Gaylord Dold Author of The Mitch Roberts Series and More - page 23

Gwynne, S.C. Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson, Scribner and Co., New York, 2014 (672pp.$35)  His father was a failed everything, lawyer, merchant, and farmer in turn, and at an early age he and his beloved sister Laura were orphaned. Luckily,…

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One reads in order to ask questions.   Kafka Letter to a Friend    

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At the periphery of existence are suicide and mental illness, each submerged in the tide of Everydayness. “They” omit mention of suicide in the Sunday obituaries. “They” have swept mental illness under the rug. We long for normalcy, a smooth ride, and an idealized conception…

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      Fairy tales for dialecticians…   Walter Benjamin …about Kafka  

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Guinn, Jeff. Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2013 (495pp.$27.50) He was a disagreeable child who lied about everything and blamed others for his misdeeds. Without a father and scrawny to a pitiable degree, Little Charlie compensated by…

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Everydayness–that ontology of the commonplace that dominates our lives, polices our world from the shadows. Its functionaries and sheriffs abound, representatives from the gray realm of routine—the job, the marriage and the kids, the lateness of the showery afternoon, commuting in heavy traffic as drive-time…

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Drury, Bob and Clavin, Tom, The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2013 (414pp.$30) Among the Bad Face Brule band of Sioux living in the western Nebraska panhandle was a brave called…

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Strohm, Peter. Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury, Viking Penguin Group, New York, 2014 (283pp.28.95) Geoffrey Chaucer, who died obscurely in 1400, achieved, rather quickly, a posthumous renown in the decade after his death—so quickly as to astonish the literary world of the…

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All that allegories intend to say is merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and that we already know. But the problems we struggle with every day are a different matter. On this subject a man was once asked: “Why such stubbornness? If you only followed…

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Beachy, Robert. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. Alfred A. Knopf,  New York, 2014 (305pp.$27.95) Modern identity politics begins with the struggle of subjugated peoples against European colonialism, a mid-twentieth century movement that commenced with plantation slavery and progressed through apartheid and on to…

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