“American Pastoral”
Life is just a short period of time in which we are alive.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, American Pastoral by Philip Roth is a thought-provoking novel about post World War II life in America and specifically, how Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and racial cultural norms interplay when forced together. Told from the perspective of Nathan “Skip” Zuckerman, a 62-year old writer who goes back to Newark, New Jersey for his 45th high school reunion in 1995, only to discover his childhood hero – Seymour “Swede” Levov and the older brother of a classmate – has just died at age 70 of prostate cancer that had metastasized. Having just seen the still “splendid-looking” Swede a few months prior at a restaurant in New York City where they had dinner together, Skip decides to write the life story of the Jewish kid from Newark who seemed to live the American Pastoral. Read more 
“Continental Drift”
It’s as if the creatures residing on this planet in these years, the human creatures, millions of them traveling singly and in families, in clans and tribes, traveling sometimes as entire nations, were a subsystem inside the larger system of currents and tides, of winds and weather, of drifting continents and shifting, uplifting, grinding, cracking land masses.
Through the years, much has been said about Continental Drift and probably equally as much about the book’s author, Russell Banks. Born into a blue-collar family, Banks led a tumultuous young life stealing a car and running away from home at 16 only to return and enroll in college before dropping out – leading him to hitchhike to Florida, where he got married, became a father and was divorced by the time he was 20. And, that’s just the beginning. Read more
“Elsewhere”
Reading was not a duty but a reward, and from that I intuited a vital truth: most people are trapped in a solitary existence, a life circumscribed by want and failures of imagination, limitations from which readers are exempt. You can’t make a writer without first making a reader, and that’s what my mother made me.
Those are the written words of Richard Russo, the Pulitzer prize-winning author of Empire Falls and most recently Elsewhere – a memoir of his life as the son of Jean Russo – a woman he credits with directing his life into a field where being “obsessive, dogged, and rigid” are assets rather than liabilities. Read more
“Foreign Affairs”
…. it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction. They may be struck by lightning or pruned by the hand of man; they may grow weak or hollow; their sparse fruit may become misshapen, spotted, or sourly crabbed. They may endure these changes nobly or meanly. But, they cannot, even under the best of conditions, put out new growth or burst into lush and unexpected bloom. Read more
“Lords Of Finance”
In 2010, “The Lords of Finance” by Liaquat Ahamed, a professional investment manager was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History. A non-fiction account of “the bankers that broke the world,” this 505 page book takes a complicated topic – macro and microeconomics – and makes it easily understandable. Read more
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