Saturday, February 14, 2009


The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. Bantam S2807. I've had this book for years, but I never read it. Lots of people read it in school, but it was never assigned to me and so I never got around to reading it. It doesn't seem very realistic to me. New York in the 1940's must have been a crazy place.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner. ISBN 0-15-140934-X. I got my copy of this book at Powells at the same time that I got the Biography of Satan (they were in the same section.) This book was easier to read than the Satan one, a bit less academic, but still very well written. The book covers the concept of Hell mostly from the view point of Western Civ. She includes stuff at the beginning about Middle Eastern and Mediterranean sources (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Jewish, etc.) but then mostly focuses in on the idea of Hell in Christian Europe, both in religious thought and in art and literature . The book contains many pictures of paintings of Hell done over the centuries. I learned a lot from this book and will be exploring some of the subjects she discusses in more detail. This book is not a religious book.