Helpful votes received on reviews:
87% (13 of 15)
Location: Reston, Va. USA
In My Own Words:
Enthusiast, Bardolator, casualty of poetry, Quixoteiste, Dickensomane, operaphile, puckhead, long-serving member, Red Sox and E-Street Nations and, more recently, for want of a better handle, "Nats Nation," rising out of the National Capital and soon to engulf the Middle Atlantic States before truly going national on the backs of young Strasburg, Harper, and company. Gives a lot of 5's. Reads or… Read moreEnthusiast, Bardolator, casualty of poetry, Quixoteiste, Dickensomane, operaphile, puckhead, long-serving member, Red Sox and E-Street Nations and, more recently, for want of a better handle, "Nats Nation," rising out of the National Capital and soon to engulf the Middle Atlantic States before truly going national on the backs of young Strasburg, Harper, and company.
Gives a lot of 5's. Reads or listens or watches expecting to love something. Often does.
Devoutly wishes that everyone who reviews a book, CD, or movie at this site would include an argument, comment, observation, or slender hint that gives reader at least a glimmer of why s/he might regard reviewer as a window to truth on the work at hand--something beyond "this is the best novel yet written" or "this CD is rubbish" or, perhaps worst of all, "this is my favorite book."
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Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
This is the mystery of two millennia, right? How does an obscure sect led by an executed convict go from less than 100 adherents to an estimated 6 million on the eve on Constantine's "conversion" in the early fourth century? Social scientist Rodney Stark did more than puzzle: he created a set of testable hypotheses and tried, via secondary literature (he reads no ancient language and disclaims any expertise in the traditional scholarship of early church history), to probe the key issues. Along the way, he uses contemporary social science findings from demography, the sociology of small groups, the psychology of conversion, medical statistics, and every other conceptual lever… Read more
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When Henry James sat down to write on his Venetian travels for what later became the Italian Hours, he began with a disclaimer: "It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything to it." Turning to Shakespeare, we might amuse ourselves by writing on, say, Hamlet, but can anything be said that's not already been said, and better, a dozen times, by superior critics and closer readers? In the appropriate spirit of humility (and in utter submission to the Bard and his great gift to civilization), I offer a few thoughts on the Arden 2nd Edition of Hamlet, and not on "the greatest work in the history of… Read more
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So sings the great contemporary troubadour, Richard Thompson, whose song title rings like a commentary on Tom Perrotta's wry, angular, strangely gripping Little Children, perhaps the most peculiar thriller this side of, oh, Ian McEwan. I say peculiar because Perrotta has assembled a compendium of male, mostly sexual, anxieties, given them names and histories, and melded them into four-fifths of a cracking good novel. And although the McEwan comparison is admittedly a stretch, long passages of Little Children induced physiological effects upon me, in my stomach, in particular, in much the same way McEwan does. But Perrotta's pallete is considerably brighter, positively Turneresque:… Read more
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