By Rand Paul
Obama acts as though we no longer have a Constitution
Pantheon Books is an American imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. - Source: Wikipedia
Virtually all the impressionists revered Cezanne. Renoir said he couldn't "put two strokes of paint on a canvas without it already being very good." He made a point of working with Cezanne, and he owned several of Cezanne's paintings. He and Degas once competed to buy a Cezanne still life of pears.
Perhaps author Jens Lapidus, described in a cover blurb as "a criminal defense lawyer who represents some of Sweden's most notorious underworld criminals," was writing about his own clients when he describes how a Serbian thug named Mrado and his sidekick Patrik went about soliciting the "right" to run the coat-check concession at a Stockholm night club.
In the beginning, there are these words, "As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe." From time immemorial, writers, like poets and painters, have tried to play God. Now Alan Lightman, author of the best-seller "Einstein's Brain" and a variety of other fine books, goes them one better by being God, at least in the form of his narrator.
Coming-of-age novels can be simultaneously enticing and boringly ho-hum. They entice because most readers already have come of age and can be charmed by reliving or reviewing the experience.
Even to those who cannot read him in his native French, the 16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne speaks clearly, rationally and feelingly of what life is like. He tells of its darker moments: of mortality and loss and war.
"The Use and Abuse of Literature" (Pantheon Books), by Marjorie Garber: In an age that prizes short bursts of electronic information, Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber asks whether literature still matters. As might be expected of someone who has spent her career teaching Shakespeare to undergraduates, she answers with a resounding "yes."
Everyone should read Susan Jacoby's "Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age" because it deals with a topic none of us really wants to contemplate: life after the traditional retirement age of 65. We'd like to think that nowadays it's fine.
