The Lonely Network

The great irony of the The Social Network, of course, is that its central theme is not connectivity but disconnection.  A film about the genesis of a technology designed to bring people closer together features a main character who experiences the painful dissolution of social bonds. The plot is driven by protagonist Mark Zuckerberg’s exclusion [...]

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Home for the Holidays, With a Book

I have two bookish confessions to make.  The first is that I keep a running list of every book I have read since I graduated from college some twenty years ago.  The list includes the author and title as well as the month and year I finished each book.  The list includes books I read [...]

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Literature and the Culture of Viral Panic

What do Philip Roth’s polio novel Nemesis and Justin Cronin’s vampire novel The Passage, both published in 2010, have in common?  Quite a bit, actually.  Roth’s novel renders the atmosphere of fear surrounding a polio outbreak in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944.  The protagonist is a young playground director futilely trying to [...]

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Bromance and the American Novel

I, for one, am thrilled that “bromance” has been officially added to the newest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.  Bromance: “a close but nonsexual relationship between two men.”  The word received its 2010 OED stamp of approval along with “chillax,” “frenemy,” “exit strategy,” and “defriend,” among others.  Now that bromance is part of our venerated lexicon, [...]

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Edward Abbey, Nature, and the “Shock of the Real”

During my recent hiking and camping trip to Utah, I re-read Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey’s eloquent and ornery work of nature writing.  First published in 1968, the book recounts the author’s three-season stint as a park ranger in Arches National Park in the late 1950s, where he was stationed in a house trailer twenty miles [...]

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Double Rainbow Guy vs. Henry David Thoreau

(photo: Modesto Bee) FAMOUS QUOTE Double Rainbow Guy: “Whoa, that’s a full rainbow.  All the way.  Double Rainbow.  All the way.  It’s a double rainbow all the way.  Whoa.  So intense.  Whoa.  Man.  Whoa.  Whoa.  Whoa!!! My God!!!  Oh my God!  Oh my God!  Woooo!  Oh Wow!  Woooo!  Yeah!!!  Oh my, oh my, oh my [...]

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Learning Solitude

In his essay, “The End of Solitude,” recently published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, William Deresiewicz argues that we are undergoing a historical shift in the social significance of solitude.  Once viewed as a necessary means to better connect with God, or with Nature, or with the fraught Self, solitude has now become synonymous [...]

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Baseball on the World Stage

Nearly 100 years ago, baseball impresario Albert G. Spalding published his sprawling, 500-plus-page book, America’s National Game.  This 1911 tome, replete with illustrations by political cartoonist Homer Davenport, is one part history, one part autobiographical recollection, and many parts unabashed celebration of Spalding’s own contributions to the development of the game.  Spalding (1850-1915) was a [...]

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On Howard Zinn

My journal entry from April 17, 1997: “Bought Zinn’s Can’t Be Neutral.  Ate a heavy calzone and too much garlic bread.  At Wordsworth books in Harvard Square, someone asked the clerk where he could find books on marionettes.” In this rather unremarkable fashion, Howard Zinn’s memoir entered my life, equally sharing diary space that day [...]

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Five Years After Six Feet Under

I recently pulled my copy of Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking off of my living room bookshelf and reread sections that I had marked off when I first read it two years ago.  Didion’s book about the death of her husband is a beautiful meditation on loss, grief, faith, and enduring.  I [...]

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