A Discussion of To Kill a Mockingbird
On the 50th anniversary of the famed book by Harper Lee, we consulted a National Endowment for the Arts 'Big Read' transcript of a radio show created in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services :
Dana Gioia: Today, we will visit Maycomb, Alabama, as we discuss the classic 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.
Anne Twomey reads from To Kill a Mockingbird…
“Scout,” said Atticus, “when summer comes you'll have to keep your head about far worse things [...] This case, Tom Robinson's case, is something that goes to the essence of the man’s conscience — Scout, I couldn't go to church and worship God if I didn't try to help that man.”
“Atticus, you must be wrong.…”
CultureWatch, July 2010
Jill Norgren, Nichola Gutgold and Joan L. Cannon review: This Is a Soul is a moving biography of a physician that gives readers a small window through which to view international medicine; The Beauty Bias delves into many sociological, financial and biological issues related to getting older and why this matters; The Hundred-Foot Journey is a wonderful yarn, in part, because of exotic settings and non-academic dissertations on food.
Read More...The Feminist Moles in the Federal Government
Book Review by Jo Freeman
The Women’s Movement Inside and Outside the State
by Lee Ann Banaszak
Published by Cambridge University Press, New York; 2010, 247 pp.
When I was in college long ago there was an ongoing debate on working inside the system vs outside of the system.
As I watched the women’s liberation movement emerge and unfold in the late 1960s and 1970s, and read more deeply in US history, I realized that this was a false dichotomy. The "system" was bigger than the government and other institutions. Indeed, the best way to bring about change was a two-pronged approach, with people 'inside' and 'outside' the government working for the same goal, if not necessarily with the same methods.
I wrote a bit about that in my first book, The Politics of Women’s Liberation. In her new book Lee Ann Banaszak has proven it.
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A Trip Through Henry James's Italian Hours
An excerpt from the free text of Henry James's Italian Hours at Project Gutenberg:
I must not, however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had the pretension of giving a description of it or as if the reader desired one. The reader has been too well served already. It is surely the best-described building in the world. Open the Stones of Venice, open Théophile Gautier's ltalia, and you will see. These writers take it very seriously, and it is only because there is another way of taking it that I venture to speak of it; the way that offers itself after you have been in Venice a couple of months, and the light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in under the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit and friendliness and a desire for something cool and dark.