Listening to a good bookTuesday August 9th, 2016
Only one of my eyes has ever worked well enough to read. Besides that, in my 20s I was diagnosed with a chronic ophthalmic inflammation that requires daily cortisone drops to control. Some versions of my condition can lead to blindness, but I’ve been lucky.
Gratitude for the gift of sight, along with a skulking dread of going blind, has therefore been a constant mental c...
Review of Culture Wars: Volume V by Barbara KayTuesday January 26th, 2016
Way Stations on Marxism’s ‘long march through America’s institutions’ in the 20th century.
By Barbara Kay
Some months ago, joining an online discussion initiated by a gay Facebook friend on the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, I countered a bitter remark about Ronald Reagan’s “homophobia” and his primary role in causing so many deaths by (as tactfully...
The conservative movement’s lion in winter: David Horowitz’s new memoirTuesday June 16th, 2015
Towards the end of his new memoir, You’re Going to be Dead One Day, David Horowitz reprises a vividly remembered incident that he had previously recounted in Radical Son (1996), his eloquent manifesto of liberation from his family’s hermetically sealed ideological prison.
Horowitz’s parents had come to California to see his new home. At the time, approaching early...
The enduring lessons of Mad Men survive beyond its denouementTuesday May 19th, 2015
Didn’t Mad Men end just perfectly? Yet it’s indisputably over. I’m nostalgic already.
Mad Men was my formative era. The show brought so much back for me: everyone smoking like chimneys; the physically uncomfortable bullet bras, girdles, hoop skirts and hair rollers; the rigid social rules that made any fate for women other than married with children susp...
Adolescent fiction has undergone a sea of change since Nancy solved the Mystery of the Old ClockTuesday May 5th, 2015
Last week Nancy Drew, teen detective, celebrated her series’ 85th anniversary of continuous publication. In the 1950s, Nancy still wore demure dresses, drove a snappy blue convertible and called home from a telephone booth. Today I’m told she wears jeans and t-shirts, drives a hybrid car and carries a smartphone. Nevertheless, I am sure the clever sleuth is still the upright...
Writers and their strange compulsionsWednesday December 3rd, 2014
Art and music are practiced by hobbyists or professionals, and are unnecessary skills for others. But we all need minimal writing skills in order to work and socialize. Consequently, the line between mere writing and (a hush falls) writing is often blurred.
For many people — bloggers, particularly, who have a point to make and nothing else — writing comes easy...
P.D. James is forever ensconced in the Great Canon of British crime writersFriday November 28th, 2014
Although it can hardly have come as a surprise to her adoring readers, the great British crime writer, P.D. James (the initials stand for Phyllis Dorothy, I have learned for the first time, as I never thought to wonder while she was alive) has died at the ripe old age of 94. She had all her wits about her and had never retired, so one may regret her passing, while hoping one’s own ...
Watching a literary chicken come home to roost, in novel formWednesday September 17th, 2014
This is a story of chickens coming home to roost in the nicest possible way.
In the early 1980s, I founded and edited an annual anthology of creative writing by Montreal and area high school students called First Fruits. Cash prizes for winners in the categories of poetry, fiction and essays attracted some excellent writing over the 25 years of its lifespan.
In 1985, then in ...
The slow, tentative return of women’s lost sense of sexual honourFriday September 12th, 2014
The sexual revolution seems to be running out of steam in the West.
The Post’s September 11 editorial informs us that many indicators, such as a dramatically diminished interest in topless bathing in France, the bellwether of female sexual liberation, point to a return of relative conservatism in women’s attitudes to sex.
In North America, teens of all...
Galunker, by Douglas Anthony Cooper, reviewed by Barbara KayWednesday July 23rd, 2014
Up until now, the charm offensive by intellectuals in the pit bull advocacy movement (PBAM) has been confined to publications targeting people capable of reading them.
Now Canadian novelist, Huffington Post blogger , and pit bull enthusiast Douglas Anthony Cooper has taken pit bull rescue activism to a brand new level of advocacy hutzpah.Cooper’s latest boo...
We all know about John Updike. But what about his mother?Wednesday July 9th, 2014
My friend David, an evolving short-story writer, spends a week every summer at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Last year, one of his fellow students in a class taught by novelist Robert Anthony Siegel was Siegel’s own 75-year old mother, Frances. David recently sent me an article by Siegel the younger published on The New York Times’ online site, “Draft” (dedicated to ...
The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 — The ProgressivesThursday May 22nd, 2014
[To order The Black Book of the American Left: Volume 2 -- The Progressives, click here.
We encourage our readers to visit our new website -- BlackBookOfTheAmericanLeft.com – which features David Horowitz’s introductions to Volumes 1 and 2 of this 10-volume series, along with their tables of contents, reviews and interviews with the author.]
google_ad_cl...
When the ‘choice’ isn’t her ownFriday March 7th, 2014
Australian celebrity Charlotte Dawson seemed to have it all: beauty, brains, success and, for a time, “the love of my life” in ex-husband, elite swimmer Scott Miller. Last week the 39-year old former model and TV personality hanged herself in her apartment.
Various mainstream media accounts link Charlotte’s suicide, and a previous 2012 suicide attempt, to depressi...
A reformed leftist’s enduring shameWednesday January 29th, 2014
In Los Angeles tonight family, friends and admirers will celebrate the 75th birthday of David Horowitz, the most formidable scourge of the American left since Whittaker Chambers.
Horowitz’s accomplishments run wide and deep. Scholar, polemicist, much-laureled author of many books (several with friend and collaborator Peter Collier), he is also the founder and overseer of the ...
The Black Book of the American Left: Volume I: My Life and TimesThursday January 9th, 2014
To order David Horowitz’s “The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life And Times,” click here.
In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed that Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists are content to murder only a handful of people. They stop killing, he explained, because “they have no ideology.”
One instantly comprehen...
How a critic of Islam ended up in the check-out aisleWednesday August 7th, 2013
As the topic for its popular annual debate last May, the Oxford University Union proposed that “This House believes Islam is a religion of peace.”
Considering the venue — Oxford is, like many Western universities, marinated in political correctness — it’s hardly surprising that the motion passed 286-186 (as described in Robert Fulford’s July 27 c...
The fine line ‘between hoarding and retailing’Thursday July 25th, 2013
It’s because of people like me that the antiquarian book trade is in peril.
I’m a lifelong reader. During the Golden Age of used books – mainly paperbacks – from the 1960s to the 1990s, I delighted to browse in used bookstores, finding treasure at absurdly low prices. But the Internet changed all that for me and millions of other readers. Where there were on...
Four rabbis walk into a barWednesday June 19th, 2013
.npBlogs #npHeader .npPgHeading {
padding-bottom: 0;
border-bottom: none;
}
.npGallery.npRuleLight {
padding-top: 0;
border-top: none;
}
When I was young, our Toronto family – like most Jews who could afford to do so – occasionally spent holiday time in the Catskill mountains’ “Borscht Belt.” Grossingers and its arch-rival, ...
Two great writers converge to publish epistolary of their e-mail correspondenceSaturday June 1st, 2013
Two of my favourite writers have published a book of e-mail correspondence: Distant Intimacy: A friendship in the age of the Internet.
Joseph Epstein is America’s finest essayist and amongst America’s finest short story writers. Frederic Raphael is English, a prodigiously gifted man of letters in the fullest sense: fluent in many languages (including ancient Greek), nov...
Barbara Kay on Brigid Quinn: A crime-solving role model for women of a certain ageWednesday March 20th, 2013
If you’re attending Toronto’s “Authors at Harbourfront Centre” event tonight, I recommend to your attention one Becky Masterman, debut author of the new Penguin mystery/thriller, Rage Against the Dying.
I read it during my vacation last week and loved it for its racy, fat-free writing and seamless dual plot. But also because the book’s author and her protago...
Listening to a good book
Tuesday August 9th, 2016
Galunker, by Douglas Anthony Cooper, reviewed by Barbara Kay
Wednesday July 23rd, 2014
