My admiration for Diane Ackerman dates from my first encounter with her unique blend of earthy spiritualism and a poetic sense of the material world. A Natural History of the Senses was published in 1993, and I have been shadowing her ever since. She lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, writer Paul West. […]
Books
In the Hive, and Out
Human beings are in some ways like bees. We evolved to live in intensely social groups, and we don’t do as well when freed from hives. Nicholas Kristof included this quote from Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis in his recent column in the New York Times. Entitled “Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex […]
Boredom and Bliss
The essay on the last page of the Sunday Times Book Review by Jennifer Schuessler this week is provocative. Her topic: Boredom. Ah, that dreaded word. Full of moral implications. Antithetical to everything I learned (and probably inherited through epigenetics) from my pioneer heritage. You never left yourself get bored, and you never admit if […]
Images With No Handhold
Sam Anderson, book critic for New York Magazine, wrote a great piece called When Lit Blew Into Bits. He spins a cogent narrative about the evolution of literature in the aughts, a time of massively multi-platform, multi-text and content-riddled genres that “seem not only to siphon our attention but to change the way our brains […]
Sontag on Interpretation
Since posting the quote from the Roiphe review of David Reiff’s memoir of his mother Susan Sontag, Swimming in a Sea of Death, I have been more conscious of the ambient energy that continues to emanate from Sontag’s thoughts and writings. Here’s a sampling: Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded […]
Elizabeth Gilbert, Explained
No question, Elizabeth Gilbert’s follow up to Eat, Pray, Love (which I hated but yes I have to confess, I did stay with it, my nose held tight, til the end), Committed, is the book of the season—the featured review in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday, media tour appearances hither and yon. […]
Condimenting
Malcolm Gladwell is a phenom to be sure. His books always end up on the best seller list (there are two of them on now, Outliers and What the Dog Saw) and he is a popular inspirational keynote speaker. I admit, I imbibe. I read his New Yorker pieces religiously. I’ve read all his books. […]
Top Ten, Plus a Few
More lists! This time, it’s books. Amazingly, the overlap of favored titles is not extensive. *** The year’s top books as chosen by the New York Times: Fiction Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem A Gate at the Stairs, by Lorrie Moore Half Broke […]
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The Mystery of Memory
The Persistance of Memory, by Dali Penelope Lively has a view of memory that reflects my own beliefs about this extraordinary thing we can do with our minds. In an article in the Guardian by Sarah Crown, Lively’s view is stated clearly: “The idea that memory is linear,” says Penelope Lively, crisply, “is nonsense. What […]
Sumptuous Failure
Sebastian Willnow/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Failure. Just writing the letters that make up that loaded term shifts my energy. We live in a culture that is fixated on success, on winning, on being the best. When an English friend of mine first moved to the United States, this is how he described his new […]