…it surprised me to find this book by Sam Harris so helpful in my own search for a deeper meaning in life; and I was more surprised still to discover, halfway through, that Harris’s path had led him to the study and practice of…
Book Reviews
The Unknown Terrorist, by Richard Flanagan: A Book Review
This powerful and still most timely book was published in 2006, and it came to my attention by pure chance, as I searched through my shelves to see what could be donated to the local library. Here was one, I thought, that looked interesting, and set it aside to read. I have no idea how it reached…
How to Change Your Mind
Meet Carm Goode. Or Miles Forthwrighte. Or should I say “and,” since they appear to be one and the same […] You’ll note that Carm seems a jovial enough fellow, Miles a bit of a curmudgeon; Carm a free spirit, Miles clearly academic. Which seems to be how they work, not so much in collaboration as in friendly…
Record of Miraculous Events… Book Review
[…] look at it from the point of view of the lay reader—one who is not principally a student of either of those areas of scholarship. In this light, my first observation is that this is not a book to be read from cover to cover…
Book Review: Mass Murder by Erik Larson
I went to bed worried about shipwreck nightmares. I had been reading Dead Wake, Erik Larson’s gripping account of the 1915 Lusitania atrocity, in which the Cunard ocean liner, with nearly two thousand passengers and crew aboard, was torpedoed by
THE VOICES by Michael Dennis Browne: An Appreciation
I learned two things in personal conversations with Michael Dennis Browne (and probably a lot more, but these two stand out!) for both of which I’m grateful. The first, many years ago, at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, was
The Other Blacklist: A Very Personal Book Review
I’m reading The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s, by Mary Helen Washington with special interest because of the work I did back in the early 1980s on a study of the artist, Charles…
Odds Against Tomorrow: Book Review
Nathaniel Rich has a fine sense of the apocalyptic absurd–its comical as well as its dark side. Odds Against Tomorrow sets us in the not-so-distant future, in a world where the threat of global climate change has become all too…
Misadventures…
…of a Parenting Yogi is the title Brian Leaf gives to his new book, whose subtitle is “Cloth Diapers, Cosleeping, and My (Sometimes Successful) Quest for Conscious Parenting.” Together, the title and subtitle pretty much say it all. It’s a humorous…
Living This Life Fully: A Book Review
Things do seem to happen as they are supposed to, in their own peculiar time. A review copy of Mirka Knaster’s Living This Life Fully: Stories and Teachings of Munindra, was mailed to me last year, but mysteriously failed to reach me.