“But the price of that fame and quasi-divine status took its toll. ‘Immortality had its costs,’ Porter writes, ‘and Homer paid for it dearly.'”
Author: Paul Krause
Review: “Homer: The Very Idea” by James I. Porter
As the Leaves Begin to Change
“In that waltz, you find me now/Singing, dancing, with the moon”
Review: “Hannibal” by Philip Freeman

“Freeman’s book, as the author acknowledges, is written as something of a eulogy to this great man of antiquity, who has captured imaginations for two millennia.”
Review: Eden Collinsworth’s “What the Ermine Saw”
“Almost all the key events of modern Europe were seen through the eyes of this painting, which Collinsworth vividly brings to life in her writing.”
Review: Barry Strauss’s “The War That Made the Roman Empire”

“Barry Strauss, America’s foremost popular classicist, brings the story of Actium to life in ways that rival and surpass Shakespeare’s tragedy Antony and Cleopatra and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra…”
Why We’ll Always Be Talking about George Orwell

“It is a shame, though, that whenever Orwell reappears it is almost always in the context of his dystopian political novel.”
Review: “Saving Yellowstone” by Megan Kate Nelson
“Much like the United States itself, the story of Yellowstone is one of tragedy and hope, defiance and cut-throat ambition, beauty and terror, charity and callousness.”
The Irresistible Passion of Peter Paul Rubens

“Rubens is my favorite artist, in part, because his paintings capture the totality of the human condition in its fleshy, pathological, and metaphysical realities.”
Review: Bruce Clark’s “Athens: City of Wisdom”
“Athens: City of Wisdom is a tour through over 3,000 years of the history of a city that has such imaginative sway and spiritual power over the hearts and minds of so many people around the world today.”
Fifty Years of “The Godfather”
It has been 50 years since The Godfather was widely released in the United States on March 24, 1972.
Review: Roosevelt Montás’s “Rescuing Socrates”
“In this rousing story, [Roosevelt] Montás concentrates on four particular ‘great authors’ that embody and encapsulate the human condition who shaped him: Saint Augustine, Plato, Sigmund Freud, and Mohandas Gandhi.”
Dante’s Divine Valentine

“Love is the central theme of Dante’s Vita Nuova and Divine Comedy. It is from love that new life begins. It is in love that life is sustained and made pleasant.”
Review: Arnold Weinstein’s “The Lives of Literature”

“His culminating chapter is a love letter from his heart of his life spent in literature, his life as it matured for himself, and he has given himself and his favorite books to us to discover afresh and anew.”
In Reply to “Jesus Mythicism Is About to Go Mainstream”
“As a former graduate student in religious studies and writer of the classics, it is deeply regrettable that the scholarship of the academy does not reach further and that century-old myths no longer of any substantial prominence in academic study still hold public sway.”
Remembering Sir Roger Scruton, Two Years On
“At the time, I would not have guessed my encounters with Roger through YouTube and a handful of books would lead me to studying with him just prior to his death.”