As I write this, the last of the 33 Chilean miners has just been pulled to safety after spending two months underground in a situation that once seemed hopeless. It appears that the entire world is celebrating, probably because we are all in need of hope. Given how we are continually battered by economic […]
Tag Archives: Charles Dickens
Hard Times in 1854, Hard Times in 2010
I am teaching Charles Dickens’ Hard Times this week and it is disconcerting to see how applicable is still is to modern life. To be sure, one needs to be careful with comparisons. Industrial England in 1854 is not America in 2010. Dickens was writing about a world in which there were no air quality […]
Forget Bootstrapism – We Need Each Other
Always be suspicious of people who talk about pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. The image is an excellent one since you can only rise if you have help from others. Yet many people think they are somehow diminished if they can’t claim to have risen on their own. Thanks to Dickens, there […]
Fighting Crime through the Classics
Reader Farida Bag sent me a link to an article from the London Guardian about literature being used to rehabilitate prisoners in Texas. The program, called Changing Lives through Literature (here’s the link to their website) has been racking up impressive results: Of the 597 who have completed the course in Brazoria County, Texas, between 1997 […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Changing Lives through Literature, Ernest Hemingway, Old Man and the Sea, Oliver Twist, Prison Comments closed
Obamacare to Tiny Tim’s Rescue
Paul Krugman made clever use of Dickens’ Christmas Carol in a column last week. The New York Times columnist and Nobel prize winning economist addresses opponents of the health care bills that have emerged out of the House and Senate, arguing that progressives should be pleased, despite the bills’ limitations. Arguing that politics is the […]
Is Father-Son Conflict Inevitable?
I had an interesting conversation with my two sons yesterday as we drove them and my daughter-in-law to the Portland airport, marking the beginning of the end of our summer vacation. The conversation began with me wondering why there weren’t works of literature that accurately capture the kind of father-son relationship that I feel that […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged A Christmas Carol, Cormac McCarthy, Daniel Defoe, David Copperfield, fathers and sons, Great Expectations, Hamlet, Henry IV, Homer, Human Stain, Lawrence Sterne, Nicholas Nickleby, Odyssey, Oedipus, Oliver Twist, Philip Roth, Road, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare, Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison, Tristram Shandy Comments closed
