Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  In the hundred and twenty-five years since two male lions terrorized workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway, as humans have encroached wild habitats at the accelerating pace of technology and habitat demands, more carnivores have had to resort to becoming man-eaters. And yet, the tale of the two maneless big cats that together were responsible for as many as 135 railway workers continues to haunt us in ways that few true tales of terror seldom do. Strangely, The Man-eaters of Tsavo , the account of the case written by Col. John Henry Patterson, the engineer sent to supervise the construction, nearly a decade after the incident offers a worthy summarization of the reign of terror but little insight into the strange behavior of the beasts. Patterson was, after all, a military and construction man first and his interest in zoology motivated by a passion for big game hunting. Indeed, only the first half of the book covers the lion attacks, the rest is a medley of memories of the con...

  Art, especially masterpieces, are remembered in pieces. For greatness does not lie only in the moments of grandeur but also in the particles, in the understated expressions. Masterworks are remembered almost universally as a whole but subjectively in pieces of brilliance. It could be argued that the parts make the whole a masterpiece and which speak strong individually will vary from responder. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment was the first of his two works which would come to stand head and shoulder above the rest. Many consider The Brothers Karamazov to be the peak of Dostoevsky’s genius but few literary works feel as complete a foray into despair as Crime and Punishment , achieving in its look into the dark recesses of the human mind a near perfection. There are many aspects of the novel that linger in the mind, from the description of the decaying edifice where Alyona Ivanovna lives in paranoid hesitancy to the dives into the mind of her killer, Raskolnikov who m...