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Tag: Espionage Fiction

Reviews

The Happiest People in the World by Brock Clarke

Posted on November 11, 2014 by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

Like so much of Clarke's work it is full of brutally honest appraisals of human nature and tendencies but also absurd events and dark humor. But Clarke's chara...

Interviews

A Conversation with Olen Steinhauer – Part Two

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

In the second part of our conversation Olen Steinhauer and I discuss the life of an expatriate and its impact on your perspective toward your own and other cult...

Interviews

A Conversation with Olen Steinhauer – Part One

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Kevin Holtsberry / 2 Comments

A conversation with Olen Steinhauer in which we discuss his latest book, the risk of bringing current events into a novel, the magic of fiction, his approach to...

Reviews

The Cairo Affair by Olen Steinhauer

Posted on March 22, 2014 by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

Steinhauer use an ensemble cast, and his more literary style, to create a unique espionage thriller with current events and Eastern Europe's dark history as the...

Reviews

On the Lisbon Disaster by Olen Steinhauer

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Kevin Holtsberry / 0 Comment

Tension, bursts of action, complex attempts at the sorting of truth from lies and the inevitable resulting grays, questions about identity and the choices we ma...

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Last Four

  • Thomas Chatterton Williams and Wrestling with Race and Culture
  • A Creepy, Atmospheric Young Adult Story From Kevin Wignall
  • Jim Geraghty Returns with Another Dangerous Clique Novel
  • Senator Josh Hawley VS Simon & Schuster

Notes & Asides

  • Trump, he loves this. He loves the bile, the wrath, the mockery. It’s a well-done steak to him, with extra ketchup. But Hawley and Cruz? I bet they are befuddled and mystified. How could it possibly have come to this? They are, then, our own Stepan Trofimoviches. It was all a game to them, until it wasn’t. They are, like him, utterly frivolous. If they had any dignity, any moral backbone, they would resign their offices. But the very frivolity that led them, and us, to this pass is the vice that will prevent them from acting honorably. I hope I am wrong, but I expect they will go to their graves thinking How could we have known?

    Frivolity - Alan Jacobs

    - Trump, Hawley, Cruz & Dostoevsky: They are our own Stepan Trofimoviches
  • While the laws that we live under matter a great deal, Christians need to recover the primacy of the personal over the political more than anything else. If we can’t love our neighbors in a personal, politically agnostic, face-to-face way, they’ll turn to synthetic and unreal ideological communities to fill the gap left by the loneliness of their daily lives.

    The road back to sanity, solidarity, and social trust on both sides of the political spectrum will involve turning away from this ideological cul-de-sac and back toward personal communities once more. If Christian churches won’t do this, they risk being exploited as political playthings of the powers that be. -- Christianity as Ideology: The Cautionary Tale of the Jericho March

    - Christianity & the Jericho March
  • You’ll notice we are not having a national debate about paying off poor people’s mortgages. We could do that just as easily if the self-declared champions of the poor had any interest in anything other than their own status and their own appetites.

    They don’t.

    The College-Debt Debate Is a Culture-War Battle

    - Kevin Williamson on the college debt debate
  • Wharton’s novel was little appreciated in its time, and it hasn’t benefited from the same revival of interest that eventually rescued F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, another Jazz Age novel. Maybe it’s because our culture is created and largely controlled by latter-day Pauline (and Paul) Manfords. Gatsby’s novel is held to reject the American dream itself as a falsity, obscene wealth as corrupting, and the WASP ruling class as a permanent source of oppression, despite its evident decline. Compared with Wharton’s novel, which cuts deeper and is more personal, Gatsby looks like a cheap attempt at scapegoating. For Twilight Sleep is a satire of the modern age, but it targets some of our permanent temptations. If we’re about to embark on a new Roaring Twenties, Wharton’s book will remind us that we’ve been there before.

    Michael Brendan Dougherty

    - Wharton vs Fitzgerald and the Jazz Age Novel
  • Mental Anchors for Information Overload - my review of Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs

    - Me in the University Bookman on Breaking Bread with the Dead

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