Canter Bridge

when did film music get this good?, September 1, 2007

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Carter Buswell’s eclectic score underscores the emotional urgency of the film it accompanied. Of the two products, it may prove the more enduring. Continue Reading »

A review like this requires full disclosure.

Sara Arias is a Costa Rica friend of mine who was during my years spent in her country a student and parisioner of mine. At the Iglesia Bíblica Nazaret that was our shared church home she served as a vibrant and thoughtful worship leader. Indeed, it gives me little pleasure to note that she was one of the few members of that guild who understood that worship was neither about her nor about exacting a certain behavior intended chiefly to raise the self-esteem of musicians. Continue Reading »

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This engaging school ‘geography’ reference is worth its weight in at least copper, and you can pick one up used for under a dollar. The DK Geography of the World is that rare book that delivers more than it promises. Continue Reading »

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Upon visiting New Zealand for the first time two years ago, an enthusiastic Kiwi colleague recommended Michael King’s recently published Penguin History of New Zealand as ‘a true page-turner’. Continue Reading »

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John Adams exercised a breed of intellectual and political discernment that has perhaps become impossible in our day. David McCullough defines popular history for our generation. Continue Reading »

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Were there ever six months like these?

Present at the creation—and barely after the deluge—Britain’s David Loyd George, France’s George Clemenceau, and the emerging American empire’s idealistic Woodrow Wilson gathered to shape the world that was to be. Loyd George’s great-grandaughter, the Oxford historian Margaret Macmillan has given us a colorful description of those titans laying with nations in the drawing rooms of post-war Paris. Continue Reading »

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The great Churchill scholar Martin Gilbert’s ‘complete’ history of the Second World War can perhaps be faulted on only one count: plodding.

This weakness in rhetorical strategy is also the virtue that sets this history of the Second War apart from others. A glimpse at the dated chapters in the table of contents is barely enough to prepare the reader for the cumulative impact of marching month by month through this great conflagration. One skips from one military theater to the next, always aligned with the same dates. Continue Reading »

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When Wilsonian ideals met European Realpolitik in the wake of the First World War, it was already late. The soon-to-be victorious European powers were already well down the road to carving up the remains of the fallen Ottoman Empire. Continue Reading »

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In an historical moment when the ‘1967 borders’ are referred to as a simple fact—except in the offices of Hamas and their compeers—it is necessary to be reminded that these lines in the sand were the provisional conclusion of six days when blood ran plentifully around and upon them and nothing seemed obvious. Continue Reading »

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Martin Gilbert does not write small books.

It’s a good deal that we have this man around at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and that we can read the large works he gave us in the twentieth. Continue Reading »