“This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage”
Only writing kept me from being swept into the dust heap of third grade, and for this reason I not only loved writing, I felt a strong sense of loyalty to it. I may have been shaky about tying my shoes or telling time, but I was sure about my career, and I consider this certainty the greatest gift of my life.
“The Soul of All Living Creatures”
Evolution favors the wolf who focuses on what matters most: finding food, remaining healthy, resting, breeding, caring for young – not confronting and dominating others. The same is true for all species.
Several weeks ago, the New York Times Magazine published “Zoo Animals And Their Discontents,” an article about Dr. Vint Virga, a veterinarian and animal behaviorist who tends to the psychological welfare of animals in captivity. Virga is to zoo animals what Freud, Frankl, and Jung were to humans. So, when an animal in captivity displays anxiety, depression, phobias, obsessive-compulsive behavior and other maladies, Virga is called in to diagnose and treat the afflicted animal. Read more 
“The Brothers”
One way to bring Americans to reflect on their past – and future – would be to revive memory of the Dulles brothers. Their actions frame the grand debate over America’s role in the world that has never been truly joined in the United States.
“My Struggle: Book 2”
At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realized it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble.
Karl Ove Knausgaard – a Norwegian living in Sweden, nearing 40, on his second marriage with three children under the age of 4 – finds himself joyless, overwhelmed with the demands of marriage and fatherhood. A lifelong reader and writer, Knausgaard has also lost faith in literature and turns to his personal diaries and essays for inspiration. From those writings, two elements that shaped his life – his father and a lifelong feeling of not belonging – lead him to write My Struggle: a 6-volume autobiography published between 2009-2012 in Norway. Read more
“My Struggle: Book 1”
My father was an idiot, I wanted nothing to do with him, and it cost me nothing to keep well away from him. It wasn’t a question of keeping away from something, it was a question of the something not existing; nothing about him touched me. That was how it had been, but then I had sat down to write, and the tears poured forth.
In Norway, revealing personal information and family secrets is considered shameful so when Karl Ove Knausgaard, the award-winning, best-selling author wrote a 6 volume autobiographical account of his life, the public took notice, read the critics’ reviews but ultimately decided to buy the books. Read more
6 Indie Bookstores to Patronize NOW
A quiet battle between Amazon (the behemoth bookseller) and Hachette (the giant book publisher) has been waging on for years but the lid was blown off this past week by a combination of factors that many observers are predicting will lead to the The War To End All Wars in Bookville.
At the 2014 Book Expo of America (the largest annual book trade fair) in New York City, a few brave authors spoke out against the giant retailer for its strong-arm tactics of notifying customers that pre-orders of books published by Hachette are no longer being accepted. In addition, Amazon notified customers of delays in book shipments and that certain books by authors whose works are published by Hachette are not available, bringing the industry issues to the public’s attention. But, I am getting ahead of myself so let’s take a step back.
“How We Die”
We rarely go gentle into that good night.
Several weeks ago while listening to “Fresh Air” on NPR, the topic was Sherwin Nuland – a surgeon, writer, and educator who died on March 3, 2014 at 83 years old. Nuland was the author of How We Die, an informative and groundbreaking book that describes death in both its clinical and biological terms in such a way that the reader doesn’t have to have a medical degree to understand the process. Published in 1994, How We Die won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Read more
“My Gentle Barn”
At the core of every human being is a resilience that buoys us back to the surface of life. With every painful loss or setback that brings us crashing to our knees, we find some way to keep breathing and move forward.
My Gentle Barn is the story of how one young girl made her dream come true. Ellie Laks grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family whose members didn’t understand who she was or what made her tick. Told to be quiet, help her mother, and subjugate herself to adults and males in particular, Ellie was a lonely and angry child who didn’t know why her family put her in a box where she didn’t belong and blamed her when she was victimized. Turning to animals – and especially those who needed help – Ellie found solace, compassion, and understanding in the creatures she shared a special connection with. Looking back as an adult, Ellie writes:
“The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay”
We have an idea of what it is to be French or Italian, or to live in Paris or in Florence, based on a certain familiarity with those cultures and the writings of English-speakers who’ve lived there, but we have little idea of what it is to be Persian or what Iranian society is really like. Read more
“How To Be Alone”
I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism – our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution – isn’t intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning, our ephemeral e-mailing, our steadfast devotion to the flickering tube. Read more
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