What We Are Reading Today: Of Divers Arts

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Updated 21 August 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: Of Divers Arts

Author: Naum Gabo

A leading exponent of the modern art movement known as Constructivism, Russian-born Naum Gabo was one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century—an artist, designer, and  theorist whose work changed the course of modern art.

“Of Divers Arts” is Gabo’s beautifully written personal account of his development and growing into consciousness as an artist and his constant search for new techniques of communication.


What We Are Reading Today: Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson

Updated 06 March 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: Three Roads Back by Robert D. Richardson

In “Three Roads Back,” Robert Richardson, the author of magisterial biographies of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James, tells the connected stories of how these foundational American writers and thinkers dealt with personal tragedies early in their careers. 
For Emerson, it was the death of his young wife and, 11 years later, his five-year-old son; for Thoreau, it was the death of his brother; and for James, it was the death of his beloved cousin Minnie Temple. 

Filled with rich biographical detail and unforgettable passages from the journals and letters of Emerson, Thoreau, and James, these vivid and moving stories of loss and hard-fought resilience show how the writers’ responses to these deaths helped spur them on to their greatest work, influencing the birth and course of American literature and philosophy.
As Richardson shows, all three emerged from their grief with a new way of seeing, one shaped by a belief in what Emerson called “the deep remedial force that underlies all facts.”