bookeywookey

The excellent Daniel Mendelsohn, sings his creed at Page-Turner on the job of a critic.  (The title for this post is his formula, not mine....

In the waning days of summer, I have been energetically immersed in reading, but not so inclined to write.  I can probably blame it on all t...

Some snowy poems as an antidote to the dog days of summer.  Jamie Olson writes informatively on the dissident form and ordinary content in h...

Ward Just is justifiably ranked among the top writers on American politics in fictional form.  Some consider Echo House (Houghton Mifflin...

Taking place across a span of nearly 100 years, Alan Hollinghurst's recent The Stranger's Child (Alfred A. Knopf 2011) offers sim...

The great rhapsodist of the American theatre, Tennessee Williams, on the fragile yet directed talents of actress Sandy Dennis.  There i...

A truly lovely tribute to Nora Ephron by Nathan Englander at Page-Turner with excellent thoughts on creative process. And that to me is a...

In America, the public understanding of an artist's work generally occupies two opposing extremes: one can either be a star or a perso...

Two maverick American souls travel to Africa 100 years apart.  Each faces an utterly unfamiliar culture and physical hardships that challe...

One of the early chapters of this book touches at some retrospective length on the way things began to change; how I moved from the fairl...

Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Emperor of all Maladies is an impressive book in two ways.  It is a comprehensive history of cancer made ...

Two positive deviants attracted my attention lately: Natalie Angier profiled physicist Dr. Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus , a New Yorker who ...

Writers who cannot seem to tell the difference between fact and fiction have been the source of many a news story, but the lines between e...

Until I can get my act together to post on The Emperor of All Maldies, The Master, and, Echo House , I'm going to direct your attentio...

One of my favorite poets, Dan Chiasson , posts a beautiful appreciation of The Collective Writings of Joe Brainard , recently published by...

Dan Sudran has created something great called Community Science Workshops .  They offer low-income youth living in communities where educa...

I read Adam Phillips's Going Sane (Harper Perennial, 2007) as part of my project looking at America's obsession with feeling goo...

The subject matter of a book is often what determines whether or not I read it.  Who and what it is about leads us to anticipate our intere...

Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist and author ( The First Scientist ) is excellent on how science works at Edge. Science is not about ...

Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips ( On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored, Going Sane ) a sensible and erudite thinker about the human m...