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Powell's Staff:
Five Book Friday: In Memoriam
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Every year, the booksellers at Powell’s submit their Top Fives: their five favorite books that were released in 2023. It’s a list that, when put together, shows just how varied and interesting the book tastes of Powell’s booksellers are. I highly recommend digging into the recommendations — we would never lead you astray — but today...
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Brontez Purnell:
Powell’s Q&A: Brontez Purnell, author of ‘Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt’
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Rachael P.:
Starter Pack: Where to Begin with Ursula K. Le Guin
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Customer Comments
Wendell Bowerman has commented on (10) products
Phaedo
by
Plato and David Gallop
Wendell Bowerman
, August 09, 2012
There are many translations of the Phaedo, and several of them are quite good, including this one by David Gallop. The dialogue is set in Athens, in the prison where Socrates is spending the last day of his life, discussing the immortality of the soul with several of his friends. The dramatic side is quite powerful, especially if you have already read Plato's Apology and Crito which take place respectively at Socrates' trial and while he is in prison, when a friend urges him to escape. Some of the arguments for the immortality of the soul are complex and difficult. Most of the annotations in the recent translations attempt to clarify these arguments, with mediocre success. There are two separate books on the Phaedo which do a much better job; unfortunately they are very expensive to buy, but perhaps you have access to a college library where you can borrow them or at least read them in the library. These two are (1) Kenneth Dorter, Plato's Phaedo an Interpretation (Toronto, 1982) and (2)David Bostock, Plato's Phaedo, (Oxford, 1986). Dorter's book is a comprehensive commentary and explication of the Phaedo, paragraph by paragraph. Bostock's book is focused on the philosophical arguments, with critiques of their validity and weaknesses. While they are not exactly easy reading, they are well-written and quite lucid.
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Sidetracked
by
Henning Mankell
Wendell Bowerman
, September 16, 2011
This is the first Kurt Wallander mystery I've read; I liked it enough to begin searching for the rest of the series. In this one, the reader knows from the beginning who the murderer is, so the suspense turns on the effort of the police to figure it out and capture him. The murderer's motive also gets clearer as the police uncover it; the process that Wallander goes through to direct the search, and his self-doubts about his procedures, add a great deal to the interest of the book.
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American Pie My Search for the Perfect Pizza
by
Peter Reinhart
Wendell Bowerman
, September 15, 2011
This is the "everything you always wanted to know but didn't know how to ask" book on Pizza. Mr. Reinhart covers the territory, not only how to make pizza dough but how to make your oven simulate a pizza oven; and the first part of his book is about the places in Italy and in the USA where he finds interesting pizzas; this part will also tell you a lot about what he regards as the criteria for a great pizza. He also provides recipes for a variety of toppings; my only criticism is that his toppings tend to be skimpy (and he admits that for him, less is more); I've eaten good pizza in the USA and in Italy and I've never seen a pizza with as little topping as he recommends. I'd suggest that you double his amounts, for starters.
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Bought and Paid for: A Jan Phillips Novel
by
Michael Halfhill
Wendell Bowerman
, September 09, 2011
This is an intellectual's summer read, not too serious or heavy, but not mindless. The plot is based on one a traditional gay themes: rich older man "buys" (literally in this case) the company of a younger man. But Halfhill does well at getting inside the head of his young man, Jan Phillips. And he adds some twists... involving Jan's mother in the story, and involving a world-wide conspiracy of older gay men who attempt to defuse international crises and attacks.
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Western Canon: The Books & School of the Ages
by
Harold Bloom
Wendell Bowerman
, September 08, 2011
Harold Bloom is one of those astonishing people who seem to have read everything about everything and remembered it all. Unfortunately, his arrogance matches his knowledge, and that makes his book tendentious in many places. But it is an excellent series of essays about 26 major writers from Dante to Samuel Beckett, attempting to explain what makes each of them so unique and so important. This book is one of Bloom's contributions to the great debate about whether there are books that one HAS to know in order to be "cultured," or whether the definition of culture is relative or even arbitrary. Obviously, Bloom comes down on the side of a permanent canon of "great books" and composes an elegy on the thought that the canon is in danger of being lost/forgotten. At the end of his book, Bloom provides a list of canonical works. Anyone can pick the list apart, both for items included, such as all of the works of Samuel Johnson, and for items omitted [it’s a Western Canon, so there is no hint of the literatures of Asia]. In general, it’s a useful checklist if you want to know what “great” works of Western literature you’re missing. I’ve been using it as a reading list for the past couple of years. The list is of literature, not philosophy [although he does include the Pre-Socratics, Plato, a bit of Aristotle, Plutarch (!), Lucretius, one essay of Cicero, Rousseau and Nietzsche] or history [except Herodotus, Thucydides, Froissart and Gibbon], or the social sciences [except Hobbes, Vico, William James, and Freud]. All of these non-literary authors are either highly literary themselves or have had an immense impact on literature of their own and subsequent eras, but their inclusion and the exclusion of so many other philosophers, historians, and social scientists, indicates a major weakness of his list. I raise this issue of what non-literature is included only because one of the most tantalizing features of Bloom’s book is what he refers to as the “independence of the aesthetic.” He seems to think or imply that the literary experience can serve as the basis for a philosophy of life. I haven’t tried to tease it out but it is an interesting idea, one that especially appealed to the German Romantic writers.
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In A Shallow Grave
by
James Purdy
Wendell Bowerman
, September 06, 2011
This book is one of the darkest that Purdy has written, about a veteran named Garnet Montrose who returns to his Southern home totally disfigured and nauseatingly repellent to anyone who sees him. His primary relationships are with two young men, Quintus Pearch and Potter Daventry, whom he hires to rub his feet and deliver messages to his childhood sweetheart, now the widow Georgina Rance. The story is told in first person, and once you get caught in its grim magic, you will not want to finish it but you won't be able to stop reading.
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The Poems of Catullus
by
Gaius Valerius Catullus
Wendell Bowerman
, September 04, 2011
Catullus is a great Latin poet whose verse is astonishingly contemporary in the treatment of his themes of love and betrayal. Most of his poems are brief, less than 20 lines, and about a third of these are about his love affair with Lesbia, who is probably Clodia, a married woman from one of Rome's leading families. Other poems deal with his friendships and betrayals, including some delightful insults. In addition, there are eight longer poems, including two marriage songs, a poem about Attis who castrated himself for the goddess Cybele, a complex and gorgeous poem about the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, and No. 68, perhaps his most complex and personal poem. His shorter poems are often quite obscene, and older translations generally gloss over or omit his blunt expressions, so it is important to read a contemporary translation. I have read three of them that I can recommend: by G.P. Gould, Charles Martin, and this one, by Peter Green. When it comes to reading poets in translation, I try to read more than one translation, because no translation is perfect, and comparing them can give you a better idea of the possibilities of the original. If you know anything of the original language, it is also helpful to have a bilingual version in order to get some sense of the sound and rhythm of the original. This translation, by Peter Green, is one of two best of those I read, and it also contains a comprehensive commentary, more extensive than either of the other two translations I used. A word of caution: None of the comments attached to this translation and to the Martin translation on Powell's site are about either of those versions.
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Bread for the Baker's Child
by
Joseph Caldwell
Wendell Bowerman
, September 03, 2011
The publisher's synopsis is accurate, for once, so I won't repeat that information. This is a very powerful and disturbing book, far beyond anything Caldwell has written previously: I think it is the book he was destined to write. The plot is "operatic," as the publisher says, but the characters are very real and appealing. The gay subtext and the prison violence are handled exceptionally well, too.
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On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers
by
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Wendell Bowerman
, September 02, 2011
This is an older translation by John Oman of the 3rd edition of Scheiermacher's classic work. A newer translation of the 1st edition by Richard Crouter is also available, in the series of Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy [see my review there]. Both translations contain commentary to identify the differences between the editions, which are substantial. Most modern critics of Schleiermacher prefer the 1st edition as a more "pure" example of the his early views on religion. Unfortunately, there is no commentary to On Religion (at least in English), so a reader needs to work his way through the book on his own; Crouter's introduction is helpful but far from complete. Schleiermacher's writing in this book is highly rhetorical and therefore difficult to follow; I have found it useful to consult both editions and their differing translations to clarify his meaning at many points, and the "explanations" which Schleiermacher appended to the end of each speech in the third edition are also helpful. The book is a classic in modern theology; Schleiermacher defines the "essence" of religion as intuition or "feeling" for what he calls the "universe"; he argues for religion as a "third way" of apprehending reality, alongside the philosophical and the ethical modes; and he denounces the conflicts between the various "churches" and institutions which represent religion in his time as in ours. His perspective continues to influence modern Protestant theology today.
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On Religion Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers
by
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Wendell Bowerman
, September 01, 2011
A classic in the history of religion, this book was written to convince the early German romantic writers that there is something about religion beyond what they despise. It's highly rhetorical writing, and somewhat difficult to read, but fascinating in its arguments.
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