• General Nonfiction - Politics/Culture

    A Manifesto for Justice: “Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth”

    January 26, 2025 - By 

    In these not-much-United States, we live, by any statistical measure one applies, in a new Gilded Age. Not since the age of the robber barons and the current president’s favorite predecessor, William McKinley, has the gap been so yawning between the upper and lower wealth strata of our society, not to mention the gap between the developed and undeveloped economies around the world. The data are most everywhere one cares to look, a bare fraction of which we will touch on in this post. The common fact binding them together is that the rich keep getting richer at an accelerating…

  • General Nonfiction - History

    Conform or Die: The Maoist Travail of Anchee Min’s “Red Azalea”

    May 5, 2024 - By 

    There was a saying that made the rounds back in the day (and daze) of the late ’70s, courtesy of the Grateful Dead’s second album, “What a Long Strange Trip It Has Been.” Having now read Anchee Min’s harrowing, urgent memoir of her experience in China during Chairman Mao’s “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” of roughly the same era, I am here to say: The Grateful Dead don’t know squat about “long strange trips.” Originally published in the United Kingdom in 1993 and the U.S. a year later, “Red Azalea” is the kind of coming-of-age story that is initially much less…

  • General Nonfiction - Personal Reflections

    Answering Alzheimer’s: Amy Bloom’s
    “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss”

    October 22, 2023 - By 

    Amy Bloom gets right down to it in her 2022 memoir, “In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss.” The city of Zurich and the fact of her husband Brian’s Alzheimer’s disease comes up in the first paragraph as the couple boards a plane headed to that Swiss city. Their purpose for the trip is revealed in the fourth paragraph, which begins with these two stout declarative sentences: “Dignitas’s office is in Zurich, and that’s where we’re headed. Dignitas is a Swiss nonprofit organization offering accompanied suicide.” Through the subsequent 200+ pages, the multi-talented, much-honored Bloom (novels, short stories, non-fiction,…

  • General Nonfiction

    Great Art From Bad People: Claire Dederer’s “Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma”

    July 9, 2023 - By 

    The theme, rendered in the form of a question, recurs over and over again in the history of the arts: Why are so many creative geniuses such terrible, mean-spirited human beings? Then the second question rising from its wake, forcing a decision by all admirers of any given artist’s work: “Can I still love the art if I come to hate the artist for all his misdeeds?” (I use the masculine pronoun there with purpose, given that most artists whose creations have been admitted to the canon of so-called Great Works over the centuries have been male [and been chosen…

  • General Nonfiction - Psychology

    A Larger Vision: Frank Bruni’s “The Beauty of Dusk”

    April 29, 2023 - By 

    “We have no control over what happens to us; we have enormous control over what happens to us. I’ll spend the rest of my life better understanding and better accepting that paradox, which I understand and accept better today than I did before October, 2017, before that first day of incomprehensible blur, before an education in neuro-ophthalmology that became an education in so much more.” That sentence near the end of “New York Times” columnist-turned-college-professor Frank Bruni’s 2022 memoir, “The Beauty of Dusk,” underpins most all the reflections on his ongoing experience of a rare stroke that robs him of vision in…