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The Weekly Wrap: September 20-26

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The Weekly Wrap: September 20-26

Withdrawn From Publication

There is a first time for everything. One of the things I do with each review I write is link to the publisher’s description of the book. As I was setting up one of my reviews this week, I discovered the book was nowhere to be found on the publisher’s website. Wondering if it was a glitch, I searched the author’s name. Nada. So that was perplexing. The publisher had sent me a finished copy of the book, published in June, for review.

I found the book at commercial sites, I’d already read it, so I wrote the review. Before I began, I wrote the publicist for the book, noting when the review would go “live.” I heard nothing and so scheduled the review. The review went up the next morning and generated moderate interest. Then I heard back from the publicist. It turns out the publisher withdrew the book from publication. I received a basic explanation, but not specifics. So because of the lack of specifics and because I only had the publisher’s reasons and not an author response, I won’t say more than that.

But what do I do with the review? I decided to leave it up. You can’t really delete things from the internet and a number had already viewed it. And since the book dropped in June, I assume a number have read the book. But I also decided to add this note at the top of the review:

Editor’s Note (Date): This book has been pulled from publication by the publisher. The review, posted before this became known, remains for archival purposes.

I also raised the issue with the publicist of notifying those who have received review copies of the withdrawal of the book. Had I known this prior to reading/reviewing, I would have tossed the book. For this particular book, I’d invested about six hours in reading and reviewing it that I can’t get back. Longer books take even more time.

I also made a decision that I would I would check the publication status of new books proactively. If I can’t locate publication information with the publisher, I’d hold off, pending confirmation of the book’s status.

This was a rare occurrence for the publisher. And it’s the first time in over 2000 reviews that I ran into this problem. Hopefully, it will remain rare. But I wonder with the increased use of AI and the increasing temptation to cut corners…. But I have a better handle on how I’ll handle this as a reviewer.

Five Articles Worth Reading

I’ve written on AI a number of times. I don’t believe it belongs in publishing. I’ve been concerned about the shortcuts to real thinking by humans, the elimination of large numbers of jobs, and the huge sums of money connected to the tech industry. And I continue to be concerned about the energy, water, and land use involved in data centers. What I should have thought about is idolatry. “The Deep Spiritual History of AI” explores the chilling spiritual dimension of AI. Consider this pull quote from the article:

“Transcendence, liberation, immortality, singularity, the uploading of consciousness—these are religious structures that organize how the field talks about itself.”

Since the death of Annie Dillard, I’ve seen a number of articles about her life and work. “The Enduring Mystery of Annie Dillard” asks the intriguing question of why she left so much of her personal life out of her writing. For example, did you know that when she was spending time in the Roanoke Valley, she was living with her first husband?

Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections published eleven days before 9/11. It seems he sensed what was coming when he wrote in the second sentence “You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.” In “The Last Great American Novel” Ed Simon considers what has happened to “The Great American Novel” in the twenty-five years since 9/11.

“T. S. Eliot and the Holy Grail” made me want to go back to Eliot’s “The Wasteland” to see if I could find the Fisher King of Arthurian legend in Eliot’s poem. I don’t remember that from college lit class.

I’m an Agatha Christie fan. But I’ve read most of what she wrote. Sadie Stein has me covered in “Love Agatha Christie? Read These Books Next.”

Quote of the Week

Kristin Hannah was born on September 25, 1960. She imparted this piece of wisdom:

“We can’t live other people’s lives for them. Even if we love them.”

Wise advice for couples, parents, and those who care for any community of people.

Miscellaneous Musings

The reason I link to publishers websites is to avoid directing people to a particular bookseller, including that big online seller. I realize I could make a token amount of money if I became an “associate.” But I support local booksellers including indie sellers. This seems the best way I can allow others to make their own book buying decisions.

The Cleveland Guardians just clinched their Division title and are in the playoffs. Maybe that explains the recent traffic to my review of Our Team by Luke Epplin, an account of the 1948 World Series Champion Indians, the last time this franchise won the World Series. Who knows…this could be the year.

I think I read mysteries to balance some of the dense theology books I read. Right now, I am delighting in J. Warren Smith’s Early Christian Theology. Dense but clear and delightful history of how the early church wrestled to understand things like the Trinity and the Incarnation. Richard Osman’s The Last Devil to Die is number four in the Thursday Murder Club mysteries–great good fun!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: George M. Marsden, Jonathan Edwards: A Life

Tuesday: Marilyn McIntyre, Start with a Word

Wednesday: Fritz Leiber, The Night of the Long Knives

Thursday: The Month in Review: September 2026

Friday: John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for September 20-26.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: September 13-19

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The Weekly Wrap: September 13-19

Consenting to Read

“Say ‘Yes’ to reading!” Sounds like the slogan for a literacy campaign. But do you realize that every time you pick up a book, you are saying “yes”? You are saying “yes” to another voice speaking into your thoughts. It means opening your mind to the world they have built in a story or the argument they are making. Your “yes” doesn’t mean “I agree.” But it does mean that you have decided to listen, to pay more or less attention to what they are saying.

That’s an insight I came across in Marilyn McIntyre’s Starting with a Word, a book on writing. She is a wise writer who cares about words. For McIntyre, the work of writing and the joy of reading begins with words. She reminds me of how different reading is from watching a video. Books call upon me to actively engage with the words, to think about what is written, and to discern the intent of the writer. Books also invite me to turn on the screen of my imagination and visualize the story in my mind. We say “yes” to all these things when we read.

We also consent to give an author our time. For a long book, that can be fifteen hours or more of your life. Our “yes” means no, for at least the present, to another book. And we can decide to withdraw our consent if the book isn’t worth the precious hours of our lives. I’ve also given up on series. After the first, very long book, I gave up on The Wheel of Time. Too many very long books, and I wasn’t crazy about this world.

To what books will you say “yes” this week? Our “yes” is actually a precious gift both to ourselves and to those who write books. It is, in the words of poet Mary Oliver one of the things you will “do with your one wild and precious life.”

Five Articles Worth Reading

Dónal Gill believes Jonathan Swift anticipated the dangers of AI, particular the sacrifice of human intellect to our machines. In “Jonathan Swift v. AI” he argues for our moral responsibility of self-cultivation.

In Live Laugh Love, Kristin Kobes Du Mez turns her attention to Christian women after taking on masculinity in Jesus and John Wayne. Caroline Fraser considers her argument that women have embraced materialism as a sign of divine favor in “Like My Jesus Sweatshirt? How Christianity Went Consumerist.”

Cormac McCarthy was a struggling author when he turned 40 in 1973. He took his truck, set out on a cross-country journey. Finally, he settle in El Paso and began work on Blood Meridian. Michael O’Donnell explores this turning point in “Cormac McCarthy’s Midlife Crisis.”

When I read “Laurie Anderson’s next manuscript to be locked away for 88 years in Future Library,” I discovered that since 2014, authors have contributed a work, revealing nothing more than the title, to be opened in 2114. “Future Library opens secret archive of unseen texts in Oslo” describes the project and some of the other authors who have contributed works.

Lastly, haven’t you wished to say more with fewer words? That’s what minimalist fiction strives for. JSTOR posted “Minimalist Fiction in Six Short Stories” with stories by Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Frederick Barthelme, Jayne Anne Phillips, Mary Robison, and Ann Beattie.

Quote of the Week

Queen of Crime Agatha Christie was born on September 15, 1890. She made this wise observation about money:

“Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.“

Miscellaneous Musings

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ” I haven’t read much of any Dillard, never finishing Pilgrim at Tinkers’ Creek. But I’ve used this quote in several talks. We lost her this week, when she joined another recently passed pilgrim, Wendell Berry.

I’ve always enjoyed Barack Obama’s reading lists and have been baffled by readers who pan these simply because of his political associations. He’s doing it again with a six part podcast series, “A Great Book.” In “Tom Hanks, Ta-Nehisi Coates and More Join Barack Obama’s ‘A Great Book’ Podcast at Audible” you can read about the books he will be discussing and the guests who will be joining them. A great lineup all around.

I’ve always wished I could be paid for reading. The closest I’ve gotten is some free books for review. So I thought it was interesting to learn that “Singapore pays people to pick up a book in battle against doomscrolling.” But readers need to put in 50 sessions of at least 15 minutes to earn S$1 (one Singaporean dollar, currently 78 U.S. cents). Somehow, that doesn’t seem much of an incentive.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: James F. McGrath, Beyond Deconstruction

Tuesday: William Kent Krueger, Lightning Strike

Wednesday: Patricia Allen, The Strain of Other Blood

Thursday: Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Friday: Douglas Groothuis and Lindsey Medenwaldt, What if Jesus is Right?

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for September 13-19.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: August 30-September 5

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The Weekly Wrap: August 30-September 5

Remembering Wendell Berry

I wanted him to live forever. But Marce Catlett, published a year ago reminded me that Wendell Berry was a mortal, like us all. I loved all of his writing, his fiction, essays, and poetry. On Tuesday, he crossed over Jordan.

Hannah Coulter was my favorite novel. It’s the story of a woman whose husband didn’t return from war, her decision to remain on her land in Port William, and share life with a second husband. Like everything Berry wrote, it is filled with communion both with the land and one’s people.

Land and people. Wendell taught me that love and careful attention to both are central to the calling of us all. We cannot care for the world if we do not love our people and our place.

He warned us to be slow to adopt the new and only do so if it was truly better, simpler, more energy efficient, and easily repaired locally. I don’t know if he wrote about data centers but I suspect he would shake his head at the folly of sacrificing arable land at the cost of huge expenditures of energy and water to impose AI on our population while we increasingly import our food from other countries, often with questionable food safety practices.

Yet amid the folly, he took joy in the bubbling stream, the changing seasons, and conversations with other men while harvesting. Few things were so beautiful as well as useful as a good team of horses. And few things so sustaining as a midday farm meal, with family and workers gathered round.

Thankfully, he left us so much of his wisdom in his books. Meanwhile, Wendell Berry is living his final Sabbath poem.

Five Articles Worth Reading

My first article is really three of the many tributes to Wendell Berry. First, verse from Gracey Olmstead, “In Memory: Wendell Berry.” Secondly, Norman Wirzba combines personal memories of meeting Wendell Berry with reflections on Berry’ sense of people and the land in “Wendell Berry’s vision of a sacred world.” Finally, Barbara Kingsolver, whose father (also a Wendell) worked with Berry to preserve threatened Kentucky lands, summarizes Berry in “Wendell Berry’s Message to Readers: All We Need Is Here.”

Perhaps it is fitting we remember Berry on Labor Day Weekend. One way to do so is to take a deep dive into JSTOR’s archive of articles on labor in “Labor Day: A Celebration of Working in America.”

However, contrary to Berry’s vision, our modern day “tech bros” have pursued a very different vision. In a review of The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore, Gal Beckerman fantasizes about taking a time machine to confiscate the science fiction these men read (or misread), that inspired their vision of the world. The review is suggestively titled “We Are Living in the Fantasy World of 13-Year-Old Boys.”

She’s an Oxford John Donne scholar and the writer of the middle grade Impossible Creatures fantasy trilogy. Now, Katherine Rundell has published a book for adults: Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. Amanda Ramirez interviews the author in “Voracious Appetites: PW Talks with Katherine Rundell.”

Finally, Mark Bauerlein writes in “Saved by the Norton” how the two-volume Norton anthology transformed him. It gave a structure and coherence to his studies and view of the world. He thinks these things are lacking in contemporary literary studies.

Quote of the Week

Mary Renault, who wrote historical fiction, was born on September 4, 1905. She offered this watchword for how we ought live:

“One must live as if it would be forever, and as if one might die each moment. Always both at once.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Last week, Dolly Parton. This week, Wendell Berry. I’ve remarked that it seems that I go to more funerals than weddings these days. And it seems this is the season of the passing of many heroes. Perhaps this makes one long all the more for the great reunion!

Matthew Crawford’s The World Beyond Your Head is deliberately titled. He contends our modern world has each of us living in our own autonomous mental worlds. He argues real knowing involves getting out of our heads and into the world of things and flesh and blood people. Crawford talks, as do Michael Polanyi and Esther Lightcap Meek about knowing as personal. I think this is an important message as we are tempted to immerse ourselves ever more in digital worlds.

Recently, I reviewed T.A. Gibson’s A Wayfarer’s Poems: The Invitation. As I was working on the review, I realized he authored an earlier collection, A Wayfarer’s Poems: The Mirror and made a note to get a copy, having liked its sequel so much. Yesterday, I learned the author graciously gifted me with one and gave me permission to use poems in my weekly Bob on Poetry readings. I don’t get paid for any of this, but things like this make it worth it!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Katherine M. Douglass and Brittany M. Tausen, Love Your Neighbor

Tuesday: Clarence Jordan, Sermon on the Mount

Wednesday: Gerhard Lohfink, The Light of Faith and Reason

Thursday: Agatha Christie, The Labours of Hercules

Friday: Tim Brown, Nolan

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 30-September 5.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: August 23-29

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The Weekly Wrap: August 23-29

Personal Libraries

Build a personal library. Unless you are at the stage of deaccumulating, I would urge you to consider this. Many homes have a bookshelf or two. I’m suggesting a real library. It could be a designated room or distributed through your living spaces, as it is in our home.

This doesn’t mean keeping every book you read. Rather, think of those books each member of your household treasures. Our household has theology and history, literature and science, cookbooks and art books. One room has Ohioana and Youngstown books. When our son was living with us, the library included his books, including stories we treasured reading aloud together.

As a child, my parents books helped feed my love of reading–everything from fiction to encyclopedias. Often guests in our home would take a book to read before bed. Sometimes those books would go with them! Hospitality is not just about feeding the body, but also feeding the soul.

Books are a kind of memory palace. They remind us of where we were in life when we first read them. Some, such as favorite stories and poetry and books of devotion are friends we revisit.

I also ponder the pulping of books and the decline of reading and worse dystopian nightmares. I hope we may, in our lives and beyond, preserve what is best of what people have thought and written. So, my advice to those starting out in life: build a personal library. It will be a friend for life.

Five Articles Worth Reading

One of the reviewers I consistently read is Jennifer Szalai, with the New York Times. This week she reviews classics translator Emily Wilson’s new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea in a review titled “For Emily Wilson, Translating the Ancients Requires a Dash of Cardi B.” That tells you something right there!

My newsfeed has been full of tributes to Dolly Parton, who passed this week. I thought “The Most Beautiful Woman” captured the many facets of Parton’s life and her cultural impact.

Those who devote themselves to the study of literature learn to engage in close reading. In “In Praise of Unclose Reading” Stephen Akey agues that there are also joys and a place for what he terms “unclose reading.”

It was many years ago, while working on a study of the theology of work that I came across josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture. I felt like Pieper wrote from another time or a different place, speaking into the dysfunctions of our culture. I was reminded of this by Griffin Gooch who makes the case for “Why You Should Read Josef Pieper.”

Finally, with students, teachers, and professors returning to the classroom, JSTOR ran another of its article compilations on “Back to School.” It includes articles on everything from primary sources to the mainstreaming of homeschooling, on libraries and reading lists and so much more!

Quote of the Week

Poet and essayist Rita Dove was born August 27, 1952. She offers this insight into the generous life that I really like:

“If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.”

Miscellaneous Musings

At a time when there are a record number of challenges and banning efforts against book, I am all the more impressed with the quiet work of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. During her life, this put over 330 million books into the hands of children, a great boost to reading literacy efforts. And during the time when so many are fighting about vaccines, she quietly donated $1 million of her own funds to provide seed money that led to the development of Moderna’s vaccine. If I had to choose, I want to be like Dolly.

I watched the American Masters documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World, on Tuesday. I’ve loved her poetry and was fascinated to learn that I had lived for a time in her childhood home of Maple Heights, Ohio. I was saddened to learn of the dark history of that childhood and her instinct, from the week she spent in the woods at 17, to seek out beauty and light, which shines through in her poetry, read by luminaries like Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Colbert, and her neighbor, John Waters. If you missed it, you can still stream it from this link or on many streaming platforms.

My son sent me this reel from Facebook on how the Internet Archive scans books without destroying them by removing the bindings. I don’t approve of what AI companies are doing in buying old books to train AI, but at least they could adopt this method and then donate the books.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Alan Noble, To Live Well

Tuesday: The Month in Reviews: August 2026

Wednesday: Muriel Elmer, Night of the Fireflies

Thursday: Stuart Kaminsky, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road

Friday: Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 23-29.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: August 16-22

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The Weekly Wrap: August 16-22

Amazon and AI

This week 404 Media reported tracing a shipment of old and rare books to an Amazon facility where they were scanned to train AI and then pulped. This follows a trend of booksellers receiving large orders for old and rare books for AI training purposes, a trend many are resisting.

What disturbed me is that this was another instance of Amazon aggressively advancing AI in the publishing industry. It is already the leading source of AI-generated works, allowing those creating these works to bypass conventional publishing while creating works imitative of human authors, often derived from their works.

Basically, Amazon is public enemy number one of human authors.

I have argued previously that AI-generated works ought have no place in the world of publishing. I’ll leave it to others to argue this case elsewhere. It is robbing authors of intellectual property. It tilts the playing field when works that take a week to generate compete with works taking months or years to write. Then, it also cast aspersions on all authors, especially debut writers. It displaces market share from human authors. If allowed into bookstores, it will also displace shelf space. And now, they are destroying old books.

The only way to deal with this is the marketplace. But this means supporting human authors through other vendors, since Amazon is also a huge revenue source for authors and publishers. Otherwise, Amazon will keep blithely going its way. And it is likely that the pollution of AI-generated works will spread. And I believe we will all be the poorer.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Related to my comments above, Jennifer Szalai reviews Jill Lepore’s new The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State in “A Government for the People, but Not by People.” She explores what happens when a liberal democracy is replaced by automation and machines.

Artificial intelligence offers the prospect of instant knowledge. In “Artificial Intelligence: Ars Notoria and the Promise of Instant Knowledge” Ann Lawrence-Mathers explores an ancient magical manuscript promising instant knowledge. It was not a good thing.

Authoritarian movements proclaim the weaknesses of classic liberalism. However, “The Unexpected Persistence of John Rawls” argues for the importance of Rawls’ works for articulating strengths of the liberal tradition.

Many commentators have noted that boys and young men are in trouble in our society. Joseph E. Davis, in “Nowhere Boys,” explores the underlying reasons for this crisis. This summarizes his argument:

“The boy crisis, therefore, is not a crisis of boys, but of the absence that is at the heart of our culture of autonomy. Parents and schools offer boys a language of limitlessness and push them along a trajectory of achievement in which many can find no resonance or inspiration, no stable and meaningful goals to guide and motivate their action. Being “all you can be” rings hollow when it is unclear what is important or necessary for you to actually be.”

In terms of the tilt of the earth, we have one more month of summer in the northern hemisphere. “Six Books You’ll Want to Read Outdoors” reminds us of the unique delights of outdoor reading, at least when it isn’t oppressively hot, stormy, or rainy.

Quote of the Week

Crime writer Megan Abbott was born August 21, 1971. Whether or not we are into crime fiction, many of us have at least one thing in common with her:


“I come from a family of readers. Our house smelled of book.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Abbott’s quote suggests why so many of us like bookstores, especially second hand bookstores. They smell like home.

PBS will be running a documentary on the life of poet Mary Oliver on Tuesday August 25, 9 pm ET. From responses to posting this on social media, there are a lot of Mary Oliver lovers out there. I’m among them. I also share something in common with Mary Oliver. She was born in and grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio. I lived there from 1981 to 1990. However, we never crossed paths.

I’m reading two delightful memoirs, worlds apart in many ways. One is by Muriel Elmer, describing her child as a missionary kid including the loss of her father, boarding school nightmares, and a wondrous display of fireflies one night. The other is from fellow Youngstowner John DeMain, who recently stepped down as director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra. He recounts his heroes from summer stock entrepreneur John Kenley to Leonard Bernstein, as well as the staging of a full length Porgy and Bess, which won a Grammy award in 1975. Look for reviews soon.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Marty Solomon with Reed Dent, The Gospel of Being Human

Tuesday: Carmen Joy Imes, Becoming God’s Family

Wednesday: A.J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All

Thursday: John L. DeMain, Working With My Heroes

Friday: Jeffrey A. Lockwood, The Good Quit

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 16-22.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: August 9-15

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The Weekly Wrap: August 9-15

Reading Projects

Have you ever thought of reading through an encyclopedia, from A to Z? In 2004, A. J. Jacobs published The Know-It-All, chronicling his big project of reading through the 32 volumes of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I am reading the book, and while I haven’t gotten to the end of the book, it is apparent that he discovered that lots of factual knowledge is not the equivalent of wisdom. I liked browsing our family’s encyclopedia as a child, but reading through one? No way!

A reading project usually involves either a number of books or one very large and challenging book. For many, the ultimate challenge seems to be the reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses or Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Hugo’s Les Miserables. Frankly, I have no interest in Joyce, but Les Miserables is on my TBR. I’ve known some to take on a topic, like the biographies of the presidents or the English monarchs. Others like to read all the works of an author. One of my reading goals for this year is to read the major novels of Jane Austen.

It seems to me that one of the reasons to pursue a reading project is that you’ve found an author or topic you love and simply want to read as much on it as you can. However, there is a certain allure for some to read through a set, whether an encyclopedia, a multi-volume theology like that of Karl Barth, or The Great Books.

I have two reading projects that I hope to get to. One is to read the set of Balzac novels my grandfather collected and handed down to my mom, who loved reading them when she was young. The other is to read the three-volume Systematic Theology of Charles Hodge. I bought it from a retiring pastor forty odd years ago. So, maybe in my retirement I’ll get around to reading it.

In the end, what it comes down to is that there are so many good books to read. But we only have one life to read them. So the project is choosing those books that will mean the most to us, to read and re-read.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Do you like thrillers and mysteries? I certainly do. The New York Times just published “Readers Pick Their 100 Best Thrillers of the Century.” You’ve probably read some and might find some others that pique your interest.

Richard Russo grew up in a hardscrabble town and his books revolve around characters from these places. In “Hard-Luck Men in Hardscrabble Towns,” Mark Oppenheimer looks at the corpus of his novels as well as reviewing the latest.

Many of us from the Vietnam era read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Now Susan Farrell has written Vonnegut’s War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five looking back at Vonnegut’s World War II experiences as a P.O.W. and how they influenced the book. Here is the Publishers Weekly starred review.

Melanie Challenger has written what looks to be a fascinating book on human agency, Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World. She previews the book in “Where Does the Will To Live Come From… in Humans and Nonhumans Alike?“

“Wielding the Blue Pencil” reveals that British publishers only added editors to their staff after World War II. The article explores the reasons why publishers added editors and the relationships formed between authors and editors.

Quote of the Week

John Galsworthy explains why politicians in power don’t always advocate the same things they did when in opposition:


“There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don’t say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.”

Miscellaneous Musings

“Jason Arday, Cambridge Scholar Who Resigned Under Scrutiny, Is Found Dead.” This story turned up in my email late yesterday. Police do not believe his death was suspicious. He was the youngest professor appointed at Cambridge but recently faced charges of plagiarism and of embellishing his resume. He resigned from Cambridge last week. Out of respect, I will not speculate, particularly because cause of death hasn’t been established and the investigations of the charges against him were ongoing at the time of his death. Very tragic.

This case also brings to mind authors rightly and wrongly accused of using AI generated text and not disclosing it. Recently, a novelist lost a $2 million dollar deal over such accusations. My son passed along this very helpful article: “You Will Be Accused of Using AI. Here Is How to Prove You Wrote It.”

Earlier this year, Daniel Kraus’ Angel Down won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. Three hundred pages. One sentence. Andrew Krivak’s Mule Boy is not that extreme but I’ve counted a single sentence covering a least four pages. Can’t say that I’m a fan of this kind of writing. Probably too much training about run-on sentences! But probably no one challenged him for using AI to write it!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: David Nasaw, The Wounded Generation

Tuesday: Christine Jeske, Racial Justice for the Long Haul

Wednesday: T.A. Gibson, A Wayfarer’s Poems: The Invitation

Thursday: Andrea Ferrari, The Fall and Redemption of Conscience

Friday: Andrew Krivak, Mule Boy

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 9-15.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.