I once asked the director of our program for non-traditional college students what the biggest challenge was for these students. Was it ability? “No,” she said. “It’s their perception of their abilities. They don’t think they’re smart enough. Then they give up because they think they won’t make it.” These … Read More
Category: non-fiction
“When I was younger, anxiety sometimes flat-out crippled my ability to work.”
In every class I teach, there is at least one student who will talk with me at some point about how high levels of anxiety are preventing him or her from completing assignments. This memoir by Andrea Petersen provides a vivid account of what living with anxiety entails. She writes, … Read More
So what about Dylan’s song “Blowin’ in the Wind”?
Tony Beck, who wrote his dissertation for Cambridge University on Bob Dylan, notes that Dylan “borrowed extensively” from the English poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley and Bryon, who also used the “wind” as a central image in their poems. For them, the wind often symbolized change and freedom. It probably … Read More
“It tells the stories of two revolutions.”
Revolutions, indeed. This book is about Revolutionary War era hero Alexander Hamilton, whose picture is on our ten-dollar bill. It’s also about the revolutionary way his story is told by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who uses hip-hop, harpsichords, and a largely non-Caucasian cast in his Broadway production of Hamilton. Unlike any … Read More
“Until recently, we simply didn’t know how immense this problem was, or how serious the consequences, unless we had suffered them ourselves.”
When Matthew Desmond was growing up, money was tight. Sometimes the gas got shut off, and his parents eventually lost their home to foreclosure. This week, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his nonfiction book Evicted, which is about eight families in Milwaukee and their evictions. Vivid and unsettling: … Read More
“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
This famous assertion from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Heroism,” published in 1841, floated to the top of my mind while – of all things! – attending a technology conference. The keynote speaker, author of the upcoming book Strive: How Doing the Things Most Uncomfortable Leads to Success, made … Read More
“By and large, art both instructs and entertains us.”
“Many modern books on ‘style’ have suggested that there are only two styles: good and bad.”
This book, Clear and Simple as the Truth, takes a much different view. The authors argue that there are many styles for writers to choose from – including contemplative, classic, romantic, plain, oratorical, practical, and diplomatic. This book focuses primarily on the classic style – its history, conventions, philosophy, … Read More
“Every work of literature has both a situation and a story.”
The situation, Vivian Gornick explains in this book about the art of personal narrative, is the context or circumstances, while the story is “the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say” (13). Gornick argues that the most difficult and important work of memoirists is to understand why… Read More
Five Intriguing Ideas from 2016 Books
This blog focuses on one idea from one book each week, and so selecting just five from the 50 or so that I’ve published in 2016 is a challenge. But after looking through them all, I have to say that the ideas that I enjoyed the most from the books … Read More
“Bernard Shaw said you should try everything once except folk dancing and incest.”
This is how Michael Billington, “the” British theater critic, who has reviewed more than 9000 plays over the last 50 years, begins his piece on “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles. Charming, gossipy, insightful, authoritative, knowledgeable, and passionate, Billington is a great writer. It’s hard to imagine what kind … Read More
“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
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
“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