What is it that really matters to us? Of course the particulars differ from person to person. But I’m inclined to believe we are more alike than different. There are commonalities among all persons, despite the fact we are perpetually at each other’s throats, and despite our diverse upbringings, during which we are forced to swallow cultural, political, and religious lies from Day 1. I have nothing against culture, politics, or religion. I am talking…
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BIG name for a book: The Return. Victoria Hislop’s second novel, following her popular debut, The Island. Books titled The Return share with The Iliad, Divine Comedy, and War and Peace a BIG thematic title that promises a BIG delivery. Such works are must-reads for any serious Book Being. Victoria Hislop was thinking BIG. Give her credit for that, but you also have to wonder what she was thinking… I do try to avoid clumsy…
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No, I didn’t come up with that title. Wish I had, though. David Shenk spent three years researching and writing The Genius in All of Us, and under different circumstances he may very well have listed me on his Acknowledgments page. But no… Shenk calculated that his book was composed at the feverish pace of eight words per hour. Shenk is no Kerouac (Jack, whose mercurial writing rendered On the Road in a smattering of…
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I’ve never been a big fan of the writing style of Joyce Carol Oates. At times her writing seems to me awkward, a bit uneven and unfinished. But her widely acclaimed 2004 novel, The Falls, has a strange, muscular power that drew me in and caused me to lose myself in the very mist rising from those rampaging waters. Niagara Falls has been known over the years to have a remarkable power to entrance, beguile,…
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Fyodor Dostoevsky wanted to write a story about a perfect man and show how that perfection jarred with the world. He created Prince Myshkin, a somewhat Christ-like figure, and placed him with less perfect persons in a complicated scenario populated by Russian aristocrats. You couldn’t help but love the gentle and humble prince, or hate him. Were you a truer person in his presence, or were you threatened by his purity? He graciously accepted being…
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Lennon and McCartney had an almost effortless ability to create something new and interesting from disparate themes, images and sounds. Their infectious energy and awesome brilliance still make me laugh. And despite Maxwell’s Silver Hammer ineluctably falling down on all our heads one day, the Lads shined a light of wonder that made us like the world and each other and the idea that all you need is love, despite all the incomprehensibilities that separate…
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Who the hell do you think you are? Can’t place it, the moment or location, but hasn’t just about everyone been asked this question in this precise way some time in his life? Maybe it was in Spanish, in my case. Or maybe it was a rhetorical question, directed by a frustrated elder or superior at not just me but those around me as well, the Captive Collective (e.g., classroom, military barracks, locker room, office,…
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My parents couldn’t speak, read or write English when I was a toddler, and being a first-born child and having no other siblings to read books to me or other family or neighbors to read to me, it wasn’t until First Grade that I got hold of my first real book in my nervous little hands and learned to read reading it. I don’t remember the title, or what the cover looked like, but I…
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You’ll surely think of other examples, but for me two that stand out as being highly representative of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” are the 1996 Yankees (who won the World Series without a super star on the No-I-in-Team team) and Pink Floyd’s trenchant observation of the precariousness of the human condition in The Dark Side of the Moon. I’ll add Richard Powers’s National Book Award winning novel, The Echo…
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On the Eve of Thanksgiving a black cloud hangs over us – since 2001, approximately 2100 United States military men and women have committed suicide. This was a front page story in the paper a few days ago. Staggering number in its own right. When you consider that this figure is roughly half of those killed during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and more than twice those killed during Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan), you begin to appreciate…
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