:: Media Times Review Blog ::

From Mark Flanagan,Your Guide to Literature: Contemporary.
Author of “The Historian”

Elizabeth Kostova is the author of The Historian (June 2005), a chilling historical mystery that reaches from the present day into the medieval past of Vlad the Impaler, Wallachia’s barbarous 15th century ruler whose gruesome deeds gave rise to the legend of Dracula. In The Historian, Kostova’s characters hunt the immortal Prince Vlad across twentieth century Europe, from ancient village to dank crypt in a quest to destroy the vampire.

Kostova, a graduate from Yale and The University of Michigan’s MFA program, spoke with me about her novel which is quickly topping the bestseller lists.

Jennifer Snead, n+1

David Hempton’s Methodism: Empire of the Spirit
(Yale, 2005)

In mid-July, 1962, Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall came for a BBC television interview to Zermatt where I happened to be collecting that summer. The lepidoptera lived up to the occasion, so did the weather. My visitors and their crew had never paid much attention to those insects and I was touched and flattered by the childish wonderment with which they viewed the crowds of butterflies imbibing moisture on brookside mud at various spots of the mountain trail. Pictures were taken of the swarms that arose at my passage, and other hours of the day were devoted to the reproduction of the interview proper. It eventually appeared on the Bookstand program and was published in The Listener (November 22, 1962). I have mislaid the cards on which I had written my answers. I suspect that the published text was taken straight from the tape for it teems with inaccuracies. These I have tried to weed out ten years later but was forced to strike out a few sentences here and there when memory refused to restore the sense flawed by defective or improperly mended speech.
The poem I quote (with metrical accents added) will be found translated into English in Chapter Two of The Gift, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1963.

Charles Murray, COMMENTARY

When the late Richard Herrnstein and I published The Bell Curve eleven years ago, the furor over its discussion of ethnic differences in IQ was so intense that most people who have not read the book still think it was about race. Since then, I have deliberately not published anything about group differences in IQ, mostly to give the real topic of The Bell Curve—the role of intelligence in reshaping America’s class structure—a chance to surface.

Leland de la Durantaye , Boston Globe

Stated somewhat differently, the most brilliant American novel of the 20th century, now a round and ripe 50 years old, tells us that the artist cannot live in the world as he lives in the world of words–and that this is a lesson worthy of expressing in the world of words.

IN THE SPRING OF 1940, on the last crossing of a French ocean liner that would be sunk by German U-boats on its return voyage, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife, and his young son arrived in New York. The family’s first, precarious years in America brought many changes, but one element remained constant. Every summer, Nabokov and his wife would drive cross country to the Rocky Mountains, which offered the country’s best butterfly hunting.

S. T. Karnick, The National Interest

In the last several decades, modernity–the period initiated by the Enlightenment–has come under increasing criticism. Most prominently, of course, the postmodernists have put together a critique of pure reason, as it were, that uses logic to question the rationality of modern, Enlightenment-based philosophy. In arguing that all reasoning is based on attempts to gain, sustain or increase power, postmodernists openly seek to obliterate the very foundation on which the modern world was built: the supremacy of reason.

Paul Farhi, American Journalism Review

Philip Meyer, who has studied the newspaper industry for three decades, can see the darkness at the end of the tunnel. If present readership trends continue indefinitely, says the University of North Carolina professor, the last daily newspaper reader will check out in 2044. October 2044, to be exact. “I use that as an attention-getting device,” says Meyer, whose latest book, “The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age,” spells out the bad news in elaborate detail. “It’s shocking, but that’s what the numbers say.”

Rachel Donadio, The New York Times

Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder.

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, The Telegraph Calcutta

In his foreword to Philosophical Remarks, Wittgenstein famously said: “This book is written to the glory of God, but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood.” Wittgenstein hesitated, not because of any philosophical commitment to the claim that the most important things were unsayable, or because an admission of this kind would expose him to embarrassment in a secular world. It was because amongst secular and religious people alike, it had become very difficult to imagine living a life that was devoid of what he thought was at the base of a properly religious attitude: a life free of vanity, and a life not judged by any instrumental purpose. Any profession of religion could itself be judged as an act of vanity, or in the service of some other value: to shore up one’s own authority, to stake a claim to truth, or to ground some other expectation. Why was it that Wittgenstein thought that the religious sensibility was the most difficult to possess? So much so that he declares: “Religion as madness is a madness springing from irreligiousness.”

By Christopher Hitchens, Slate

One of the many problems with the American left, and indeed of the American left, has been its image and self-image as something rather too solemn, mirthless, herbivorous, dull, monochrome, righteous, and boring. How many times, in my old days at The Nation magazine, did I hear wistful and semienvious ruminations? Where was the radical Firing Line show? Who will be our Rush Limbaugh? I used privately to hope that the emphasis, if the comrades ever got around to it, would be on the first of those and not the second. But the meetings themselves were so mind-numbing and lugubrious that I thought the danger of success on either front was infinitely slight.