Nathan Bick

I read Crime and Punishment in 2019, before I began my custom of writing book reviews such as this. It surprised me to rediscover this fact, but thereafter I recalled that, several times, I held off from retroactively writing a review with the reasoning that my recollection was insufficient. That’s probably still true, but this time I felt this review’s absence was too conspicuous not to jot down something.  The novel follows its main character Rodion Raskolnikov, a very poor and resentful student. Near the beginning of the story, Raskolnikov is in acute need of money and is planning to visit a pawnbroker, an older woman. As the moment of his transaction draws near, he becomes obsessed with the woman and her wealth, which he views as ill-gotten. He contemplates what he could do with money - he was, after all, an intelligent student with (in his mind) a great understanding of the world and worthwhile ambitions who much more deserved the money. Therefore, Rodion kills the pawnbroker...

  Introduction I began reading The Last of The Mohicans during a time of consolidation for my book collection. I’ll be moving from DC to Boston in two months, and transporting three full bookcases is more than I can justify. So, it fell to me to prune down the collection. Happily, there’s “Little Library” book donation cabinets around DC, including a couple near my apartment, which allowed me to think of my pruning as a “good deed.” Incidentally, it would be fascinating to know who picked up any of my donated books and what value they may have found in them. But I digress. Suffice it to say, I looked across my bookshelves, seeking to identify those books that I would likely never really read or otherwise had no more use for. My eyes fell on a copy of Mohicans that I’d had since childhood, and on account of my enjoyment of the Daniel Day-Lewis film adaptation and my warm memories of watching it with my late father, I decided to pick it up.  I realized that the focus of my readi...