Much like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, this collection of elegant essays by the poet Mary Oliver is for those who “are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.” It’s a guide for dreamers – for people who … Read More
Category: non-fiction
“All was artifice.”
Can a 20-year-old character study still be relevant? In the case of this essay by New Yorker writer Mark Singer, which one British newspaper said offered “clearer insight into the mind” of Donald Trump than the longer biographies, my answer is yes. After spending several months with Trump, Singer … Read More
“And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rise up from the depths of time.”
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, perhaps the most dog-eared book on my shelves, doesn’t give advice on writing poetry. Instead, it’s what Einstein –his contemporary — might have written if he had been a poet. Compare the Theory of Relativity to this statement: “People have already … Read More
“The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.”
This 2015 winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction – “a work of rare beauty and revelatory honesty” that is “highly provocative, thoughtfully presented” — is a meditation on race as a social construct. Written as a set of letters to his young son, it raises many … Read More
“With grammar, it’s always something. “
This is the first sentence in the chapter titled “Plurals before Swine: Blunders with Numbers” in Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English by Patricia T. O’Conner. The tone is light-hearted, which, as the Publisher’s Weekly reviewer noted, makes it readable “even for those … Read More
“A writer’s goal is to light up the sky.”
“The difference between landscape and landscape is small, but there is great difference in the beholders.”
Recently, I visited Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house in Concord, MA, which has the chair that Emerson sat in while he wrote his famous essay “Nature.” As a fan of what Anne Fadiman calls “You-Are-There Reading” I had to reacquaint myself with this wonderful piece. When it was published in 1836, … Read More
“[L]adies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.”
Purely by coincidence, I was reading Virginia Woolf”s A Room of One’s Own during the week that the first woman became the presumptive nominee for a major political party in the U.S. In 1928, when Woolf gave a series of lectures on “Women and Fiction,” she described the differences in … Read More
“Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”
Simultaneously a “breathtaking memoir” and a “small instant classic of nature writing,” this book juggles multiple themes and techniques. One often-used technique is metaphor: we meet a fellow who is as “serene as a mid-ocean wave” and see the deer “ankle their way out of the … Read More
“Why, you may ask, should you write serious nonfiction as a story?”
The authors’ answer to this question: “[T]he first job of any book is to get itself read.” Narrative tension, they observe, “remains a highly effective tool for keeping the reader engaged with the material” (179). If that’s so, why don’t all writers use narrative techniques? Perhaps because it’s harder to … Read More
Best of 2015 Books
2015 has been a wonderful year for publishers and readers. My “Best of 2015” list consists of the books that I am most likely to read again. In the memoir category, Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard’s fourth volume of My Struggle is part of a series that I believe will be … Read More
“Anders was often the only one not invited to come and stroke other children’s new puppies or kittens.”
They didn’t invite Anders Breivik to see their pets because they knew that he tortured his pet rats by poking them with pencils. One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway provides layers of details about the man who killed 77 people in Norway in … Read More
“Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story,”
Researchers now believe that the average daydream is 14 seconds long, and we have about 2,000 of them each day (11). Scientists used to believe that humans dreamed in a story-like way only during their REM sleep cycles; it’s now thought that story-like dreams occur independent of REM and across … Read More
“Examine each position they take, and ask yourself ‘Why?'”
Negotiations often start with the question “What do you want?” The more important question, according to the authors of this classic book on negotiation theory, is “Why do you want that?” Understanding the interests that determine the positions is critical when searching for a wise solution. It isn’t easy. While … Read More
“Teaching is situational.”
One of the first lessons that new teachers learn is that it’s impossible to predict how well a workshop, lecture or discussion will work. Teaching is situational. What works well in one class might not work in another. That’s why Stephen D. Brookfield, one of the most respected scholars … Read More