Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
One challenge in writing a book is how to structure it. Putting all the material together in a coherent package is tough. Where to start, where to finish, how to best arrange things in the middle, and what to leave out(!)—it can all be rather daunting. In Write Better I include a chapter offering a …
Reading Camus in time of Covid with my fifteen-year-old grandson has been one of the many unexpected twists of this past year. Somehow he became interested in the existentialists. I thought Camus’s book The Plague might be the easiest way in since it is a novel (rather than dense philosophy) and because of its timeliness. …
This week I am scheduled to receive my Covid-19 vaccine. To mark the occasion I am republishing here my blog from June 23, 2016. 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 …
After re-reading Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, I thought about taking a 24-hour fast from media. No TV, no radio, no smart phone, no laptop–for a whole day. Then I remembered it’s winter here in Chicago and weather forecasts are nearly a prerequisite for citizenship. And I’m expecting important emails soon. And what about …
Two novels written decades ago have shaped the genre of dystopias–grim tales of the near future. From these have come The Hunger Games, the Divergent series, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Matrix, even Pixar’s WALL-E, and many more. What are the two landmark books? George Orwell’s 1984 (published in 1949) imagines a future dictatorship in which …
I stopped reading, watching, and listening to the news twelve years ago. Although I believe in the importance of an educated and informed electorate, the news just made me mad and agitated me. It was simply not good for my soul. In Stop Reading the News, Rolf Dobelli adds a myriad of other compelling reasons …
Tomorrow, January 20, the United States will inaugurate its 46th president, Joe Biden. Given the contentious political year it has been, I thought it appropriate to repost my blog from February 8, 2019, about an important book by Republican Senator Ben Sasse (Nebraska) regarding the non-political reasons for our divides. Why are Americans so at …
Robert Caro’s book on Robert Moses and four books on Lyndon Johnson are legendary for their length (a total of almost 5,000 pages) and the length between volumes (about a decade). In Working, a collection of interviews and articles, we learn something of the method in his madness. His passion is not just to inform …
In a day when so many of us think we are RIGHT while so many others are WRONG, Reinhold Niebuhr’s neglected classic, The Irony of American History, deserves wide reading. Published the year I was born (1952), in the context of a world dominated by the sharply defined conflict between democracy and communism, its clear …
Daniel is one of the most popular and yet challenging books in the Bible. In plain language yet without oversimplifying, Tremper Longman guides us with a steady hand through its sometimes wild passages. While not a commentary, How to Read Daniel insightfully walks us through the main aspects of each chapter. Daniel is divided into …