Monthly Archives: September 2017

Prayer for My Granddaughters

By Robin Bates | Published: September 10, 2017

As Hurricane Irma bears down on Florida after having devastated several islands, I find myself delivering up Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter.”

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Reasons to Read

By Robin Bates | Published: September 8, 2017

Will Schwalbe, author of “Books for Living,” has a great list of reasons to read.

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DACA Kids, Back to the Shadows?

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2017

“Invisible Man,” with its protagonist moving in and out of shadows, is all too relevant as the Trump administration threatens to deport the DACA kids.

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Kingsolver Explains Climate Denial

By Robin Bates | Published: September 6, 2017

Rush Limbaugh has been calling Hurricanes Harvey and Irma liberal conspiracies. In “Flight Behavior,” Barbara Kingsolver shows the dangerous impact of such pronouncements.

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What Tennis Meant to Tolstoy

By Robin Bates | Published: September 5, 2017

Leo Tolstoy picked up tennis late in life, even though at one point seeing it as symbolic of bourgeois decadence. A look at the novel “Resurrection” explains why he changed.

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“Find Work,” an Answer to Every Grief?

By Robin Bates | Published: September 4, 2017

Rhina P. Espaillat captures the ambivalent nature of work in the poem posted for Labor Day. It can be ennobling but too much emphasis on it can rob us of our humanity.

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A Blessing We Cannot Begin To Fathom

By Robin Bates | Published: September 3, 2017

Jan Richardson reminds readers not to offer facile rationalizations to those who have lost loved ones. She also reassures that the heart a “stubborn and persistent pulse.”

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Great Lit Changes Expectations Horizons

By Robin Bates | Published: September 1, 2017

Hans Robert Jauss’s believes that great literature changes horizons of expectation whereas lesser lit simply confirms them. If “Madame Bovary” was brought to trial, Jauss says, it is because it charted a new course in literary history that people didn’t understand.

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