BOOK BARN

#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

#268: OUR TOWNS.  For Thornton Wilder, the town is Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, the date May 7, 1901.  I’ve wondered what imaginative consent young people can now give his play Our Town , which may look to them at first like a rather arch and audience-courting version of small town life.  It was first produced in 1938; when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties a good deal of 1901 Grover’s Corners was still recognizable and familiar.  The media have since reduced lo

#267: A PARTY FOR HIS FRIENDS.  A quick-moving and entertaining documentary that has just (July, 2025) shown up on Netflix is a chance to learn something you never knew, or, if you are of sufficient age, to have your memory and sense of history revised.  Sunday Best  is about The Ed Sullivan Show  and the man behind it—one of the great success stories of early television, but a slightly different story than I for one remembered.  Sullivan, born in 1901 in Harlem when it was s