Book Review: Tripping to Dickeyland

5 years ago today:
“An elegy for 

James Dickey”

By Moristotle

[Apropos my recent poem, “For My Grandmother Effie [Dickey Dean],” we republish this review from May 4, 2018.]

There’s something very special about an audiobook recorded by the author, and Michael Hanson is an excellent reader. My paperback copy of his tribute to his mentor, the poet and novelist James Dickey, arrived from Amazon weeks ago.

Rave Book Review: It Really Is Simple

A life-changing book

Reviewed by 

Geoffrey Dean

Over the last six months I have experienced intense and exponential growth in my creativity, self-confidence, and capacity to find meaning and joy in everything I do. Changes in diet and exercise have played an important role in this, but the courage and motivation to make these changes, and the determination to stick with them with a level of consistency I have rarely achieved before, are attributable to a life-changing book that I read last spring. Alexandra Dotcheva’s It Really Is Simple is a compellingly-written, comprehensive guide to achieving the kind of life you want for yourself and your loved ones. It is all about setting very specific goals and mastering the steps to achieving them.

Book Review: Rhino Dreams

10 Reasons
to Read This Novel

Reviewed by Moristotle

I chose the “10 reasons why” approach for this review because – in full disclosure – I said yes to Jon Price’s request that I please help a writing colleague in California – Kathy Williams – market her just-published book. (I’m not one to say no to a friend, and I might have been hoping to receive a free copy of the book, which I soon did.)

Book Review: Nate’s New Age

Michael Hanson’s novel (upper left)
on display at Flyleaf Books
in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

A Wild Ride

Reviewed by Moristotle

Like the life of the central character of Michael Hanson’s novel Nate’s New Age, reading it can be a bit of a bumpy ride, especially if you make the mistake I did at the start: trying to read it only a few pages at a sitting. After a couple of weeks of sporadic sittings, of having to thumb back to be reminded who Brenda was, or Max, or Shuly, or Margaret, or Rebecca, or Kimberly, or his therapist Lynn… I finally realized I needed to buckle down and read continually. That worked much better, and I recommend that other readers approach it the same way.

Book Review: Poetic Philosophy / Philosophical Poetry

A review of Allegory in Early Greek Philosophy, by Jennifer Lobo Meeks

By Moristotle

From her opening pages, Professor Meeks, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Perimeter College of Georgia State University, manifests writing mastery and loving expertise on the technicalities and history of her subject. I recognized a book I wanted to savor; anyone interested in the roots of philosophy in Homeric and Hesiodic myths would.

Nine Years Ago Today: Science vs. religion

David Deutsch

A battle of the memes

By Moristotle

[First published on August 26, 2011.]

A book you might like to read: The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World, by David Deutsch (illustrated. 487 pp. Viking. $30—or borrow it from your local university library).

West Coast Observer: Too Much Already, and More to Come

By William Silveira

Two  urgent books, The Room Where It Happened, by John Bolton, and Too Much Is Never Enough, by Mary Trump, provide shocking insights into the malignant individual who is the United States’ current president. Bolton was the head of the National Security Council before resigning. He recounts numerous instances of Trump’s chaotic mismanagement of foreign affairs.

[Rave] Book Review: The Time of the Canton

His father’s story

By Roger Owens

In his historically reconstructed story, The Time of the Canton: A Sea Story, Michael McLoughlin takes us on a journey through light and darkness, in the now nearly mythical age of the German U-Boat Wolf Packs of World War Two, which terrorized the sea lanes practically unopposed. Hundreds of ships, huge tonnages of supplies, along with thousands of crew and passengers, met a watery death at the Wolf Packs’ cruel hands.

Book Review: Rocky Road Is More Than a Candy Bar

The fourth volume of Shirley Skufca Hickman’s autobiography

By William Silveira

Rocky Road Is More Than a Candy Bar is the fourth volume of Shirley Skufca Hickman’s memoirs. The first volume started out in the small coal mining settlement of Crested Butte, Colorado, where she was born. She now takes us to her first job as a teacher after graduating from Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado.

Book Review: A Slipknot into Somewhere Else

Poet Michael H. Brownstein’s “Journey to the Borderlands of Dementia”

By Moristotle

A lot of books are easier to read and review than Michael H. Brownstein’s A Slipknot into Somewhere Else. Maybe most books. Some of the poems in this collection, on their first reading, seem to be only just begun and not yet fully formed or developed, as though an early draft had made it to press by mistake. But read them again.
    For that first impression of “undeveloped” is when the work of reading begins, and – if you enjoy the intellectual and emotional challenge of reading difficult poems whose author you trust – the pleasure of discovery also begins, not only of meanings and associations in the poet’s words, but also of depths and meanings in yourself. This review may be more a report of some of my experiences reading the book than a critical appraisal of it (that, fortunately for me, is one definition of “review”). Other readers will have their own experiences.

Book Review: Finsoup, by edRogers

Coming soon to a Barnes & Noble store near you?

By Moristotle

Wednesday evening, UPS delivered to my doorstep a printed proof copy of edRogers’s new action & adventure thriller Finsoup. [edRogers is the pen name of Ed Rogers, a contributing editor of Moristotle & Co.] Of edRogers’ several such thrillers, it’s the first he wrote for the sake of a cause, one that, as the book’s “about the author” section conveys, “he became passionate about while living in Costa Rica for four years this decade – the urgent cause of ending shark finning.”

Book Review: Jonathan Price’s just-published collection of film reviews

In the Nick of Time

By Ann Weldy

In this interesting and somewhat quirky selection of reviews from the past six years, most of them first published on a friend’s blog, Jonathan Price reveals a fluent and graceful writing style, imbued with his joy in films and illuminated by his wide acquaintance with literature and cultural history. The book is organized around eight themes, each given a chapter comprising several essays, rather than the more usual chronological order, and this arrangement provides useful coherence among the texts and the films they present.

Book Review: Cross Creek

By Neil Hoffmann

We are in Maine and I have been reading voraciously. Not since childhood summer vacations have I read so much. I am bewitched.
    Nothing contemporary. I am reading Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings's Cross Creek, a trip into another time and place, her home in rural Florida orange groves in the 30’s [the book came out in 1942, when the author, whose life spanned 1896-1953, was 46]. The copy I found on a book shelf in the rental we’re staying in is a first edition and inscribed “Ruth Lunt April 1942,” a month before my birthday. Someone I know visited the house represented on the book’s dust jacket not long ago. She reported that the house was virtually as Rawlings left it, including her typewriter and car.

Book Review: Philip Roth Unbound

The Nobel Prize and various and sundry matters

By Jonathan Price

Philip Roth died a month ago. And it is a great loss though little surprise since he was 85 and had intentionally retired from writing six years ago and not given a farewell tour. His prominence is perhaps indicated by several articles the next day in the main section of the New York Times¹ marking his death, and a two-day retrospective of his interviews with Terry Gross on Fresh Air² (culled from seven interviews over the past, say, 25 years).

Book Review: Tripping to Dickeyland

“An elegy for James Dickey”

By Moristotle

There’s something very special about an audiobook recorded by the author, and Michael Hanson is an excellent reader. My paperback copy of his tribute to his mentor, the poet and novelist James Dickey, arrived from Amazon weeks ago.

Book Review: Unwanted President

A highly entertaining story, based on true events, and inspired by a certain conspiracy theory

By Moristotle

My paperback copy of edRogers’ political thriller, Unwanted President, arrived on Monday, occasioning me to review it on the publisher’s website, which happens to be Amazon.com. For readers who haven’t been to the website yet, to purchase their own copy of the book (and read my review), I thought I’d provide that link and the review itself:

For the fifth anniversary of my retirement

Why I decided to retire

By Moristotle

In the final hours of overnight between Thursday and Friday, the remnants of sleep inundated me with what felt like some hidden layers of past remembrances, with feelings of loss, of shortcoming, of empathy for a few people along the way.

Book Review: Nutshell (a novel)

By Moristotle

With a whoop and a slap of my thigh, I finished Ian McEwan’s latest novel, Nutshell, its final act an ingenious, but inevitable turn of plot. What a read! I highly recommend Nutshell, for all those who like their fiction with a flair for invention – in language as well as in setting and narrative voice – and for informed comment on culture, politics, psychology…and, in this case, forensic investigation. For Nutshell involves a murder.

Book Review: Olive Kitteridge

Life as we live it

By Moristotle

[In Wednesday’s post, “A curious case of apathy,” I mentioned a book club I had participated in. The book reviewed today was discussed in that club, and the review, “Life as we live it,” was originally published on August 14, 2012.]

Book Review: Family Is Forever: High School 1950-1954

The third volume of Shirley Skufca Hickman’s autobiography

By William Silveira

On July 25, my wife, Marylin, and I drove to Porterville to join Joe and Shirley Hickman for lunch. I had taken a speech class from Shirley in my junior year at Tulare Union High School (1958-1959). Shirley had just graduated from Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado, and this teaching assignment in Tulare, California was her first.