In 2005, Jake Morrissey published a book called The Genius in the Design: Bernini, Borromini,…
Book #2 in 2018: Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
I had read David Grann’s article in The New Yorker, “The Marked Woman,” last March so the outlines of this appalling story were familiar to me. The completed book, however, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (Doubleday, 2017),...
Book #1 in 2018: “It’s All Relative” by A.J. Jacobs
I decided a few days ago that I would record every book I finished reading in 2018 and say something about each. As it turns out, this book, It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree by A.J. Jacobs (Simon & Schuster, 2017), a Christmas gift...
Based in Batignolles 2: One Thing After Another
Gounod’s Faust was the first opera I ever saw, and I saw it at Palais Charles Garnier in Paris in March 1970. As we ascended the massive stair forty-eight years later, studied Marc Chagall’s rainbow of a ceiling and gazed out over the loggia outside the ornate Grand...
Christmas Letter 2016
Dearest all, I made the pilgrimage on my own, from our moorage on the Danube in Passau, Germany, up the Wallfahrtsstiege, the 321 steps to the Mariahilf. I counted off the Stations of the Cross and contemplated the gifts people had left, pleas for help and...