Though my education was decidedly inferior (a product of the Chicago Public Schools and lower-tier universities), that dis-educational experience did not seem to affect my interest in history and its broadest expression, the various narrative arts (for which I still owe thanks to mother who pushed me into
While I assign to the film Saturday Night Fever the role of token/emblem of the worst decade in my lifetime, I have never enlarged that judgment to include the whole of the most prevalent music of the time, disco. In the main because I admired the talents of the
As an unrepentant Vietnam war dissenter, political contrarian, and admirer of Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Christopher Hitchens, I had a feeling I would not be able to read very much of Karl Rove’s new memoir Courage and Consequence (Threshold Editions). But seized by a moment of attempted fairness,
My first impulse upon encountering this article, found in/on the ostensibly British Guardian newspaper/website penned (forgive the old-school locution) by their Manhattan correspondent Ed Pilkington, was dismissal. And upon short reflection my view remained unchanged. I’m not sufficiently acquainted with current brain science (actually not familiar
Reading Agni editor and Harvard mentor (The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age) Sven Birkets at his best is like listening to an old-style baritone crooner like Johnny Hartmann squeeze every last nuance from a classic ballad. The occasion for this observation is Birket’s
Leslie Jamison certainly has some weighty credentials—though I am in a quandary as to which element of her neophytic novelist capsule-bio/gestalt moved me to pick up her debut novel, The Gin Closet (Free Press). I am even considering the subliminal connection to my reading of Dan Okrent’
My guess is very few of you have read novelist Gilbert Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew, Gold Fools), probably through no fault of yours, and most certainly through no fault of his. This accomplished writer, who was felled by the big C in 2006, had published over 30 books, mostly fiction, and
Probably everyone knows someone whose predilection for collecting has gone off the rails and might be viewed as a pathological condition. (Consider the two daffy uncles in Diane Keaton’s 1995 film Unstrung Heroes.) Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, social scientists and scholars, have taken their decade-long research into
May is National Older Americans Month, Get Caught Reading Month, Meditation Month, Clean Air Month, Haitian Heritage Month, and a host of others—in honor of which I want to continue noting and advocating poetry. In this instance, Lucia Perillo, whose Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press) was a finalist
For the purpose of this communiqué I don’t need to resolve whether myth-making is both a necessary and sufficient ingredient of nationalism—let’s agree that it is at least a sufficient condition. Hence, the various fabricated or embellished narratives regarding the Pilgrims and their Native American hosts,
