Re "Second Opinions, Through a Patient's Eye" (Essay, Feb. 12): As a cardiologist, I have always encouraged my patients to get a second opinion if they are contemplating a major procedure or if they are hesitant about a treatment plan that I have recommended.
I accept long novels about young love written by old maids in South Dakota, detective stories concerning wealthy clubmen and female apaches with "wide dark eyes," essays about the menace of this and that and the color of the moon in Tahiti by college professors and other unemployed.
Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art by Julian Barnes (Cape).
We were talking about his new book, "Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art," a selection of articles that previously appeared in a variety of publications over the last few decades.
Julian Barnes's Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (Jonathan Cape) is a typically elegant and absorbing book by one of the great contemporary English writers, and with strong Gallic undertones – a wonderful set of essays about artists, many of them French, covering the period from Romanticism through to modernism.
I'm attracted by primary sources that are relevant to historical questions of interest to me, by famous old books on philosophy or theology that I want to see with my own eyes, by essays on contemporary science, by the literatures of antiquity.
But the Winter 2008 issue contains an eye-opening essay by Philip Hoffman and Jean-Lurent Rosenthal setting the current economic crisis in a broad historical setting.
Last year, in an eye-opening essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the writer David Tompkins connected VanderMeer's trilogy to the "hyperobject," a philosophical concept invented by the eco-philosopher Timothy Morton.
The "Suits" star recounted her experience visiting with young women in India in an eye-opening essay for Time.
And the sardonic reportorial eye that those essays displayed is one of this novel's most attractive features.
