Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Book Report”
I am cranking my way through this outstanding biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. I have long been fascinated by Oppenheimer perhaps since I saw the footage in which he ominously…
As the whole world likely knows, the reclusive author, J.D. Salinger, died at the age of ninety-one last week. I was royally hooked on everything written by Salinger when I was an impressionable teen. Franny and Zooey was my favorite…
One of my resolutions for 2010 is to jump-start what I’ve taken to calling my solo MFA regimen. I know I have many gaps to fill, knowledge-wise…
I recently returned to writing poetry after years in the prose wilderness, writing short stories and the inevitable attempt-at-novel. While I’d never abandoned the reading poems—a love from way back when—in graduate school, my workshops and classes were focused around the craft of fiction. Oh, I waded into the…
In his smart and insightful collection, Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation, William Stafford has the briefest of essays that always has something to say to me. Originally published in the second issue of the the-then-fledgling FIELD in Spring 1970, it’s called…
Mary Oliver is a beloved contemporary poet. Her work is read at weddings and funerals and by Garrison Keillor on his radio show, “The Writer’s Alamanac.” Even my yoga teacher in Corvallis, Oregon, often began our class with inspirational lines from Oliver’s work…
Every one of us has one of those books—assigned in a class, passed along from a friend, found in the bottom of the box you bought for a buck at the annual Friends of the Library book sale in Ithaca, New York…
Trigger is not one of my favorite nouns mostly thanks to its too frequent use under sad and horrific circumstances in this gun-toting, trigger-happy country of ours. But one of my favorite books about writing is a little gem by Richard Hugo called The Triggering Town…
I have been reading Annie Dillard’s book, The Writing Life, again this week. It was published way back in the dark ages of 1989. That was right around when I re-opened the writing Pandora’s box in my own life and put pen back to paper, fingers to QWERTY keyboard again. Not long after, I headed to graduate school part-time, feeling for the first time in forever that I’d been reunited with my creative tribe. Sing hosannas—wait, not so fast….
We are on the cusp of having a U.S. President who is both a gifted orator and a talented writer. Election Night was “a very good night for the English language” according to James Wood in a recent issue of the New Yorker. He writes: “A movement in American politics hostile to the possession and…
