America's Most Critical Journal since 1999
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins Review By Dan Geddes Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is a self-conscious novel—a novel that knows it is a novel, and reminds you of this fact at every opportunity. Its self-consciousness, best seen in Rob... More »
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe Review By Dan Geddes 10 January 2000 Thomas Wolfe shows his readers the magic in everyday life. Look Homeward, Angel is the story of an early twentieth century North Carolina family as told through the eyes of the youngest ... More »
The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield Review By Dan Geddes The Celestine Prophecy claims to be a novel, and it is: a novel disguising a New Age primer. The hero, (who I believe is never given a name) is told about a mysterious, ancient Manuscript now in the... More »
The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche’s most sustained critique of morality, exhibits such an original approach to value theory that many readers feel lost in the whirlpool of his ideas, and grapple for some solid ground from which to evaluate him. Surely m... More »
Swann’s Way Remembrance of Things Past (volume 1) Marcel Proust Review By Dan Geddes 10 December 1999 Proust’s fundamental triumph in Swann’s Way is in reconstructing his own past in such detail. He recreates the rhythm and events of his childhood so viv... More »
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess Review By Dan Geddes Perhaps I expect too much of literature. Coming to read a novel for the first time, one nearly always has preconceptions of it, whether from its reputation, reviews, word of mouth, a movie version, or ... More »
The Book Of J By Harold Bloom Translated by David Rosenberg (1990) Review by Dan Geddes 11 October 1999 See also reviews of Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, Omens of Millennium, and The Western Canon. Although ostensibly a book of literary criticism, Bloom&... More »
by Harold Bloom Review by Dan Geddes 5 October 1999 See other reviews of Bloom: The Book of J, Omens of Millennium, The Western Canon. After a generation characterized by psycho-criticism and the New Criticism, Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence mus... More »
The Four Noble Truths The Dalai Lama Review By Dan Geddes The Dalai Lama’s The Four Noble Truths was originally given as a lecture in London in 1996. The Dalai Lama introduces the essential tenets of Buddhism to a Western audience. For the Dalai Lama the t... More »
The Conquest of Cool Thomas Frank Review By Dan Geddes Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool successfully reframes the traditional perception of the Sixties counterculture: that it represented a rebellion against the consumption-oriented values of “m... More »
The Psychoanalytic Movement by Ernest Gellner Review By Dan Geddes 18 September 1999 The Psychoanalytic Movement tries to answer the question: how did Freudianism come to achieve such a solid foothold in the intellectual life of the West, especially in light o... More »
by K. Eric Drexler Synopsis By Dan Geddes Engines of Creation introduces the power and possibilities of nanotechnology to the general reader. Drexler believes that nanotechnology—the ability to create molecular assemblers capable of constructing nearly any... More »