Archive for September, 2010

Obama’s ‘Dreams from My Father’

September 30, 2010 | 4 Comments

Dinty W. Moore on essays, essaying & earning self-knowledge

September 24, 2010 | 13 Comments

Dinty W. Moore’s books include a popular spiritual inquiry, The Accidental Buddhist, and an award-winning, nontraditional “generational memoir,” Between Panic and Desire. His new book—his sixth—is Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (Writers Digest Books, 262 pages). “The personal essay is a gentle art,” he writes, “an idiosyncratic combination of the author’s discrete sensibilities and the endless possibilities of meaning and connection. The essay is graceful, wise, and always surprising. The essay invites extreme …

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Lucy Grealy’s ‘Autobiography of a Face’

September 19, 2010 | 8 Comments

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people . . .”—Lucy Grealy Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, is an account of her childhood and young adulthood struggling with surgeries, treatments, and disfigurement from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer of the jaw. She conveys so well the aloneness of a sick child, at the mercy of hospital staff, and the effect of looking different from other people. Even when she wasn’t …

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Review: Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’

September 14, 2010 | 11 Comments

Literary artistry and a chilly persona imbue this classic memoir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov. Knopf, 268 pages. “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.” Vladimir Nabokov follows this intriguing precept, which he announces in Speak, Memory, with vigor in the book, fondling the minute sensory and surface …

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Dinty W. Moore: revise & discover

September 9, 2010 | 3 Comments

“Too often, in my opinion, beginning writers focus on what point they want to make, what the message will be in their writing, the ‘theme’ or ‘thesis,’ whereas the seasoned and successful writers that I know are always after what they can discover. Being too sure of what you want to say from the outset can be a bad thing in writing—you just end up re-stating the obvious.” “If you want to be a writer, you have to love to write, …

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‘Saddest Music Ever Written’

September 4, 2010 | 7 Comments

Review: Thomas Larson’s hybrid narrative on a classic composition. The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” by Thomas Larson. Pegasus Books. 262 pages It’s the soundtrack at the climax of Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and was played in countless memorial services for the victims of 9/11. You may not know the title or its composer, but you know—everyone on this planet knows—the pensive, foreboding tune: those ever-rising violins as if a spirit is ascending, the …

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