en-US Tue, 29 Apr 2025 07:06:49 -0700 60 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Review7528384989 Tue, 29 Apr 2025 07:06:49 -0700 /review/show/7528384989 Vathek gave 5 stars to Natural Right and History (Walgreen Foundation Lectures) by Leo Strauss
]]> Review7517922655 Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:14:32 -0700 /review/show/7517922655 Vathek gave 5 stars to Cymbeline (Mass Market Paperback) by William Shakespeare
]]> Review7503925564 Sun, 20 Apr 2025 11:02:15 -0700 /review/show/7503925564 Vathek gave 4 stars to Perrault's Fairy Tales (Paperback) by Charles Perrault
Charming little tome. Perrault's renditions are highly aestheticized: self-conscious, wry, and even a whit decadent in their lavish descriptions of dress and treasure. A favourite device has the deadpan narrator attempt to rationally account for the fantastic events. People make much of the grim nature of original fairy stories, but these are pretty sanitized, all sweetness and delight, not least 'The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood', which is as pleasant a tale as I ever read. ]]> Review7498294245 Fri, 18 Apr 2025 06:01:43 -0700 /review/show/7498294245 Vathek gave 5 stars to Prometheus Unbound (Paperback) by Percy Bysshe Shelley
This Tyrian-purple play occasionally seems like the work of an immature and overexcitable imagination - but who better to dramatize the ultimate redemption of universal humanity? Shelley ransacks the universe for imagery, but the eagle-baffling mountains, earth-convulsing behemoths, and golden spears with tyrant-quelling myrtle intertwined are not mere pageantry: they serve as the visible images and outpourings of an innocent and idealistic soul who loves the good because he loves the beautiful. If Prometheus Unbound cannot achieve the mythical gravity its author desires, it reaches for it powerfully, and with that becomes a splendid work of its own kind. ]]> Review7444107655 Sat, 29 Mar 2025 00:03:24 -0700 /review/show/7444107655 Vathek gave 3 stars to Confessions of an English Opium Eater (Paperback) by Thomas de Quincey
]]> Review7436168700 Wed, 26 Mar 2025 03:16:14 -0700 /review/show/7436168700 Vathek gave 3 stars to The Birth of Hedonism: The Cyrenaic Philosophers and Pleasure as a Way of Life (Hardcover) by Kurt Lampe
]]> Review7404710956 Sat, 15 Mar 2025 04:57:55 -0700 /review/show/7404710956 Vathek gave 3 stars to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (Paperback) by Lord Byron
]]> Review7317935793 Thu, 13 Feb 2025 10:24:57 -0800 /review/show/7317935793 Vathek gave 2 stars to A Room of One’s Own (Paperback) by Virginia Woolf
Woolf, like Byron, is only great as a poet; as soon as she reflects, she is a child. Unfortunately, unlike Byron, she is not content with conventional ideas, but is forced to play the revolutionary. Hence we are informed, that the job of the historian is to record facts; that men despise women in order to feel better about themselves; that misogynists are simply unsuccessful in love. This lack of philosophy mars the style: the author cannot distinguish between an elevated thought and a trivial one. Her smug put-downs of uncertain young men make especially noxious reading in our times. ]]> Review7248054044 Thu, 23 Jan 2025 06:37:08 -0800 /review/show/7248054044 Vathek gave 4 stars to A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls (Paperback) by Stephen P. Schwartz
]]> Review7181301736 Mon, 06 Jan 2025 07:01:53 -0800 /review/show/7181301736 Vathek gave 3 stars to Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion (Paperback) by Jan Assmann
This seems like a book that will be the more impressive the less you know. The scholarship is prodigious, the facts are innumerous, but the book wants unity of purpose. This is decisively not a book about "How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion", but a learned and lucid meditation on secrecy and multiplicity in religion and politics - though a bit of an aimless one. By the time we are discussing the secret Masonic ideology of Mahatma Gandhi, we are far indeed from ancient Egypt. ]]>