Face to Face with Elie Wiesel
This short review was originally published in the bulletin of the Center for Ethics and Social Policy in Berkeley, April 1993. My book, Elie Wiesel and the Politics of Moral Leadership, was published in spring 2001….
Category: World Literature
A Nation of Words
Miriam Weinstein’s Yiddish: A Nation of Words is a compelling book. Go to Amazon.com and type in “Yiddish” and many books will come up whose titles are cheap, sentimental, ridiculous, goofy. Weinstein has a sense…
Poetry Lover
I’ve read it every day of my life since I was thirteen. It is, among the man-made artifacts, my primary source of knowledge of the stuff of this world and the next. Its limitless archive…
The Last Sentence of Middlemarch
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number…
Be Here Now
In one of Tolstoy’s parables, a peasant is plowing a field. The narrator asks the old man what he would do if he knew that Death was coming to take him away within the hour….
Remembering Kanafani
Fatima Rhodes sent me this message: “Have you seen this, Remembering Ghassan Kanafani, or How a Nation was Born of Storytelling by Elias Khoury ? It was published around the time we read Men in the Sun together….
Patience
There are years that ask the question and years that answer. — Zora Neale Hurston
On Book Six of The Brothers Karamazov
For Cab Yau Perhaps these will speak to you as we reconsider Dostoevsky’s masterpiece… “where we read truly, where the experience is to be that of meaning, we do so as if the text (the…
On Diane di Prima (Again)
for Lindsey Trout Danielle Mackey Katie Madges Katie Consamus Magan Wiles New Yorkers all As some of you know, I have recently taken to the writing of Diane di Prima. You know this because…
The Typewriter Is Holy
Later this summer at Cafe Ventana, I’ll be facilitating a reading group of the new book, The Essential Ginsberg. I was just rereading Bill Morgan’s history, The Typewriter is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat…