In which I fall to musing upon the amount of information an average reader of Charles Dickens’ novels would have been expected to possess in his own time and how it compares to that which could be assumed of us today.
Most of us likely first heard the name Isaac Newton when we were in primary school. For some, it may have been in a classroom; for others it may have been while viewing a television program – most likely a cartoon. However, in most all instances, I’d be willing to wager that the name was […]
When it comes to books that not only upset the metaphorical apple cart but felled the entire orchard of toleration on the part of those able to wield raw and unmitigated power at a truly global level, few can be said to have accomplished this more so than Galileo Galilei’s “Dialogue on the Two Greatest World Systems,” of which a fresh translation by Mark Davie and William R. Shea will be published by Oxford University Press in February of this very year as an addition to their superb Oxford World’s Classics series.
Had I not grown up in a rural American town where hunting was a very common activity among the residents, I doubt I would have ever understood very much about it. Even though my family contained very few hunters (in comparative proportion to those of many of our neighbors), simply living day-to-day, year-in and year-out among so many hunters – of both mammals and birds – was sufficient to acquire an understanding of both the mechanics of the activity, as well as the ethics and psychology of it.