BOOK BARN

#261: THE ONCE AND PRESENT EMPEROR.  Charles Allan’s Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost   Emperor (Abacus Books, 2012) is a good book on a great subject.  Reading even causally in the history of Buddhism, one encounters the story of Ashoka, who in the third century BCE became India’s first avowedly Buddhist emperor.  He promoted Buddhism throughout the subcontinent primarily by carving the precepts and exhortations into rocks and onto standing pillars, a number of which are

#260.  MAGIC.   Is there any noise anywhere in the world, any sounds and sweet airs so lyric-glorious, as those of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte--The Magic Flute ?  In Vienna at the end of the eighteenth century, there was a fad going for “magic” operas, so Mozart’s librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, raided fairy tales, Egyptian mythology, and a frame of Masonic numerology and moral adages to come up with the opera’s moonstruck and kitchen-sink storyline.  Richard Wagner compl

#259.  WHEN WE LEFT IT WAS STILL LIGHT.  In 2021, Louise Glück published Winter Recipes from the Collective (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux), a...