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Gemini Outsider Book Review

Gemini Outsider Book Review

In the second Gemini Man book, Gemini Drifter, I said that Matthew and Jason had the freedom to make their own path. In Gemini Outsider, that choice has now been made. The choice is to seek anonymity and normality, whatever that means for two young men who have traveled between

The Long View 2009-03-09

The Long View 2009-03-09

John J. Reilly helps us to understand what decadence means: Barzun laconically informs us that late medieval Europe was a "decadent" society. I myself had thought that Richard Gilman had permanently retired that word with his study "Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet," but Barzun

WBH Weekly Digest 2023-12-22: All Westerns are Fairy Stories

WBH Weekly Digest 2023-12-22: All Westerns are Fairy Stories

My theme this week is around the true value of the romance. This Twitter thread lays out the mythic reasons why Jack Reacher and Conan are the same character. The mythic resonance goes far beyond their giant, hulking portrayal, as David Carradine's Kung Fu is another representation of

Chesterton: Introduction to the Book of Job

Chesterton: Introduction to the Book of Job

A perhaps unexpected source of my style of book criticism, and how I understand popular adventure stories, can be found in G. K. Chesterton's essay "Introduction to the Book of Job". This is an explicitly theological investigation of one of the most mysterious and allusive books

Uncle Iroh

Uncle Iroh

I wrote my review of The Last Airbender before I had kids. Since then, I did in fact show my kids this show, and they loved it. And I still do too.

The Turquoise Serpent

The Turquoise Serpent

Alexander Palacio's The Turquoise Serpent is R. E. Howard's Conan transposed into a demon-haunted pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and it is awesome. I imagine a certain fraction of my audience will know exactly what that means without elaboration, but for the rest of you let's dive

The Long View 2009-02-27

The Long View 2009-02-27

John J. Reilly was an attorney, a writer, and very well-read. He did like to opine on science, although in my years of knowing him and my subsequent years of going through his writing, he never struck me as a man who approached the world in a primarily quantitative way.