Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun
I remember exactly where I bought my first collection of Frank O’Hara poetry. It took me a long time to read all of it which I did grimly at times since poetry wasn’t yet my natural reading material. Since then I have branched out considerably…
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Sanders
I have read ‘Lincoln at the Bardo’ and several story collections by George Sanders and find him an astute observer, a writer of vivid and perverse imagination sprinkled with a compassion and kindness that makes him stand apart from most writers who at the very…
Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
I read ‘On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous’ and loved Ocean’s voice, courage and willingness to share of his life. I loved the poetry anchored by prose and grounded in a quivering emotionality. This poetry collection also benefits from these qualities and while most of…
Foucault, A Very Short Introduction by Gary Gutting
I came to this book via this imprint called Posthumanities out of the University Minnesota Press which focuses on a discipline of studies which removes the human from center stage. Publishing books with titles such as Insect Media, Animal Stories and Bios, it sounds intriguing….
Essential Soil Science by M.R. Ashman and G. Puri
My route this book was circuitous. In March of this year I read an article by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New York Review of Books about soil and waste in which she discussed the U.S. Soil Taxonomy and its classification of twelve soil types. For…
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid
This book made me think how much ‘whiteness’ is like Soviet-styled Communism. During the Cold War the Communist world was all-pervasive in its territory. Communism was taken for granted as a way of life. Everyday people were Communists unthinkingly and without any sense of an…
One-Way Street by Walter Benjamin
Benjamin life had a tragic end. A German Jew who got out of Germany before Hitler took power fleeing to Paris but France falling into Nazi hands in 1940 put him in precarious place. Still he was almost safe across the Spanish border when word…
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
This is a necessary and powerful book. Once Ms. Zuboff leaves her dubious framing behind and delves into the story of Google and Facebooks’ theft and exploitation of our digital identities, her writing is vivid and the research conclusive. These two companies with many allies…
The Hurting Kind by Ada Limon
I heard Ada Limon interviewed by Ezra Klein recently and she read a couple poems from this collection. The collection is divided up into the four seasons and many of the poems’ titles are about plants, animals and experiences of the natural world. I wouldn’t…
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