January 2013 - Richard GilbertRichard Gilbert

Review: ‘Honeybee Democracy’

January 30, 2013 | 16 Comments

Bees give lessons for leadership and group intelligence. . . . [N]atural selection has organized honeybee swarms and primate brains in intriguingly similar ways to build a first-rate decision-making group from a collection of rather poorly informed and cognitively limited individuals. —Honeybee Democracy Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley. Princeton University Press, 264 pp. How can humans make better group decisions? We might look to the bees, says Thomas D. Seeley, a Cornell biologist who has spent his life studying …

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Boycotting ‘Zero Dark Thirty’

January 25, 2013 | 12 Comments

Kathryn Bigelow falsifies an American tragedy. That’s too strong a word, boycott. It’s more like deep ambivalence that has kept me away. And today I’ve failed yet again to get myself out the door to see Zero Dark Thirty, despite being between semesters and having my classes pretty well planned. And despite having loved Kathryn Bigelow’s previous movie, The Hurt Locker, about a bomb disposal unit in Iraq, which captures both war’s horror and its addictive quality for some combatants. …

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Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’

January 17, 2013 | 29 Comments

Storytelling & spirituality in Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist text. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.—A Room of One’s Own A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. Harcourt, 112 pp. I forgot to bring to the beach Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a lamentable oversight with the Atlantic surf hissing and breaking outside. Sometimes I feel almost frightened by …

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Swamped by ‘Infinite Jest’

January 11, 2013 | 13 Comments

On failing to finish David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece novel. Carry nothing even remotely vegetabalish if in the path of a feral herd. —Infinite Jest To paraphrase Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven, “It’s a terrible thing to quit a book. To take from it less than it has to give.” I don’t believe that about books—we should quit any one that’s not working for us and start another—but David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest is a special case. And I’ve …

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A slew of new books about writing

January 1, 2013 | 13 Comments

“Most problems in writing are structural, even on the scale of the page. Something isn’t flowing properly. The logic or the dramatic logic is off.”—Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd As the owner of an entire bookcase crammed with writing manuals dating back to the 1940s, Dad’s as well as mine that begin in the 1970s, I’m leery of new acquisitions. Rearranging my books earlier this winter, I thought, “I should at least reread …

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Richard's books

The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

by David Shields

I loved this inquiry and lament about human mortality, a stealth memoir in which we learn about the author indirectly, mostly in relation to his vibrant, dominating 97-year-old father.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

by Jon Krakauer

For some reason not as engaging to me as Into the Wild but a great account; his spare style failed to help me see the mountain, but by the end I felt its cold. I am troubled by the human costs of the sport, as is Krakauer, who seems perm...

House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home

by Mark Richard

A fascinating experiment in point of view: it opens with an overview in distancing third-person; then it becomes a story told in differently distancing second person. His childhood and child self are fascinating. For me, he did not full...

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

by Hal Herzog

As a dog owner, an “animal lover,” and a former farmer, I largely enjoyed Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Author Hal Herzog’s message is simple and clear: humans’ relationship with animals is illogical and emotional. My bona fid...

Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

by Vivian Gornick

Gornick’s truths blaze off the page, her portraits of others transfix, her sentences and rhythms delight. What she remembers, she says, of growing up in a Jewish tenement in the Bronx, is a building full of women: "Shrewd, volatile, u...