well.
