John Wilson

The books of 2014, like the books of any year, utterly exceed our grasp. In one aspect, they suggest (they mimic, we could say) the divinely gratuitous excess of Creation; seen from another angle, their multiplicity reflects our fallenness, our propensity to error, our confusion. We need to hold . . . . Continue Reading »

In the month since Ray Bradbury died at the age of 91, a host of tributes have appeared, touching on almost every salient aspect of his long life and his exceptionally many-sided work. Yet one theme worthy of attention, so it seems to me, has been largely ignored. “Largely,” I say”not entirely… . Continue Reading »

Ah, the books of 2008: Who can number them? All About the Beat and The Art of the Public Grovel; American Earth and American Pests; The Lost Spy and The Terminal Spy. This was the year of Original Sin and The Forever War and a great wall of books about China. Fiction? Palace Council and Moscow . . . . Continue Reading »

The Right Attitude to Rain by Alexander McCall Smith Pantheon, 288 pages, $21.95 Hard to believe that, only a handful of years ago, the name Alexander McCall Smith would have drawn a blank among American readers. An African-born academic in Scotland who specializes in medical law and frequently . . . . Continue Reading »

There’s an ancient human dream to be tiny: to make a hammock from a leaf and sup on nectar, to soar on a falcon’s back. This longing turns up in the folklore of fairies and the wee people, and its guises are sometimes charming, sometimes malign. Patrick Leigh Fermor tells of Voodoo adepts . . . . Continue Reading »

The era of the book is coming to a close. No one knows the day or hour, but inventor Ray Kurzweil says it will be soon. The fate of the book is merely a detail in the sweeping vision of Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking), but it is exemplary: Just as . . . . Continue Reading »

The Statement By Brian Moore Dutton, 250 pages, $22.95 Brian Moore writes about the life of faith from the perspective of a long-estranged insider. Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1921”the family home stood across the street from the Grand Lodge of the militantly Protestant Orange . . . . Continue Reading »