Draft No. 4

John McPhee discusses chronological structure

February 13, 2013 | 28 Comments

Chronology is useful but hostile to thematic content, the writer says. You can build a structure in such a way that it causes people to want to keep turning pages. A compelling structure in nonfiction can have an attracting effect analogous to a story line in fiction.—John McPhee, in The New Yorker “There’s nothing wrong with a chronological structure,” McPhee explains in a recent New Yorker essay. “On tablets in Babylonia, most pieces were written that way, and nearly all …

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Time to call ‘In Cold Blood’ fiction?

February 10, 2013 | 20 Comments

Why Truman Capote’s slippery masterwork keeps making news. Everyone acknowledges that true stories can never be fully known—too many details lack corroboration, too many witnesses disagree about what really happened.—Jane Smiley, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel Reading the excellent new writing book Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction, by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, I was a tad surprised to see Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood extolled on page five for its magisterial opening. Capote’s start is gorgeous, with …

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Richard Russo’s ‘Elsewhere’

February 4, 2013 | 20 Comments

Review: Narrative risks & rewards in a talky memoir about Mom. “You do know your mother’s nuts, right?”—Russo’s father to him when he was twenty. Elsewhere by Richard Russo. Knopf, 243 pp. Rather dense, slow-moving, and expository, Elsewhere isn’t a memoir I’d make students read. Smoothly written, interestingly structured, a complex portrait of mental illness, love, and lower middle class life in a wretched town, Elsewhere is a book I’d recommend, with caveats, to adults. They must be serious readers, …

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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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