Malcolm Gladwell introduced the concept of the “10,000-hour rule” in his 2008 book, Outliers. As Wikipedia describes it, “…the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total … Continue reading →
Continue readingTag: books
Chadwick's Blog & Commentary: Mastery: Self Help or Just Opinion?
Robert Greene’s new book has me somewhat flummoxed. It’s not at all like his previous books. The other books of his I have were all ‘meta’ books – books about what others thought on various subjects: power, leadership, war, seduction, … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship
I was 8, maybe 9 years old, when my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship by Victor Appleton II. Probably a birthday or Xmas present. I can’t recall which. I just recall how … Continue reading →
Continue readingkirbycairo: E.V. Lucas and the Gradual decline of the Book. . . .
One of my very favorite writers is an obscure Englishman named Edward Verrall Lucas, usually known in print simply as E.V. Lucas. Lucas was the author of over a hundred and thirty books, a few of which are novels and biographies, many collections of essays, and quite a few excellent compilations of
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Snow White and the Huntsman reviewed
Take one part Brothers Grimm and one part Malory’s Morte d’Artur, add a dash of Tolkein, a pinch of Joan of Arc, a sprinkling of Robin Hood and a sprig of English folklore; mix it in a bowl with copious … Continue reading →
Continue readingPolygonic: New projects, new horizons
Hello, all you phenomenal followers of Polygonic, who’ve put up with both my obtuse rants and my long, long silences with absolute aplomb. Your stamina and support bends my actual mind. I wanted to just update you on new projects (and, as the title suggests, new horizons as well… well,
Continue readingPolygonic: New projects, new horizons
Hello, all you phenomenal followers of Polygonic, who’ve put up with both my obtuse rants and my long, long silences with absolute aplomb. Your stamina and support bends my actual mind. I wanted to just update you on new projects (and, as the title suggests, new horizons as well… well,
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Waterloo, 200 years later
This June we will be a short two years from the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo*. It is expected to be a large event, especially since the 100th anniversary was not celebrated because it fell in the middle … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Rasputin: Two Perspectives
Perhaps no character stands out in pre-Revolution Russia as much as that of Grigory Rasputin. He was influential, enigmatic, charismatic, secretive, held no office, yet had enormous influence on the events and people of the era. How could a barely … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Shakespeare’s Lost Plays
Shakespeare’s canon, as it is known today, is incomplete. The Bard is known to have written several plays that were not, for various reasons, included in the First Folio printed shortly after his death. Other plays, several included in the … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: The Pulp Renaissance
In the late 1950s, I came across a copy (1912; an original edition, I believe) of Edgar Rice Burrough’s first published novel, Tarzan, The Ape Man, on my parent’s bookshelf in the basement. A forgotten book, one my father had … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Plato, Music and Misquotes
I spent a pleasant morning, Saturday, browsing through the works of Plato, hunting for the source of a quotation I saw on Facebook, today.* I did several textual searches for words, phrases and quotes on sites that offer his collected … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: The Missing Lines
The National Museum of Iraq – known originally as the Baghdad Archaeological Museum – once housed some of the oldest works of literature in the world. Treasures from the origins of civilization, from the cities of Sumeria, Babylon, Assyria were on … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: April, the cruellest month
April, wrote T.S. Eliot in his remarkable poem, The Waste Land, is the “cruellest month.”* And not merely because of the inclement and unsettling weather that seems to mix winter with spring in unpredictable doses. Nor for the necessity of … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Culloden and the Family Tree, 267 Years Later
It doesn’t begin with Culloden. History is seldom so neat and precise that a single event can be identified as the start or end of a thing. Rather, Culloden was a hinge, a point at which events changed direction, when … Continue reading →
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: Enter Christopher Marlowe – Again
Back in the late 1990s, I wrote an essay about the “controversy” over who actually wrote the works of Shakespeare. I wrote, then, Not everyone agrees that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. The challenge to his authorship isn’t new: for the last … Continue reading →
Continue readingAnother Step to Take: Homeschooling Topic of the Week: Afghanistan
I noticed the book The Sky of Afghanistan, by Ana A. de Eulate and Sonja Wimmer, with the library’s collection of new kids’ books. The title of the book brought to my mind images of Canadian and American airplanes, but the front cover shows a young girl flying through the air,
Continue readingChristy's Houseful of Chaos politics » Christy's Houseful of Chaos: Homeschooling Topic of the Week: Afghanistan
I noticed the book The Sky of Afghanistan, by Ana A. de Eulate and Sonja Wimmer, with the library’s collection of new kids’ books. The title of the book brought to my mind images of Canadian and American airplanes, but the front cover shows a young girl flying through the air,
Continue readingArt Threat: Weiwei-isms: the Coles Notes of an infamous Chinese dissident
A magnitude 8.0 earthquake shook through Wenchuan County in Sichuan province of the People’s Republic of China on May 12, 2008. Official figures listed 69,197 dead, including 5,335 children, mostly killed as a result of shoddy school construction — a horrible tragedy, particularly due to China’s one-child policy, that caught
Continue readingChadwick's Blog & Commentary: The Consolation of Literature
For Boethius, it was the Consolation of Philosophy*. For me, it’s literature. Not to write about it so much as to read it. Consolation from the act of reading. And read about literature. Sometimes literature is made more meaningful, brought … Continue reading →
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