Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.
Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series is on Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. It begins:
Two of the most famous lines Charles Dickens wrote, two of the most famous lines in the English language, are the first and the last sentences of A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” And, “It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done.” Both lines are connected to the the events of the French Revolution, which, along with the American Revolution, changed the world forever, a revolution which is now celebrated as aVisit D.W. Buffa's website.new birth of freedom, but which, at the time, and for a great many years after, was seen as the end of civilized life. Charles Dickens saw it as both.
The opening line, that remarkable first sentence, is not the kind of sentence taught today in writing classes; the first sentence is a whole paragraph:It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epic of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present, that some of the noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.In this, the “year of Our Lord 1775,” while Louis XVI was safely on the throne of France, a young boy was sentenced to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers and his body burned alive, “because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honor to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards.” Death was a remedy for crime, or rather for criminals; “not that it did the least good in the way of prevention…but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each particular case….” It was also a popular form of entertainment, and not just in France. In England, Dickens explains, people paid to see “the play at the Old Bailey.” Someone is asked what...[read on]
Third reading: The Great Gatsby.
Third reading: Brave New World.
Third reading: Lord Jim.
Third reading: Death in the Afternoon.
Third Reading: Parade's End.
Third Reading: The Idiot.
Third Reading: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Third Reading: The Scarlet Letter.
Third Reading: Justine.
Third Reading: Patriotic Gore.
Third reading: Anna Karenina.
Third reading: The Charterhouse of Parma.
Third Reading: Emile.
Third Reading: War and Peace.
Third Reading: The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Third Reading: Bread and Wine.
Third Reading: “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities.
Third reading: Eugene Onegin.
Third Reading: The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Third Reading: The Europeans.
Third Reading: The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction.
Third Reading: Doctor Faustus.
Third Reading: the reading list of John F. Kennedy.
Third Reading: Jorge Luis Borges.
Third Reading: History of the Peloponnesian War.
Third Reading: Mansfield Park.
Third Reading: To Each His Own.
Third Reading: A Passage To India.
Third Reading: Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Third Reading: The Letters of T.E. Lawrence.
Third Reading: All The King’s Men.
Third Reading: The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus.
Third Reading: Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt.
Third Reading: Main Street.
Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I.
Third Reading: Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II.
Third Reading: Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Third Reading: Fiction's Failure.
Third Reading: Hermann Hesse's Demian.
Third Reading: Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July.
Third Reading: Caesar’s Ghost.
Third reading: The American Constitution.
Third Reading: Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities.
--Marshal Zeringue
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