Category: books

“Wild Rose” with Jessie Buckley

July 13, 2026 • 9:00 am

One of the finest new movies I’ve seen in the last decade or so was “Hamnet” (2025), about Shakespeare’s relationship with his family and his writing and production of “Hamlet”.  But Will himself makes very little appearance in the film, as the story is driven by a mesmerizing performance from Jessie Buckley as Agnes Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife, who lives through the death of their 11-year-old son Hamnet. While Agnes abides in Stratford, Shakespeare goes off to London to write and produce his plays.

I won’t give much of a spoiler, but I will say that the ending involves Agnes’s unannounced trip to London to see the first production of “Hamlet.”  The most wonderful part is the last ten minutes of the film, which focuses almost solely on Buckley’s face as she realizes that the play is based on her late son.  It is a tour de force of acting done only through facial expression, and it’s mesmerizing, moving rapidly back and forth between grief and elation. When I saw that in the theater, through tears, I thought immediately, “This woman is going to win an Oscar.” And so she did: Buckley took home the 2025 Oscar for Best Actress.

If you haven’t seen “Hamnet,” do so immediately. A few people here haven’t liked it, perhaps because it has a touch of magical realism, but I found it fantastic in both senses. Further, it’s one of those movies just as good as the book that inspired it, the eponymous novel by Maggie O’Farrell (2020).  Two other pairs of great movies made from great books are “The Remains of the Day” (1993 movie based on 1989 book) and “Never Let Me Go” (2010 film based on a 2005 novel). I have a weakness for Ishiguro, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In case you haven’t seen the movie “Hamnet”—nor read the book—here’s the trailer. There is nowhere I can find that whole last crucial scene with Buckley, but this is what’s on YouTube. And the bits of that last scene shown below still make me tear up.

I digress, but today I’d like to recommend a movie brought to my attention by my nephew Steven, who knows of my admiration for Buckley and shares it.  He knows far more about movies than I, watches tons of them, has great taste, is paid to write about them, and calls Buckley, whom he interviewed, “the finest actress of her generation”.

I didn’t know anything about Buckley’s oeuvre, but Steven told me I needed to watch an earlier movie of hers, “Wild Rose,” released in 2018. It couldn’t be more different from “Hamnet.” Here Buckley plays Rose-Lynn, a Glaswegian (with the proper and appealing accent) who’s just been released after a year in jail for having tossed a packet of heroin over the jail fence from the outside. Her dream is to become a country singer, and her dream destination is Nashville. She’s a potty-mouthed single mom with two kids, depending heavily on her mother to take care of them.  Her mother is wonderfully played by Julie Walters, and her employer, for whom she cleans house, by Sophie Ok0nedo, of whom I hadn’t heard but was delighted to see onscreen. Walters is famous, and Okonedo should be. Her background is great:

Okonedo was born on 11 August 1968 in London, the daughter of Joan (née Allman), a Jewish Pilates teacher who was born in the East End of London, and Henry Okonedo (1939–2009), a British Nigerian who worked for the government. Okonedo’s maternal grandparents, who spoke Yiddish, were from families of Russian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish origin. Okonedo was raised in her mother’s Jewish faith.

“Wild Rose” shows Rose-Lynn’s ups and downs as she fights for her dream, and I won’t spoil it save to say that Buckley puts on another bravura and mesmerizing performance. I bet almost no reader has seen it, and it’s surely not widely known in America. Buckley does all her own country singing, and she’s excellent (see below). Steven tells me that the movie’s final song, ““Glasgow (No Place Like Home)”, was written by Mary Steenburgen. Steenburgen, who herself won Best Supporting Actress in “Melvin and Howard”, came to her second career as a songwriter at 47, when after a minor operation on her arm she came out of general anesthesia with her head suddenly flooded with tunes!

I digress again.  If you can see “Wild Rose,” do so. Steven tells me that if you become a Jessie Buckley acolyte, two other “essential” films are “Beast” (2017) and “The Lost Daughter” (2021), which according to Wikipedia “received a four-minute standing ovation from Venice Film Festival attendees in the Sala Grande.”

Here’s the trailer for “Wild Rose”:

One final digression, and I’ll quote my nephew:

Another tidbit about [Buckley] is that she first broke through on a U.K. talent show whose winner got to play Nancy in a West End revival of Oliver! Jessie finished second despite having the support of Andrew Lloyd Webber, who was one of the judges. Here she is, at 18 years old, singing a song from Oliver! (She sang about a dozen other songs throughout the run of the show, all viewable on YouTube.)

Short review: “Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return”

June 30, 2026 • 9:45 am

About two weeks ago I reported favorably on a book, Persepolis, that was new to me. It was a graphic novel, a genre I don’t often essay, but it was excellent.  And that book had a sequel (Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return), which I finished yesterday and I’ll mention today. First, here’s some of what I wrote about the first part:

The other day I reported on the death of Marjane Satrapi, comic book creator (she preferred that term to “graphic novel”), film producer, and author.  She was only 56, and her family reported that she became depressed and “died of sadness” about a year after her partner, Mattias Ripa, died of cancer.  Wikipedia outlines her accomplishments, headed by the comic book Persepolis, which came in two volumes:

Her best-known works include the graphic novel Persepolis and its film adaptation; the graphic novel Chicken with Plums; Woman, Life, Freedom; and the Marie Curie biopic Radioactive.

The success of Persepolis established Satrapi as one of the most widely read Iranian authors in the world, and her role in co-directing the film adaptation led to her becoming the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Yesterday I finished the first volume of Persepolis, and was greatly moved by the illustrated account of Satrapi’s life in Iran, both under the Shah and thereafter.  Her disillusionment with 1979 Iranian Revolution is the centerpiece, and the illustrations are instrumental in conveying her feelings.

Here are the two volumes together from the Wikipedia site.  The English translations came out in 2003 and 2004, respectively.  Together they constitute a graphic autobiography of Satrapi from birth up to the age of 25, when she left Iran for good.  She died on June 6 of this year.

The first volume ends when Satrapi is in Austria, sent by her parents to escape from political oppression endemic to Iran under the Revolution.  She had a hard life in Vienna, essaying the idea of boys (the thought of romance without marriage was verboten in Iran), encountering xenophobes suspicious of Iranians, falling in with a group of drug-taking punks, becoming depressed, and then finally living on the streets for two months in the winter and contracting a near- fatal case of bronchitis.

She finally returns to Iran seeking solace but finding only more oppression.  Marjane meets a fellow artist Reza, the two get married, and the marriage falls apart after two years. She finally returns to Europe, leaving Iran behind for good.

The story is simple but revealing as we get to know a rebellious, outspoken girl who cannot tolerate the theocracy, the veil it imposes on her, and the government Diktats that penalize people for any attempt to find pleasure or simply be themselves. Her tortuous search for love is also highly constrained by a morality imposed by Islam.

I recommend reading both books, which I see are available on Amazon pretty cheaply (volume 1 here, volume 2 here). I’ve been posting tweets daily from Masih Aminejad, whose life is devoted to freeing Iranians (especially women) from Islamic oppression, and this book gives you an excellent idea of what it’s like to grow up female in that country. It’s a shame that Western feminists don’t make more to-do about this kind of oppression.

Here’s a sample page from the Amazon preview:

Satrapi also co-wrote and co-directed (with Vincent Paronnaud) an eponymous 2007 film based on the books, a film that won a ton of prizes, including an Oscar nomination.

[Satrapi and Paonnaud] received numerous awards including the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and the César Award for Best First Film as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature.

In this clip from the movie, Satrapis is stopped by the morality police for running, an act that is supposedly lewd because it makes her butt wiggle. There’s also a scene in which the officials of her school try to cover up the women students.

. . . and the movie’s trailer:

Andrzej’s new book

June 22, 2026 • 10:45 am

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Andrzej has written a new book, whose cover is below (the title translates to The Blue Stone of  Sisyphus. Sadly, it’s unlikely to be translated into English).  I had an idea that this might be a memoir or autobiography, but I knew that Andrzej, who has had a varied and fascinating life (for example, as a newborn his life was saved by a Nazi doctor), could not limit his writing to autobiographical details. I asked him what it was about and when it would appear, and got this reply:

I still don’t know when the book will be published, probably not until the fall. And what it actually is, I don’t really know myself, because it’s supposedly a memoir, partly literature (but with zero fiction), partly essays, because there’s a lot of politics in it. A troublesome mix for a bookseller.
And I was pleased to see that the cover featured a picture that I took on January 4, 2014, on my first visit to Andrzej and Malgorzata (Andrzej had asked me about the photo before, and I said SURE!)

 

 

I remember that we were all walking together, and I dropped behind them.  When they walked ahead in a loving pose, I couldn’t resist taking the photo. Andrzej remembered the occasion but got the date slightly wrong:

As I recall, it was the fall of 2013, and we were at the Dobrzyń harbor. We wanted to show you the place where we had scattered Małgorzata’s mother ashes, and the hill where the stronghold had once stood when the Teutonic Order was brought here. You fell behind because you were taking photos of some ducks, and we went ahead, talking about our own concerns.

 

And while I’m at it, I’ll add my other favorite picture of my surrogate parents, along with the late Cyrus on the porch and Hili at lower left. This was taken on July 24, 2024. Good times.

 

“Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi

June 17, 2026 • 10:30 am

The other day I reported on the death of Marjane Satrapi, comic book creator (she preferred that term to “graphic novel”), film producer, and author.  She was only 56, and her family reported that she became depressed and “died of sadness” about a year after her partner, Mattias Ripa, died of cancer.  Wikipedia outlines her accomplishments, headed by the comic book Persepolis, which came in two volumes:

Her best-known works include the graphic novel Persepolis and its film adaptation; the graphic novel Chicken with Plums; Woman, Life, Freedom; and the Marie Curie biopic Radioactive.

The success of Persepolis established Satrapi as one of the most widely read Iranian authors in the world, and her role in co-directing the film adaptation led to her becoming the first woman to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Yesterday I finished the first volume of Persepolis, and was greatly moved by the illustrated account of Satrapi’s life in Iran, both under the Shah and thereafter.  Her disillusionment with 1979 Iranian Revolution is the centerpiece, and the illustrations are instrumental in conveying her feelings.

Below, the volume I read; click to go to the Amazon link, where it’s only about eight bucks. The publisher’s website is here, where you can buy both volumes in hardback.

Since I started reading this book, which won many awards, I’ve been surprised at how many people also know of it and have read it.  Besides Maus, which I thought was a masterpiece, and two volumes of The Rabbi’s Cat, which was also superb, this is the only “graphic novel” I’ve read.  I recommend it highly, and have asked Interlibrary Loan at the University of Chicago for the second volume.

Here are two pages from the book as reproduced by Emma Knopik , who gave it a favorable review on Medium.  Knopik’s explication of each page is indented:

I found page 43 particularly interesting. After a series of massacres and revolts, the Shah finally fled Iran and sought refuge with Anwar Al-Sadat in Egypt. Satrapi’s parents explain that although the Shah has left, people’s celebration will be ephemeral as long as the Middle East has oil. In this panel, her father’s expression shifts from his regular reassured, pleased look to a more cynical, concerned expression. Satrapi achieves this shift by raising his eyebrows, lowering his eyes and simplifying them, and turning his mustache downward as in a frown. The black background of the panel intensifies the unfortunate realization. Perhaps the most compelling panel on this page is the bottom left panel, that depicts Satrapi and her parents along with a dragon figure. The dragon represents the former Shah, and even though Satrapi’s parents are glad that the “devil” has left, this dragon figure exerts an invisible claw before the family. The dragon’s body acts to outline the panel, suggesting these figures unclenching control over Iranian’s lives.

This page below made a big impression on me. It depicts the death of many Iranian boys, age 14 and up, who were used as cannon fodder and trotted through minefields to find the mines (by being blown up, of course). Some of the boys were given plastic keys to wear around their necks, and assured that if they became “martyrs,” the key would let them into Paradise.

Knopik:

Additionally, page 102 illustrates the complex political situation in Iran that Satrapi was forced to process while also experiencing the staples of adolescence. The two panels on this page break from Satrapi’s smaller, more grid-like panelled pages. The top panel occupies a majority of the page, and it illustrates the young, impoverished children who were convinced to sacrifice their lives for religion. The figures are shown with the keys to paradise around their necks as they are dying in explosions. The figures are blurry and dark, with no distinguishing features, which illustrates the high degree to which they were robbed of their lives. The bottom panel depicts Satrapi going to a party and experimenting with a punk rock style that many teenagers cycle through. Unlike the children in the previous panel, Satrapi and her friends have distinguished facial features. Her friends’ poses while they dance mirror the children who are dying in the panel above.

The book is sad and moving in recounting Satrapi’s disillusionment with both the Shah and the mullahs, and the tales of her friends and relatives she lost who were tortured and executed. It’s a short read, and I recommend it highly.

Here’s Satrapi talking about Persepolis (she could speak six languages).

Although Satrapi was doubtful about whether her work could be made into an animated movie. In 2007 it was, directed and written by Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, and it’s supposed to be good. It certainly got a lot of awards and acclaim, including the Jury Prize (tied) at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.

Here’s the trailer.

A superb book about Gauguin

May 31, 2026 • 9:30 am

Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) and his erstwhile friend Vincent van Gogh, are two of my favorite painters, though I like van Gogh’s work better. But nobody from the post-Impressionist era ever went off to Polynesia like Gauguin, bent on living and depicting what he conceived as the natural life, unspoiled by the trappings of the West.  He produced some marvelous paintings (and sculptures, which he also was good at), though he was largely unappreciated and ignored during his life.

I first saw a lot of Gauguins at the famous Boston Museum of Fine Art’s exhibit in 2004, which displayed more than 150 of the painter’s works. I was mesmerized, not only by the colors and exoticism, but by narrative works like “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (see below).

Gauguin is buried on Atuona in the Marquesas Islands, his grave sporting a bronze cast of one of his wood sculptures:

Gauguin’s grave. Attribution: makemake, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I just finished a recent biography of Gauguin: Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin, written by Sue Prideaux and published by W. W. Norton in May of last year.  You can see the Amazon version by clicking on the cover below, which shows  a photo of the painter.  It’s thorough and well documented but not academic: that is, the narrative is up to date, replenished by recently available sources, and it’s an engaging read. If you have any interest in art, I’d recommend it highly.  Gauguin was an important figure in the history of art, sui generis in his work but influential in the work of painters like Matisse and Picasso.

One could characterize Gauguin’s life as that of the classic “tortured artist”—tortured not by mental illness (as was van Gogh) but by an endless search for a place to escape civilization, a tortuous marriage, an endless search for money to live on, and, in the latter part of his life, severe medical issues. (His heart was bad, he had chronic eye problems, and he suffered from open sores on his legs, the result of a stomping in France by clog-wearing bullies.) That, combined with his love of lots of red wine and an odious diet of tinned food, led to his death at only 54.

Yet he had moments of great joy and beauty, and this is expressed on his canvas. In that way he resembled van Gogh. His most pleasurable moments were at his easel, where he spent a lot of time, and his paintings from Brittany, but especially Tahiti and the Marquesas, are splendid. I show a few below.

Prideaux’s book recounts a tumultuous life, with four years of Gauguin’s infancy spent in Peru (he called himself “the Peruvian savage” for the rest of his life) and later a stultifying stint as a stockbroker in Paris.  He was a self-taught painter who married a Danish woman. Circumstances forced her and their two children to move back to Denmark, where Gauguin joined them on occasion. Money was always an issue, and Gauguin, like van Gogh, simply couldn’t gin up much interest in his paintings. His need to sell his art to buy food, paints, and lodging persisted throughout his life.

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, obsessed with the idea of starting a colony of artists, invited Gauguin to live with him at the famous “yellow house” in Arles, France.  They didn’t get along well, and it was during this period that, after an argument with Gauguin, van Gogh cut off his own ear and deposited it at a brothel.  After only nine weeks, Gauguin fled, but not before they had painted each other’s portraits. Here is van Gogh’s depiction of Gauguin:

Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret), 1888, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam:

via Wikimedia Commons
And Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh as “The Painter of Sunflowers.”  Gauguin really did love and admire van Gogh, but couldn’t tolerate his eccentricities and periods of lunacy; yet for the rest of his life he would sometimes paint a sunflower in honor of his friend, even in Polynesia, where Gauguin planted some (van Gogh committed suicide two years after Gauguin fled Arles).
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The rest is history—and in Prideaux’s book.  Gauguin took off for Tahiti in 1891, returned to France for a few years, and set out for his second visit to Tahiti in 1895, where he took up residence with young Tahitian women (13 or 14 was the age of “marriage” for many of them) and produced many canvases. But dissatisfied with the fact that French colonialism was spoiling his “paradise,” Gauguin repaired to the Marquesas in 1901, where he spent the last three years of his life. After becoming integrated into local society, he eventually stopped partying and took seriously to painting. He was found dead in his bed on May 8, 1903.

Here are a few paintings I like from Gauguin’s stay in Polynesia. Click to enlarge them.

Below is his most famous painting. Gauguin captioned it Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, (1897, oil on canvas, 139 × 375 cm (55 × 148 in), Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It is his vision of the span of life, starting with an infant on the right and moving an old woman on the left. Prideaux explains all the imagery of this and other paintings, which are reproduced in color in her book. 

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maternity, 1899:

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Spirit of the Dead Watching 1892, Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. This was apparently painted after Gauguin returned home at night, with his young mistress, left in the dark, scared to death.  There is a lot going on here; note the iconography at the bottom and the weird figures at the upper right. 

Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Among the Mangoes (La Cueillette des Fruits), 1887, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. Gauguin loved color and lots of it; he was always sending back to Europe for more and different paints. 

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Tehura (Teha’amana), 1891–3, polychromed pua wood, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Public Domain, CCo, Wikimedia Commons

Here’s Gauguin about 1891. The book describes him as a handsome man, one who had no trouble attracting ladies either in Europe or Polynesia, where he lived with several women from the islands. But he was often laid low by his many maladies.

Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And here is his last self-portrait, painted only a year before he died. To me this image looks like the middle-aged Eric Clapton:

Paul Gauguin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Below is the NYT review by Jennifer Szalai. Click the headline to read from the NYT site or find it archived here:

As you see, it’s laudatory.  One excerpt from the review:

For much of his life, Paul Gauguin railed against the deadening effects of bourgeois domesticity. But as Sue Prideaux writes in “Wild Thing,” her terrific new biography of the artist, for about a decade early in his career the self-proclaimed “savage from Peru” enjoyed a stint as a happily married stockbroker in Paris. . .

. . . Given how eventful Gauguin’s life was, it’s remarkable how much Prideaux packs into this briskly readable volume, which clocks in at barely 400 pages. She elegantly recounts his artistic struggles and his persistent money worries. She offers lucid re-creations of key moments, like the time Vincent van Gogh, his friend and roommate in the south of France, ran at him with a razor. (The next morning, Gauguin learned that van Gogh had cut off his own ear and handed it to a brothel worker.)

But it’s Gauguin’s experiences in French Polynesia that have understandably become the most notorious. (The last major biography of Gauguin, published in 1995, called him a “syphilitic pedophile.”) By the time he died, at 54, on the tiny island of Hiva Oa in 1903, he had gotten two Indigenous girls — each about 14 years old — pregnant. Prideaux does not deny this fact, reminding us only that in France and the colonies, the age of consent at the time was 13.

“Wild Thing” is not a whitewash of Gauguin’s legacy; instead, Prideaux fills it in with more detail. As a Frenchman in a French colony, he excoriated himself for his moral hypocrisy and became a pamphleteer, taking a job writing for the opposition party’s newspaper. He also helped locals with their petitions against the colonial authorities. In a letter to the inspector of the colonies, he noted the “singular irony” of “the hypocritical proclamation of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” when it came to “men who are no more than tax fodder in the hands of a despotic gendarme.”

Toward the end of his life, Gauguin — who never fully healed from a nasty leg injury sustained in Brittany when he was almost kicked to death in a melee by a clog-wearing mob — hobbled around his island paradise, subsisting mainly on a calamitous diet of canned food. After his death, the administrator in charge of selling the contents of Gauguin’s home did not believe it would be possible to pay back creditors in full: “The liabilities will considerably exceed the assets, as the few pictures by the late painter, who belonged to the decadent school, have little prospect of finding purchasers.”

Again, I highly recommend Wild Thing.  And tell us below what you’ve read and liked lately.

“Raising Hare”: an engrossing natural-history memoir

May 15, 2026 • 11:00 am

Raising Hare was published by Pantheon books in 2024; it’s a relatively new and short book (2024; 284 pages) by Chloe Dalton, who worked for the UK government as a foreign-policy advisor. But her regular work receded in importance when she came across a baby female European hare—a leveret—huddled in the bush in her country residence.  Her decision to take in the orphaned baby changed her life and character in many ways, all recounted in this wonderful memoir which has won many prizes.  I recommend it very highly.

The book is not mawkish at all, but observant and thoughtful. Most of it is devoted to her perceptions of the hare (which she never names), an animal that she lets run free indoors and out, though it usually spends most of its time in her house. The narrative lasts three years, during which the hare has six leverets of her own. Dalton becomes engrossed with its behavior and studies the literature on hares extensively in addition to her own constant observations.  All this results in the reader becoming deeply educated about an animal that few see—except running away at a distance.

It turns out that hares are not only playful, but extraordinarily patient, sitting in one spot for hours. (The leverets are largely left alone after birth, huddled inconspicuously in the vegetation save for a brief daily period when the mother suckles them.) The adults, too, spend a lot of their time flattened in places where predators are less likely to attack them. After all, hares have been called “nature’s buffet,” for they are herbivores but are attacked by all manner of carnivores.

Dalton spends a fair amount of time in introspection, wondering what it’s like to be a hare (a question never answered) and seeing how she herself has been changed by the constant presence of a wild animal. (I have to say that I’ve gone through something similar with ducks.) At any rate, the writing is first-rate, the natural history is thorough, and this is one of the best human-and-biology books I’ve ever read.

Two friends who have good taste in books recommended Raising Hare, and I didn’t look up any reviews before I read it. Now I will, so I’ve just read the NYT review here.  An excerpt:

Despite less-than-encouraging words from a local conservationist about the leveret’s chances of survival, Dalton committed. For anyone who has hand-fed an unweaned animal in the hopes of saving its life, her anecdote about desperately eye-droppering lamb formula into the leveret’s mouth on their first night together will spark an instant flashback.

As she found out, the internet is full of information about rabbits (the hare’s smaller domesticated cousin), but there’s not much on hares themselves. She dug deep into the research, even consulting the 18th-century poetry of William Cowper for clues on which solids to feed the leveret, and reports, “Porridge oats were the final revelation. When I sprinkled a few oats in a bowl, it swallowed them with every appearance of satisfaction.”

Dalton did not name, tame or cage the animal, turning her house into a free-range hare bed-and-breakfast. Its behavior began to change her own: “I was moved by the leveret’s dignity, the sense of well-being and calm it spread, and the simplicity of its life.”

Adapting her own work-driven existence to the daily rhythms and environmental awareness introduced by her furry new housemate, she had an epiphany: “I’d been waiting for life to go back to normal, but if I could derive this much pleasure from something so simple, what else might be waiting to be discovered?” The irony of learning to slow down from an animal known for its speed is not lost here.

. . . To divulge much more of the book’s arc would rob the reader of its most revealing moments, especially as the hare matures and her priorities shift. But Dalton’s clear, measured prose and Denise Nestor’s delicate drawings provide a gentle cottagecore vibe and a bit of solace in a world that has now returned to an even more frenetic state. In “Raising Hare,” nature, indeed, takes its course.

The review is, in my view, far less enthusiastic than the book deserves, so here’s a bit from the Guardian review:

The cover and endpapers of Chloe Dalton’s debut, Raising Hare (beautifully illustrated by Denise Nestor) at first seem to resemble these children’s books: there are no rabbits, but hares, doing what hares do: inspecting berries, leaping, boxing, feeding young and gazing outward, apparently, towards the reader. The story of this excellent book is in one sense familiar: a narrator, experiencing a rupture or crisis, is transformed through a magical encounter with a “wild” creature, a hare. But there is much more going on here. As hare and narrator enter into conversation, their strange dialogue begins to shed light on our relationship with our non-human neighbours, bringing into question assumptions about control, consent, boundaries and autonomy. Unlike my daughter’s books, this is a sustained and patient attempt to cross the species abyss, and to see the world through the hare’s eyes.

That’s more like it. Here’s the cover, and you can click on it to access the Amazon review.

The NYT gives a photo of Dalton’s hare attributed to Dalton, so I don’t think I’m violating any journalistic rules to show those photos. Isn’t she beautiful?

(From the NYT): The hare at the heart of Chloe Dalton’s memoir.Credit…Chloe Dalton

Here’s an 18½-minute video of Dalton reading from the book and discussing its contents, including the changes the hare wrought in Dalton herself.

Book take: “Heretic” by Catherine Nixey: a heterodox view of Christianity

May 12, 2026 • 9:30 am

Most of us probably see Christian doctrine as a monolithic set of ideas that emerged within a few decades of the purported death of Jesus.  “Common wisdom” also maintains that Christianity transformed the world for the better, spreading a message of tolerance and love soon after the Roman emperor Constantine began promoting the new religion early in the fourth century A.D. Both of these views are exposed as myths in Catherine Nixey‘s new book Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God (2024; the book appears to be called Heresy in the UK).

This is Nixey’s second book, following the successful The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, a bestseller that was translated into quite a few languages.  Like Darkening Age, which I haven’t yet read, this one dispels myths about Christianity. Wikipedia describes The Darkening Age‘s thesis this way:

In the book, Nixey argues that early Christians deliberately destroyed classical Greek and Roman cultures and contributed to the loss of classical knowledge

Heretic has had mixed reviews, both glowing ones (e.g., here, here, and here), and critical ones (e.g., here and here). The critical reviews often argue that what Nixey says is well known, so she’s simply reiterating the accepted history of early Christianity while pretending she’s forged a new thesis.  That doesn’t bother me too much, as I was unfamiliar with this history and thought it eye-opening regardless of its novelty.  I found Andrew Copson’s review pretty fair; here’s the ending (Copson is head of Humanists UK):

In a way the strange thing is how novel the premise of the book might seem to its readers. Classicists have always known that the mediterranean world was full of god-men, miracles, and magic so why should it be shocking to read this now? A lot is down to a conspiracy of silence (Nixey calls it a ‘gentleman’s agreement’) between theologians and classicists or ancient historians is real. I once asked one of my ancient history tutors at university what he thought about the historical Jesus and he scoffed. ‘That’s myth – not history’, was his view. You might as well investigate whether Vespasian rose to the heavens as an eagle. But he never said that in print to my knowledge and certainly not in his lectures. Nixey’s book breaks an important taboo in a well-crafted and eminently readable combination of scholarship and polemic.

The book describes the many competing sects of early Christianity, some of which saw Jesus as either a magician or sorcerer (sometimes with a wand!), or a figure of fun, and followed alternative scriptures that were very different from the canonical texts we know today. In some, God is depicted as of uncertain sex (sometimes suckling Jesus), female, or even as more than one figure. Creation stories differ, and accounts about how Jesus’s mother got pregnant vary wildly.

What happened over time, as Nixey argues, is that Christianity coalesced around the present version, discarding other “noncanonical” gospels for various reasons. She argues further that there’s been a tacit agreement among Christians and theologians to downplay or erase these earlier versions, pretending that the current version of Christianity emerged sui generis as a monolith after Jesus’s death.

Now we already know that earlier gospels existed (Elaine Pagels has written at length about them), so perhaps there’s some justice in the criticism that Nixey is reiterating what’s already known. But for those of us who don’t know the history of Christianity (and that includes most Christians!), it’s worthwhile to discover how the diversity of Christian faiths has been pruned away to its present form.

Nixey’s other thesis is that the idea that earlier faiths of the Romans and others repressed the rise of Christianity is misguided and wrong. In fact, she says, it’s the reverse. Nixey gives many examples of how Christians themselves repressed other faiths, including torturing and killing their adherents and burning their books. And some sects of Christianity repressed others. Far from Christianity coming to the fore because of its message of love, it dominated via repression and the sword. I’m not a historian, so insofar as what Nixey says is true, I was edified, even if she reprised what’s already known.

One of the best aspects of Heretic is Nixey’s lively and informal prose, something unusual in books of this type. She’s an engaging writer, and I’ll give two examples. The first is in a discussion about how early Christians opposed the idea of a spherical Earth, claiming that people would have fallen off the part that was upside down (p. 246):

. . . However, the idea that a spherical earth is somehow ‘pagan’, and its opponents Christian, crops up in several other authors, too. The fourth-century Christian author Lactantius—a man whose intellect and education were rated highly enough that he was appointed as tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine—also considered the idea of a spherical earth to be pagan bunk. In a typically zesty passage, after Lacantius has laid into Socrates (‘ many of his actions are not only undeserving of praise, but also most deserving of censure’) and had a good go at Plato (his arguments are ‘impossible’ and ‘unjust’), Lactantius turns his attention to the idea of a spherical world.

And from the Epilogue (p. 279):

This is a story about how ideas are born, and how they die. It is also a story about how they survive. It is about how ancient stories linger, and divine whispers persist. It is about how religions change and change again, as they travel, and age, and spread into other lands, and other ages. It is about how long memory is, and how short. It is about what was, and what might have been. It is also about what is. And it is about why, when midwinter falls, and cribs are set out, an ox and an ass stand and watch over the baby Jesus in the manger. (p. 279).

The breezy prose does not denote a lack of scholarship: the book is heavily documented and footnoted.

I’d recommend Heretic for its combination of history and fine writing. You can find the Amazon site by clicking on the cover below. (The title, by the way, refers to the way that the dominant form of Christianity prevailed by deeming adherent to other faith as heretics.)


Here’s Nixey in 2018. She was the daughter of a monk and a nun: