• 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…

  • General Nonfiction - Politics/Culture

    Two Black Men Learn to Read…and the Rest Is History

    April 15, 2023 - By 

    In case you didn’t recognize it, that’s a picture of an aardvark off to the left. Can’t say that I know or have ever thought much about aardvarks in my life, though the oddity of their physical appearance—halfway between a pig and an anteater, it seems to me—makes them worthy of at least some note. But “aardvark” is important here for an entirely different reason: As the first actual word in the English dictionary, it stood as a kind of gateway drug from which civil rights icon Malcolm X commenced, with an insatiable, addictive lust, one feverishly ingested word at…

  • General Nonfiction - Personal Reflections

    The Illusion of “Normal” Life:
    C.S. Lewis’s “Learning in War-Time”

    September 11, 2022 - By 

    There are times in life when everything we perceive as “normal” about it screeches to a halt. We’re at work or at the park with our 2-year-old, lazily pushing him on the swing when the call comes in—a loved one has suffered a calamity. We hustle home, throw a few things in a bag and either start making flight arrangements or hop in the car, “dropping everything.” Time and every other obligation and interest as we know it fades, and we enter an altered inner landscape where only one thing seems to matter. Or does it? On September 1, 1939,…

  • General Nonfiction - Personal Reflections

    Life on the Farm:
    E.B. White’s “Death of a Pig”

    July 10, 2022 - By 

    Like all city boys (I spent my formative years in Los Angeles), I was enchanted when I finally got out to the radically different milieus of the coastal beaches, the small town countryside, the mountains that became visible around the LA basin when the smog finally lifted in winter, and the deserts that sprawled out seemingly to infinity on the far side of San Bernardino. The slower pace, the natural grandeur, the different recreations and preoccupations engendered by distance from the urban hubbub. It was like a new life had been opened to me, featuring new vistas over which my…

  • General Nonfiction - Politics/Culture

    A Question From Marilynne Robinson: “What Are We Doing Here?”

    May 8, 2022 - By 

    So the United States, with plenty of company from around the world, is going through a terrible time. A devastating and wearisome pandemic, renewed inflation, climate change and its associated weather catastrophes, a reinflamed battle over abortion, a fight seemingly unto death over the very nature of how we acquire knowledge, see reality and practice democracy. It’s hard to find optimists out there, and I wouldn’t claim you’ll discover a raging one in eminent novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson either. What you will find throughout her work, though, and quite specifically in the title essay of her 2018 collection, “What…