Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
When employees are unhappy with a decision that leaders have made, often they don’t react against the decision. Instead they complain long and loud about the process.
“All sides were not heard adequately.”
“There wasn’t enough time.”
“We didn’t know how the decision would be made.”
“Key discussions were behind closed doors.”
“The right people weren’t involved.”
“Clearly some ulterior motive was at work here.”
My sister died because of a vaccine . . . a vaccine she never received. On a September morning in 1952, at the age of seven, Lucy Rae Le Peau contracted polio and died that afternoon. The vaccine that would have saved her life would not be developed for another year.
It was a vaccine my grieving mother prayed for desperately, especially because her three other children, including me, were still vulnerable to the terrifying disease. Every year thousands of children across the United States were struck with it, peaking the year my sister died with over 57,000 cases, of whom 3,145 died.
Kevin Kelly, guru of Wired magazine, proves himself to be a polymath who is not afraid to have an opinion or two in his book What Technology Wants. His main provocative point is that technology is developing in certain predictable ways.
Continue reading “Where Is Technology Going?”
In the 1970s a friend gave me a copy of Kenneth Bailey’s The Cross and the Prodigal. I was blown away. It transformed my understanding of how to read the New Testament. Later I devoured Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes. Bailey’s basic thesis was that Middle Eastern peasant culture changes only very slowly. So if we want to understand the world that Jesus lived in, we should get to know Middle Eastern peasant culture today.
Continue reading “Kenneth E. Bailey, 1930–2016”
I remember first coming upon T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and thinking it was completely nuts. I was in high school at the time. So it is a tautology to say I was quite sure of my opinions.
Continue reading “Was Eliot Nuts?”
Franklin and Winston is a delightful piece of narrative history from one of the masters of the genre. By focusing on the relationship of these two titans rather than the massive array of events that was World War II, Meacham gives us, just as the very apt subtitle promises, “An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship.”
Continue reading “Dance of the Titans”
Bobby Fischer was a World Chess Champion who stood out as an eccentric genius in a field full of eccentric geniuses. As portrayed in the movie Pawn Sacrifice, he walked out of a chess match complaining about the lighting, ransacked his own hotel rooms looking for bugging devices, thought the Russians were watching him through his TV and believed the US government was listening to him through (wait for it) his dental fillings. Though his mother was Jewish, he was vocally anti-Semitic, holding to many conspiracy theories about Jews.
Continue reading “Bobby Fischer Played Tennis”
The Wright Brothers, by David McCullough, paints a portrait of two heroes and celebrities who stand in sharp contrast to those of today. The brothers didn’t look to maximize their fame; they simply wanted due credit. They didn’t try to amass enormous wealth; they simply ran a business.
Continue reading “The Right Brothers”
When people hand me a proposal or manuscript for a non-fiction book and ask me for a publishing opinion, we’ll talk about a number of issues. But I have one chief diagnostic question. Almost anything and everything an author has to say flows from the answer to this question. It tells writers what kind of vocabulary and images to use, how long the piece should be, how to organize the material, what to leave in, what to take out, and even where to try to publish it.
The question is this:
Continue reading “The Key Question I Ask Authors”
What is it like to grow up black and male in the United States? Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the highly acclaimed Atlantic article on reparations, tells us in Between the World and Me, a memoir cum extended letter to his fifteen-year-old son. It is a life in which you don’t have final control over the most basic aspect of human existence–your own body. Your body can be thrown in prison or shot or just pushed aside at most any time for most any reason with little recourse.
Continue reading “Between the World and He”