The Good News, 3.8.2017
I once asked Mayuko and Minami (both in my fall 8 a.m. MWF Humanities class) if they had heard of Sei Shōnagon (清少納言). Of course they had! They had read her years ago in school. …
Category: Reviews
Because We Say So
Dear Kelley, I’m delighted that you inquired about where to start with reading Noam Chomsky. I look forward to discussing Hegemony or Survival with you in a couple of weeks. Back in 1986—those horrid years…
After Reading Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life
July 2005 It was one month ago that I began to read Whitman in earnest, and, while I still have far to go in prose and poetry, an impression has been made, a fire has…
Photography as a Way of Life
for Oliver, Cami, and Julie Sebastião Salgado, From my Land to the Planet Contrasto, 2014 I first heard the name of Sebastião Salgado from Mev in the early 1990s. She esteemed him more than any…
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….
On Susan Sontag, Trip to Hanoi
Journal, July 2005 Susan Sontag spent two weeks in North Vietnam in 1968, and wrote 90 pages about her experiences. (Perhaps I will cull from those notebooks I kept in Gaza and the West Bank…
On Ivan Ilyich
ahamkara [aham, “I”; kara, “maker”] Self-will, the ego mask, the principle in people which makes them feel separate from others. — Diana Morrison, A Glossary of Sanskrit from The Spiritual Tradition of India The Death of Ivan…
All Power To the Imagination
Have you ever tried to email chicken soup?Diane di Prima The Poetry Deal—It’s only 109 pages. But Diane di Prima—poet, printer, feminist, Buddhist, anarchist, pacifist, cultural revolutionary— packs a lot of life into those pages….
On Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work: A Reckoning with Life
–first published in Episcopal Life, 1997 This memoir grabbed me from the moment when I first read its opening epigraph, “Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.” I remember laughing with gratitude, “Yes! How…
What You Understand Depends on Where You Stand/1
For Brent and Brett On Daniel Berrigan’s Night Flight to Hanoi Night Flight to Hanoi is an account of Jesuit Daniel Berrigan’s odyssey in late January and early February 1968, when he and historian Howard Zinn traveled…