Fierce & Tender: Book Review

May 23, 2022

Dene Maria Sebastiani’s story has left me—not wordless: I am, and always have been a man of words—but deeply moved, and in some mysterious way healed by their relentless exploration of the dark side of human nature and their celebration of the power of deep consciousness to heal the wounds that scar that every human […]

BORN A CRIME: Book Review

September 28, 2017

…It bubbles over with excitement and good humor, and at the same time it’s penetrating in the accuracy of its psychological and social observation. To have been “Born a Crime” was of course a literal truth for a bi-racial child in his native apartheid South Africa. Deprived of more than fleeting contact with…

GOING DEEP: A Book Review

May 23, 2017

…even as a layman with no professional application for its contents, I enjoyed the read and learned a lot from it. I came to it with some presumptions about hypnosis from which Moss and Prince speedily disabused me. No swinging timepieces or crystals here, no spooky instructions to “Go to sleep!”, no invitation to weird or untypical behaviors. No regression to childhood experience or prior lives.

A LATIN INVASION!

[Carlos’] paintings are frequently playful, fantastic, always infectiously energetic and vivid, working with iconography that ranges from the landscape of dream to fiery freeway crashes. They explore and expose both the artist’s inner consciousness and the social realities of the outside world.

ABSTRACTION

May 4, 2017

No surprise that I found myself thinking about abstraction as I made my way through the spectacular Matisse/Diebenkorn exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last week. I was pondering some pretty basic, perhaps even naïve questions, like Why abstraction? And, What is abstraction anyway? Also…

AN ITALIAN JOURNEY: Book Review

April 26, 2017

A few pages into The Delight of Being Ordinary I collapsed in a fit of nearly uncontrollable giggles. They were triggered in part by the situation with which Roland Merullo opens his novel (this is fiction, remember): Pope Francis and the Dalai Lama secretly escape from the holy confines of the Vatican through an ancient underground tunnel leading…

The Answer To All Our Problems: Book Review

April 13, 2017

Are you tired of the political blame game, hearing those on the left blaming those on the right, and those on the right blaming those on the left? Of feeling impotent, because money rules the world? Are you fed up with the governmental paralysis that results from…

IN THE GARDEN OF BEASTS: Book review

March 29, 2017

It is not only the German people who stood by, some even applauding, as Hitler and his Nazis first seized, then held on to power with vicious, unrelenting efficiency. Out of self-interest or self-preservation, the majority of Germans failed increasingly to challenge

Socialism: The Power of a Word

March 20, 2017

…I do have a layman’s take on how we arrived at our current national nightmare. It’s just one, personal approach, and it’s conditioned in part by my having grown up in England since before World War II, and during the war and the post-war period, and particularly by what I know of my earliest years. I was born…