Archive for The Book Bum - page 11

Harrison, Jim. The Big Seven. Grove Press, New York, 2015 (341pp. $26) Jim Harrison’s formidable accomplishments include writing half a dozen of the best American novels of the past forty years (Dalva, The Road Home, True North, Farmer etc.), some poetry to break the heart…

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Flanagan, Richard. The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014 (334pp. $26.95) A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else. In his old age, Dorrigo Evans never knew if he had read this or had…

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Harrison, Jim. The River Swimmer, Grove Press, New York, 2013 (198pp.$25) At 75, novelist and poet Jim Harrison towers over his contemporaries in talent, exuberance and style. Readers who unpack his portmanteau of literary enthusiasms (food, sex, wilderness, rivers, birds and bears, wine—to name just…

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Theroux Paul. The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari, Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt, New York, 2013 (353pp. $27) Nobody has demonstrated more flair, courage and persistence in a life of travel than Paul Theroux, and nobody in our vast travel literature has managed to spend…

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Ford, Richard. Canada. Ecco/Harper Collins, New York, 2012 (420pp.$27.99) For some of us the lunar loneliness of adolescence is truly the outer space of human life, clinging as we do to a cold blue moon that would just as soon let us drift away, ridding…

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Buruma, Ian, Year Zero: A History of 1945, The Penguin Press, New York, 2013 (368 pp. $31.50) The great cultural critic Walter Benjamin reminds us of a Paul Klee drawing called “Angelus Novus”, which depicts the angel of history staring fixedly at something distant while…

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I have been practicing yoga for about twenty years. I follow the Hatha Yoga path, the one that is based on controlled breathing, relaxation and long, slow poses. Here is my review of a recent book about the science of yoga by an award winning…

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Theroux, Paul. The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New York, 2011 (285pp. $25) Before too much of the 19th century had exhausted itself in revolution and bloody war, travel, which had once been the province of solitary wayfarers,…

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Baker, Nicholson, Traveling Sprinkler, Blue Rider Press (Penguin Group), New York, 2013 (291 pp. $26.95) Nicholson Baker is the anti-Mailer who knocks Mailer into the first row without throwing a punch, he’s that force-field mysterious. Everything about Baker—his perilous imagination; a style that hot-foots it…

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Englund, Peter. The Beauty and the Sorrow: An Intimate History of the First World War (tr. Peter Graves), Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011 (540pp.$35) Groom, Winston. Kearny’s March: The Epic Creation of the American West 1846-47, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2011 (310pp.$27.95) Knopf…

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