BOOK BARN

#270: THE WORLD ONLY SPINS FORWARD. IN 2003, HBO filmed and aired a six-part miniseries of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. The play, subtitled “A Gay Fantasia on American Themes,” was performed onstage in two three-hour-plus chunks, Millenium Approaches and Perestroika; it was controversial, highly lauded, and swept the year’s theatrical awards. Its ambition and reach was obvious from the first. Playwright Mayo Simon wrote, “It was about the Jewish experience, the gay e

#269: TAOISM FOR ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS. Taoism is, with Confucianism, one of the two chief indigenous Chinese systems of thought, that have shaped their culture, world view, and history. By the time its principal texts were composed, around the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Taoism was already of great antiquity, and its influence has continued, reluctantly tolerated by China’s Communist political leaders, who seem to have figured they have to make the best of something they

#244. THE POETRY OF INDIA, SOUTH AND NORTH. Almost everything I’ve written on India has tried, time and again, to evoke the mass and welter of its culture: the profusion of its architecture and sculpture, the sheer tonweight of its literature, its plethora of deities. This hasn’t touched its other wild conglomeration: the twenty-two officially recognized languages, with numbers ranging from Hindi’s 528 million speakers (not to mention its official status in government docu