About an hour into The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s meditation on nature, grace, Brad Pitt’s crew cut, and the laying of the foundations of the Earth, I turned to my wife, snuck a Twizzler from the bag in her lap, and said, “I knew this was going to cover a lot of ground, but I really didn’t expect the dinosaurs.”

I should have guessed that for a director obsessed with Big Questions, a family drama set in 1950s Texas would also be an epic about the birth of the universe, the origins of life, and, yes, frolicking CGI velociraptors, which give the film a Land of the Lost vibe that is at once

“I was under the tragic spell of the South, which either you’ve felt or you haven’t,” John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in “Mr. Lytle: An Essay,” from his new collection, Pulphead. “In my case,” he continues, “it was acute because, having grown up in Indiana with a Yankee father, a child exile from Kentucky roots of which I was overly proud, I’d long been aware of a faint nowhereness to my life.”

Sullivan’s previous book, Blood Horses, was an extended meditation on the horse, adapted from a gripping cover story he wrote for Harper’s Magazine in 2002, “Horseman, Pass By.” I remember thinking it

Toward the end of his life, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) entered a Sicilian church and was offered holy water. Caravaggio asked what good the blessing would do, and was told it would cancel his venial sins. “Then it is no use,” he replied, “because mine are all mortal.” Like most information about Caravaggio, this account may be a half-truth, if not an outright myth. But it captures a sense of the painter’s defiant character and resigned fatalism, and hints at the source of his intransigent aesthetic vision. In a portrait of Saint John the Baptist (painted soon before Caravaggio

The most charming thing about perennial Washington Post literary guru Michael Dirda is his near-on phobic aversion to saying anything other than that a book is wonderful and a pleasure (a word for which he has a long-standing affinity, e.g., Reading for Pleasure, Bound to Please, etc.). If we were all to write about reading as Dirda does, if we taught children to write from joy rather than to form arguments, then the world would have many more serious readers and far better books. Yet Dirda’s loving take on the legacy of Arthur Conan Doyle reveals that his strength can also be a shortcoming.

Books about corporations tend to stick to a few tried-and-true formulas. Many read like sports stories: Companies win with visionary leadership and by being smarter and showing more gumption than their competitors. Some of these accounts are anthropological treatments—thick descriptions of what it’s like to work within the unique culture of a firm. Then there are the angry tirades about the damage companies do.

Google, in many ways the most significant company of our time, has been the subject of books in each of these genres in recent years. Ken Auletta told the “great man” story of the

MOBY-DICK IS ONE OF THOSE WORKS of literature more honored than fully read. Many a bold reader has sailed into its opening pages only to leap overboard in the midst of some lengthy, minutiae-rich account of the whaling business. Melville’s action-adventure scenes, harpooning rather than sperm milking, have certainly inspired visual artists—from the Rockwell Kent expressionist woodcuts published in a 1930 edition of the novel, to the ’40s Classics Illustrated comic-book versions, to Will Eisner’s recent graphic retelling. Kent’s copious illustrations—nearly 280 images—kick-started interest in