The Mitch Roberts series—featuring private detective Mitch Roberts of course, ran through ten volumes stretching from the early 1980’s through 2004, with the final entry, Samedi’s Knapsack. The Roberts series was originally set in Wichita, Kansas. Later titles saw Roberts adventuring in London, Amsterdam, Reno, and…
Jim Harrison. Songs of Unreason, Copper Canyon Press (143pp. $22) My friend Arlice Davenport is the book editor of the Wichita Eagle. He’s a perceptive traveler, philosopher and poetry lover. He wrote this appreciative review of Jim Harrison’s latest volume of poetry. I know he…
Harrison, Jim. Brown Dog, Grove Press, New York, 2014 (525pp. $27) Few American writers—Mark Twain comes to mind, the early Hemingway of the “Nick Adams Stories”, or in short bursts, Henry Miller, leave so much of their own blood and sinew on the written page…
Every college kid my age read and was influenced by Beat literature in the 60’s. After all, it was Lawrence, Kansas and everybody opposed the war in Vietnam, everybody smoked dope, and everybody was having a good time. I came across “Naked Lunch” in a…
de Botton, Alain; Armstrong, John. Art as Therapy, Phaidon Press Ltd., London and New York, 2013 (239pp. $39.95) At the turn of the 20th century an Arts and Crafts movement, born in England as a response to the ailments of the Industrial Revolution and its…
With a review of Frederick Turner’s “Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of Tropic of Cancer, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2012 (244pp. $24.95) The Yale Icons of America Series Henry Miller is one of my literary heroes. Every five years or so I re-read…
The Bay of Sorrows (1994) Dold makes all this read like nobody has ever written it before. A ragged, raw poetry keeps these pages turning. Anyone expecting just another mystery from Bay of Sorrows will get the same surprise. The Washington Post Book World …
Packer, George, The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013 (430pp. $27) The unwinding of the Old America has taken forty years or so, seemingly stable structures firmly in place by 1960 which produced prosperity and economic…
McKibben, Bill. Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist, Times Books (Henry Holt and Company), New York, 2013 (272pp. $26). Independent science confirms that human-caused global warming is real. There is reason to believe that a warming climate could have dire…
Isenberg, Andrew, Wyatt Earp: A Vigilante Life, Hill and Wang (Farrar Strauss and Giroux), New York 2013 (296 pp. $30) Gardner, Mark Lee, Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, The Northfield Raid, and the Wild West’s Greatest Escape, William Morrow (Harper Collins), New York, 2013…