Robert Siegel interviews Zachary Leader

LISTEN: Robert Siegel Interviews Zachary Leader

Robert Siegel spoke with Zachary Leader, author of the new biography The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, at a bookstore in Washington, DC. Bellow “has fantastic mimetic powers, imaginative powers,” Leader says, “and he created a range of reference in his language that was new and more fairly American than the style of his predecessors.” Read the full interview from our latest issue here.

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Manna Is Real and Not So Heavenly

The description of manna in the Bible matches what Danin found in the Sinai Desert. He soon discovered that the white drops on the shrub’s stems were the digestive byproduct of insects that feed on the plant’s sap, known as honeydew. The secretion, formed at night, is loaded with sugar. The sweet liquid hardens to the form of white granules and is still collected from spring to early fall in many places in the Middle East today.

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