Zondervan to publish story of Chilean miner
May 21, 2011 All The Rest, Books
Book to be released on anniversary of first miner’s rescue.
David Orr’s Beautiful & Pointless: How do you read a poem?
April 14, 2011 All The Rest, Books
Guidebooks, especially guidebooks to poetry, make me nervous. I can’t help feeling ambivalent about authoritative maps, wherever I’m headed—but in particular if I’m delving into poems. That’s why David Orr, the New York Times Book Review’s poetry col…
Who was behind plot to kill Lincoln? Author to discuss during West Michigan visit
April 10, 2011 All The Rest, Books
The four primary conspiracy theories surrounding the killing of Lincoln.
Deborah Lutz’s Pleasure Bound: Why are we so obsessed with the Victorians and sex?
March 21, 2011 All The Rest, Books
I haven’t had sex since starting Deborah Lutz’s book, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism. Now that I’ve finished, I’m still in recovery. It’s only fair, you say, to look for other causes, but, I’m sorry, the correlation is too strong. These interwoven tales of Victorian high jinks include some piquant stories: Dante Gabriel Rossetti digging up his poems from his wife’s grave, Algernon Swinburne scurrying off to be “birched” by prostitutes near Regent’s Park, Richard Burton (the explorer) trying to wake the British out of their sexless sleep. But there’s a problem. Here’s a representative passage.
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Stacy Schiff can’t help adding to myth in Cleopatra: A Life.
November 18, 2010 All The Rest, Books
Who is the most famous woman of the Greco-Roman world? No contest: Cleopatra. In fact, you may have to think a bit to come up with someone for second and third place (Sappho? Pericles’ mistress Aspasia?). Queen of an ancient, exotic, immensely wealthy land, twice married to her much younger brothers, mistress of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, flamboyant flinger-about of royal treasure, international power player, glamorous suicide, Cleopatra has been poeticized, dramatized, painted, and prosed about countless times.
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Human trafficking, exploitation is on the rise in Michigan
September 6, 2010 All The Rest, Books
Read about one woman’s true story of trafficking in Michigan.
Jack London’s many sides emerge in James L. Haley’s Wolf.
August 15, 2010 All The Rest, Books
The United States has a startling ability to take its most angry, edgy radicals and turn them into cuddly eunuchs. The process begins the moment they die. Mark Twain is remembered as a quipster forever floating down the Mississippi River at sunset, while his polemics against the violent birth of the American empire lie unread and unremembered. Martin Luther King is remembered for his prose-poetry about children holding hands on a hill in Alabama, but few recall that he said the U.S. government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
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Mark Twain – United States – Mississippi River – Martin Luther King – Alabama
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Nabokov’s The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun).
Back when I was a young viewer of Sarajevo TV, there was a cult show along the lines of Monty Python that once featured a skit with a poem presumably found in the papers of a deceased genius poet. An actor ponderously declaimed the newly discovered verse—”Bread/ Milk /Cooking oil …”—as it became clear that the masterpiece was in fact a grocery list. The last, crushing line was: “And some fish, if you can find any.”
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Monty Python – Television – Original of Laura – Actor – Comedy
