Articles Written By Robert Birnbaum
Robert Birnbaum is editor-at-large at Identity Theory. All the sketchy details of his life will be (re)fabricated in his memoir-in-progress, Just Talking: How to Do Things With Words. His weblog can be found here.
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Reading
Book Digest: December 17, 2007
From The Once and Future King by T.H. White: The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may...
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Reading
Book Digest: December 10, 2007
As Dec. 31 approaches, the year-end lists and other media devices for taking up space and time remind me that there is, of course, something useful to be said about the...
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Reading
Book Digest: December 3, 2007
Not that I expect anything for such efforts, but a trickle of perspiration did break out as I pondered the pros and cons of participating in the year-end list frenzy....
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Reading
Book Digest: November 26, 2007
From Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster”: A totalitarian society makes enormous demands in the courage of men and a partially totalitarian society makes even...
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Reading
Book Digest: November 19, 2007
From Joseph O’Connor’s yet-unheralded new opus, Redemption Falls, as his protagonist is escaping exile in Tasmania: The revolution needs theorists, visionaries, poets: figures who will be cast in...
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Reading
Book Digest: November 12, 2007
Norman Mailer died this weekend. I was a fan of Mailer’s and think I be may one of the few people who read his massive stinker Harlot’s Ghost....
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Reading
Book Digest: November 5, 2007
Last week I made reference to Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska—and once pointed out that her small volume Nonrequired Reading is my inspiration for this column. In that book, she...
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Reading
Book Digest: October 29, 2007
From Wislawa Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel Lecture: The world—whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of...
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Reading
Book Digest: October 22, 2007
From Red Rover by Deidre McNamer: He was generous and grave, Aidan was, and equipped with such frank curiosity about himself and how his life might unfold that he heartened...
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Reading
Book Digest: October 15, 2007
The silly season has begun—awards nominations being announced and no doubt the attendant contretemps to follow. I’ll refrain from my usual jaundiced opinionating except to relay the good...
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Reading
Book Digest: October 8, 2007
I have never thought myself better or smarter because of my love of reading—though I do tend to think that about others who read. But I am beginning to...
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Reading
Book Digest: October 1, 2007
I was completing David Plante’s riveting novel, ABC, in which the protagonist has what I would call a transcendental episode with a 1923 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, when I...