Monthly Archives: July 2009

The Magic World of Children’s Lit

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2009

William Kristof, the much traveled Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, wrote recently about the disturbing way that children’s IQ scores often drop over summer vacation. The cause is lack of intellectual stimulation. The problem is more severe with poor than it is with middle class kids. As an antidote, Kristof offered […]

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Applying Kipling’s “If” to Wimbledon

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2009

An exhilarating and exhausting week at Wimbledon has come to an end with an exhilarating and exhausting match between Swiss player Roger Federer and American Andy Roddick. Roddick was once my favorite player and Federer is my current favorite so I felt torn as I watched the longest match in grand slam history. It came […]

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Gatsby in Iran: A Dream Betrayed

By Robin Bates | Published: July 3, 2009

The Iranian authorities allowed Nafisi to teach “The Great Gatsby” because they regarded it as an expose of American materialism and decadence. And certainly it has that dimension. But Nafisi focused more on how the work explores the betrayal of dreams. Both countries have experience with that betrayal.

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Iranian Women Identifying with Lolita

By Robin Bates | Published: July 2, 2009

The kicker in the book title Reading Lolita in Iran is the shock of imagining people risking their freedom to read Nabokov’s scandalous masterpiece about an elderly writer who falls in love with twelve-year-old “nymphet” Dolores Hayes. What would anyone get out of that experience? The surprises keep on coming in Azar Nafisi’s book as […]

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Reviewing Lolita in Tehran

By Robin Bates | Published: July 1, 2009

  Yesterday’s mention of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books gave me an excuse to go back and reread that marvelous book. The work embodies the central premise of this website: that literature can come to our aid when we need it most, helping us negotiate even the most difficult of […]

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