It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

Yes, there are plenty of heroes and heroines everywhere you look. They are not famous people. They are generally obscure and modest people doing useful work, keeping their families together and taking an active part in the health of their communities, opposing what is evil (in one way or another) and defending what is good. Heroes do not want power over others.

There has never been an 'original' sin: each is quite banal.

Most of the literary classics are worth reading, if you've nothing better to do.

Platitude: a statement that denies by implication what it explicitly affirms.

I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

There comes a point, in literary objectivity, when the author's self- effacement is hard to distinguish from moral cowardice.