Carlin Romano | Playing 'Top Ten' with Will Durant and the grand sweep of history
Remember Will Durant (1885-1981)? If you grew up with the Book of the Month Club, some corner of your book-shelved field is forever The Story of Civilization, his 11-volume, six-million-word chronicle written over half a century and coauthored in later years with his wife, Ariel. The club offered it for decades as an inducement to join, and sold 13 million.
( By Carlin Romano, Inquirer Book Critic, 10/27/2002 01:07 PM EST)

Carlin Romano | Book title misleads, with scant modern thought on evil
Not since God put "evil" on the front burner by zapping Job has a world leader - so to speak - directed our attention to that notion with the consistent force of George W. Bush.
( By Carlin Romano, Inquirer Book Critic, 10/20/2002 12:08 PM EST)

Carlin Romano | Why do we love puzzles? Professor fills in the blanks
Do you stop to watch the neighborhood chess game? Can memories of ETS problems from exam days ("Two cars are hurtling toward each other at 120 m.p.h...") trigger instant seratonin spurts? Is a day without your crossword a Code Blue emergency?
( By Carlin Romano, Inquirer Book Critic, 10/13/2002 11:55 AM EST)

Carlin Romano | For fighter Reeve, the pen is mightier than the paralysis
It's not easy to look at Christopher Reeve. It's not easy to think about him. In that altered face, in that still largely immobile body, we see how life can go horribly, irreversibly wrong in one tragic moment.
( By Carlin Romano, Inquirer Book Critic, 10/07/2002 02:15 PM EST)

Carlin Romano | Greatness meets Greekness in tale of a gender shifter
All big fat Greek families aren't alike. The Nia Vardalos movie version orchestrates cliches of bighearted ethnics so smoothly that it continues to break box-office records. George Stephanopoulos' extended clan (he of the Bubba past, Sunday-morning present, and politically controversial sister) defies every working-class-diner stereotype.
( By Carlin Romano, Inquirer Columnist, 09/22/2002 01:42 PM EST)

A few books get reviews, but volumes overlooked
Momentous times threaten with neglect anything not momentous, which takes its toll on modest books. Even when history is on vacation, highly promoted and highly-paid-for volumes (often the same thing) commandeer space on book pages that otherwise might favor the spry and idiosyncratic, the eccentrically intellectual, the irrefutably local.
( By Carlin Romano, INQUIRER BOOK CRITIC, 09/15/2002 09:39 AM EST)

Carlin Romano | A rising flood of 9/11 volumes
'Ev-ree-bah-dee wants to get into the act!!!" banana-nosed comic Jimmy Durante used to shudder in his signature routine, his mock exasperation signaling that to do so was probably a venial human sin.
( By Carlin Romano, Inquirer Columnist, 09/08/2002 09:47 AM EST)

'Accounting Ethics': What a timely tome
If Ron and Brenda Duska were completing their new book, Accounting Ethics, for a big commercial publisher like Random House, they'd probably be under 24-hour guard - maybe even a suicide watch - in a Manhattan hotel suite, cranking out up-to-date pages as company officials on the scene pressured them to get the thing out now!
( By Carlin Romano, Inquirer Book Critic, 08/20/2002 02:24 PM EST)

Carlin Romano | American thought, narrowly defined
What should a history of American philosophy include? The aphorisms of Benjamin Franklin? Frederick Douglas' fiery view of the Fourth of July? Native American environmental philosophy? Enduring observations by feminist thinkers from Mott to Friedan? Or just the mainstream tenets of white-male philosophy and theology professors back to the 18th century?
( By Carlin Romano, Inquirer Columnist, 08/18/2002 08:03 AM EST)