My Book Reviews

Review: Empire Falls by Richard Russo It is indeed one of life’s pleasures to read a really good novel.  I am currently on holiday in Calabria and picked this book from the shelves in my apartment.   It is called  Empire Falls,  a novel that was given to me some years back by a colleague who is an English teacher. He informed me at the time that one idea he had had in the past few years was to read as many award-winning novels as he could, going back over the last twenty years – all the Booker Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners. That way, he got to read the best books, he maintained. Anyway, he lent me Empire Falls as one he considered a good read.  Empire Falls was written in 2001   by Richard Russo, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002. The story is set in Empire Falls, a fictional town in Maine , where the Whiting Family, owners of the once-vibrant mills and the shirt factory, have sold out to a multinational. The author, Richard Russo...

In this post, I review a philosophical tome which I had to plough through twice during my postgraduate studies some years ago.  The book in question is the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor 's magnum opus on the self :  Sources  of the Self:  The Making of the Modern Identity ( Cambridge , 601 pp., 1989).  I use the description of "ploughing" merely to inform the reader that this book is no light read and that it takes a certain commitment of time and labour to engage with the substance and central argument of the book.  I was lucky to read five or six pages per evening -- in that way, I was able to think through and digest as best as I could what the author had written.  However, the task was worthwhile as I gained not a little wisdom and information from this obviously erudite and brilliant philosopher.  In other words, the struggle with the text was a worthwhile one.  Most philosophers and theologians who have reviewed this book are lou...