Dante’s famous The Divine Comedy lies at the intersection of art and theology. I love artful renditions of theology. Further, it is known as the best work of poetry ever to grace the language of Italian. Therefore, I decided to look for a good translation. I’ve enjoyed Longfellow’s poetry in the past, and when I saw that he undertook an adaptation, I chose to give it a go. Unfortunately, Longfellow seemed to stick a little…
The Plague seems like an appropriate title of a book for a coronavirus-stricken world. Set in modern (1940s?) North Africa, this book reimagines a world where the plague mysteriously makes a recurrence. The work is told from the point of view of a doctor. As with COVID-19 paralyzing the world, the disease paralyzes an entire town for several seasons. Many die over many months. This work provides moving portrayals of individual death and of massive…
This story of adoption operates on the premise that adopted children have an adopted family and a birth family (the other family). The protagonist is adopted shortly after birth into a family which raised her. As an adult, she has a daughter who, in an all-too-common tale, comes down with severe peanut allergies. The lack of progress of treatment lead the duo to an allergist who practices “holistic” approaches to treatment, such as meditation and…
This brilliant work, published in 1920s America and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, addresses the state of medical research shortly after the Flexner Report famously shone a path for medical research to progress. It sets forth the classical view of a medical researcher – isolated, dedicated to his research, not interested in people, and essentially living in his lab. And yes, that view is traditionally centered around a researcher being a male in a more-or-less…
This work is a sequel to Kim’s other novel The Phoenix Project. Although the books fit together, they need not be read together. In other words, both books are self-standing. This work – essentially about dealing with the software industry in an age of constant change – does an even better job than The Phoenix Project at highlighting how businesses can adapt to and thrive in the digital era. The book is set in an…
O’Connor wrote about the strange world she found herself living within in twentieth-century rural Georgia. Her characters were exceedingly strange, even grotesque. However, as her stories unfolded, the reader got inside these characters’ world-views. Indeed, they became relatable and empathy for their condition grows. Wise Blood is no exception for this trend. This work is O’Connor’s first great work. She tells the story of the relationships between several characters who, to say the least, are…
This work, written while Southern blacks were still oppressed by Jim Crow, chronicles what it was like to come of age in mid-twentieth-century America as a black man. The title is apt: The main character, whose name is never disclosed by the author, feels as though he is invisible to the world. This is true not only in the American South but also in the American North. Eventually, he learns to embrace this invisibility and…
I picked up this highly regarded work because I like books that put an interesting spin on meaning-of-life issues and religion in general. I had heard that this book was ranked as one of the greatest 100 books written in English in the twentieth century. It did not disappoint. The author Greene was a Englishman who travelled in Mexico – the setting of this novel. He wrote about a “whisky priest” – an alcoholic. The…
This book came out of nowhere to with the National Book Award in 1960. Percy was a doctor disqualified from medical practice because of tuberculosis. He had published a few philosophical musings in minor journals. He was the definition of obscure. His book wasn’t even nominated for the award. Nonetheless, a committee-member suggested The Moviegoer (a suggested read by a friend), and the rest is history. When Percy died in 1990, he was mentioned among…
As detailed in the Acknowledgements section, this book narrates in fiction the true story of young black men imprisoned in Florida. Only this was not a regular prison; it was a torture chamber. It details how this prison’s culture sought to imbue a feeling of worthlessness on its black prisoners. Nonetheless, Whitehead’s story is one of redemption, about one man’s successful attempt to overcome life within this prison. Whitehead, himself an African American, projects to…