Meaningful Audacity

In her short story collection, the author knows that we long for love far more than we ever have love, even when it’s laying right beside us.

Lapses in judgment from a major voice always seem the most confusing to gauge. Glaring faults from a lesser author, one whose renown is safely bound to expire or one who doesn’t personally speak to you, can be passed off with a guiltless lashing of criticism. But authors of more consequential ilk, ones capable of …

The opening piece in David Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day offers one of the most endearing indications of a person’s sexual orientation I’ve ever heard.

I actually read this book: five hundred and forty-six dense pages revolving around the politics and presidency of Richard Milhouse Nixon. More accurately, it’s a study of the very widely disparate politics of the late 1960′s (from Classical Liberalism to Reagan-Goldwater Conservatives; from the Democratic Left to the Radical Left) and how Richard Nixon, a …

I bought this book for two dollars along with a large bag of other unused titles that a university library was discarding. These Signet Classics paperbacks would normally only sell for five dollars new, anyway. They seem like throw-aways to most people, but they’re much more likely to have something significant inside them than most …

I have six of Nietzsche’s books on my shelves, every single one decked out in a pitch black cover. When I first came across that thick name (“Nietzsche”) with those at first un-pronounce-able five consonants in a row, I thought such a dark figure must somehow stand for NIHILISM or perhaps stand for DEATH, whatever …

I absolutely adore this book cover. It has such a beautifully despondent, very dark image of a lost looking man’s face on it, all done in the most archaic, most indistinct manner. The title is a little wit on buying on margin and the over blown credit systems in practice at the time the book …

The central thesis to Mailer’s book is that the “cold, sexless” way with which the U.S. Government and NASA approached the 1969 moon landing took all the heroics out of the endeavor and only made our world proportionately that much smaller. It’s a beautifully written, densely thick book (414 tightly packed pages in my copy) …

The heaviness in this book is simply breath taking. That leaden, wrought-iron quality of such formidable all-capital letters spelling “LIFE AGAINST DEATH” is out of this world. Brown’s scope (“THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL MEANING OF HISTORY”) is so comprehensive, so eternal, so irrefutable. Its first chapter, “The Disease Called Man,” is such a beautifully smug condemnation of, …