This week in the Great Books List

Democracy in America. Alexis de Tocqueville. 1835

It is somewhat ironic that the best book on American government and one of the most astute observations on the American character was written by a French aristocrat. Alexis de Tocqueville's 1835 travelogue Democracy in America was written specifically for a French audience and intented to spark debate about political reform before the country plunged into revolution again. The book, however, became a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic and today is regarded as one of the foremost books on American politics. Read more here.

Book of the week

The Blasphemer by Nigel Farndale

Perhaps it is because we are at war that the conflicts of the past continue to exert such a grip on the imaginations of contemporary novelists. Nigel Farndale’s debut novel is dedicated to his grandfather, 'Private Alfred Farndale, who died in the mud of Passchendaele, and again seventy years later in his bed’, and interweaves the story of a solder of the First World War, Private Andrew Kennedy, with that of his great-grandson Daniel, a zoologist, and the first man for four generations of his family not to serve as a soldier. Read the Telegraph review here.

Articles of note

A Generation's Silent Hero

As Robert Fulford writes in this week's National Post," Forty-five years after his last appearance in print, the most secretive and most eccentric of the world's important writers, J.D. Salinger, died yesterday at the age of 91, in the town of Cornish, N.H., where he lived in isolation for more than half his long life. Perhaps he left behind an explanation of his peculiar decision to cease submitting his work to The New Yorker or any other publication after 1965. Perhaps, as his many passionate admirers dare to hope, he left behind something much more valuable, a cache of work he had steadily accumulated in solitary self-confinement over all those decades, to be released after his death." Read the full article here.