Our Emily Dickinsons covers a truly impressive mix of writers, their eras, their literary and personal histories. Not all of this material is likely to appeal to all readers—but similarly, what does appeal at any given time may be surprising.
Pellett does not shy away from her deep, and sometimes naïve, infatuations with the Chinese revolution that she developed in her formative years in San Francisco as an anti-war and feminist activist, going from St. Louis to Berkeley as a student studying the family revolution in China.
Hawley’s book predates the events in Charlottesville, which means that its value resides not in interpreting that watershed incident but rather in its ability to tell the story of how a movement characterized as leaderless and “almost exclusively an online phenomenon” developed the capacity to organize significant numbers of supporters in physical space.
I suppose mothers are always trying to save their sons. And sons are always making their mothers suffer, always making their mothers need to save them. Despite my stupidity, my unworthiness, my mother was determined to save me anyhow.
Every era tends to think theirs is the most difficult, amazing, or inexplicable time period, but historians would remind us that this assumption is the folly of myopic thinking. The same can be said for the past century on Cherokee Street.
I was not thinking of the modern catastrophes of movement and making-do that end so many human relationships in our time. For some reason I was thinking of Bobby McHein.
The gun show was small, which was fine with me. We would not have to shuffle-walk through the civic center for long. I left my eyeglasses in the car and wore a military-themed shirt but fooled no one. Just past the ticket counter, where everyone entered and automatically turned left,…
Portland, Maine, sometimes dismissively known as “the other Portland,” the New England city that may not get as much attention as its funky, bigger sister in Oregon. That is a damned shame, however, because Portland, Maine is one of the most beautiful small towns you will find in the Union.
Last Friday Michelle Obama shared her struggles to conceive her daughters Malia and Sasha. As someone who has also experienced miscarriage, infertility, and IVF before conceiving, I am so grateful to the former First Lady for telling her personal story to the nation in her memoir Becoming. It is a…
Back in what was called (affectionately in the military) the Reagan-Bush years, I got out of the Army, did a bachelor’s in English and philosophy, then realized I needed a job. I had one unsolicited offer, to manage a city-park facility where I worked summers with a team of disadvantaged…