Month: September 2002

In the 19th century they called this a Chautauqua—a small group of professors or other assorted eggheads traveling the country to give lectures, spread wisdom, and just generally drop science. What this means to you is, grab the kids and get ready to fill your brain all the way to the top, because the Smithsonian…

Talk about enlightened self-interest. This benefit, for 11-year-old Hendrix Johnson who suffers from a rare brain disease called Rasmussen’s Encephalitis, is a treasure trove of goodies. Paul Metsa and the Butanes, among others, provide the music. But dig the raffle and the silent auction—tickets to huge upcoming concerts like Cher’s farewell tour and Joe Cocker,…

Talented though he is, Dave Eggers was also the most overhyped author of 2000. For a while there you couldn’t go more than 10 minutes without hearing how the brilliant young memoirist of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was shaking up the staid world of publishing. That has toned down, thankfully, but Eggers is…

Worthington, Minnesota native O’Brien is best known as one of the more insightful writers to emerge out of the Vietnam War, chronicling the ongoing cost of the conflict in books like The Things They Carried , In the Lake of the Woods , and Going After Cacciato , which won the National Book Award in…

It’s fittingly ironic that Umberto Eco finds such rich soil in which to plant his postmodern mysteries back in the Middle Ages. In his fourth novel, 12th-century Italy is a backdrop for the tale of Baudolino, an Italian peasant who becomes the adopted son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa. Mixing…

It’s been 20 years since Milan Kundera first published The Unbearable Lightness of Being and became literature’s equivalent of a rock star. It was the kind of book that American college students thrive on—Eurotrash romanticism, haphazard pop-philosophizing, and lots of adulterous affairs with mysterious Women of the Warsaw Pact. If you wore black back then,…