On the Natural History of Destruction, by W G Sebald.

Very few writers could approach this book’s subject matter and deliver such a powerful, methodical damnation of a generation. W G Sebald asks a simple question in the first essay: how is it that the near-total destruction of Germany by allied bombing in World War II has been so completely ignored by the survivors, and particularly by German culture and writers?

I have created an eBook, in ePub format, of Theodor Adorno’s magnificent, haunting book, Minima Moralia, using the Creative Commons-licensed translation by Dennis Redmond.

I have been disapointed by the formatting of the Gutenberg edition of Ulysses for some time now. It lacks chapter breaks, so the only navigation points are the three parts of the book. It makes it hard to pick out a favorite episode to read. There is also inconsistent emphasis, capitalization, margins, spacing, etc.

The dual loss of Christopher Hitchens and Václav Havel this week have left the world intellectually poorer. Hitchens would be the first to disavow any comparison between the two of them, but there is a line in Disturbing the Peace that I believe speaks to the essential struggle of both: