“When a mob tears down a statue, they are tearing down art,” Tony Daniel writes. “The artistic aspect of a sculpture is more important than its historic significance, and grows more so over time. All of this wrecking is a great shame. Furthermore, moving the statues to ‘safe spaces’ for political reasons plays right into the hands of the destroyers.”
Read the article here.
Uncle Hugo’s and Uncle Edgar’s were legendary among the community of science fiction, fantasy, and mystery readers—and now they’re gone. Rioters burned the Minneapolis mainstay to ruins. Daniel includes an account by owner, Don Blyly.
In the article, Tony Daniel reflects: “The hustle and bustle of the street, the shops and restaurants and churches and halfway houses and all the rest engender this hustle and bustle. When you burn such places down. . . you are not clearing for renewal. You are destroying the very possibility for growth and change in a community. You are killing hope.”
Read the article here.
Tony Daniel details how the new book by former Yale Law School Dean Anthony Kronman, The Assault on American Excellence, bizarrely avoids placing the blame where it squarely belongs—our morally bankrupt educational systems.
Read the review here.
Tony Daniel reviews essay collection The Patch, by John McPhee, and discusses McPhee’s work in general, which has been highly influential on Tony.
Read Tony’s piece here.
The only therapy animal that works is another human being, argues Tony Daniel at the Federalist.
Read the essay here.
Tony Daniel says that novelist and cultural commentator Bret Easton Ellis’s new collection of essays, White tears into the proponents of “woke” culture for eroding free expression and encouraging victimhood. Despite some melodramatic overwriting and amusing naiveté regarding the excesses of the identity-politics-drunk mob, Ellis’s judgement is sound: freedom of expression is all-important to an artist or writer.
Read the review here.
Gene Wolfe died recently at age 87. Tony Daniel says Wolfe was a major influence on him, and one of the greats of American letters.
Tony writes in the piece: “I’m quite sure that Wolfe’s reputation will recover and grow in the coming years. He’s as good as the best we’ve had in American letters, and, though there are many great contenders, he’s my pick for the best science fiction writer of them all.”
Read the essay here.
Tony generally likes the Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child, including Child’s latest, Past Tense, but finds them pretty thin gruel for readers. He comments that after 23 novels, Lee Child continues to sell paperbacks by the truckload, and making his books entertaining is no mean feat when you consider how ridiculous they are.
The review is here.
More than 70 foreign nationals working as spies for the CIA in Iran and China were systematically identified and slaughtered in the past decade, thanks to agency negligence, according to recent reports. “How and when is this catastrophic failure going to come back and haunt us?” Tony asks. “Because it will.”
Read the article here.
Tony Daniel says that the venerable best-selling author of historical fiction has gotten a bad rap in literary circles as Michener’s rejection of postmodernism has given rise to jaded and unfair judgments of his epic storytelling.
“Reconsidering The Astonishing Literary Legacy Of James Michener” is here.
Tony Daniel 