Gaylord Dold Author of The Mitch Roberts Series and More - page 17

Vodun is the supreme factor in the unity of Haiti. It came to crystalize, in the dynamism of it’s cultural manifestations, the past of the African on native soil,his martyrdom in the colonial hell, the heroism of the knights in realizing the miracle of 1804….

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Edward Hoagland. Sex and the River Styx, Chelsea Green Publishing, Vermont (272 pp. $$17.95) Edward Hoagland is one of my favorite writers and a beloved figure in American letters. He is my review of one of his latest books. Biologists worldwide warn that we are…

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All factions have reason to worry if the broad majority of citizens lose that mysterious sense of felicity and exuberance they once had in the presence of natural grandeur—the feeling of having known it before, of being linked to it via thousands of centuries before…

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Krakauer, Jon. Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town, Random House, New York, 2015 (367pp.$28.95) Missoula is a college town in the beautiful southwestern part of Montana where you can fish for brown trout off a bridge on busy 5th Street. The…

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Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014 (615pp. $35) These days cotton as a capitalist commodity traded globally reveals itself mostly as a sales channel to WalMart and other massive retailers, branded and organized world-wide by huge “apparel”…

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There’s a sense of being young and, all of a sudden, the opposite feeling, of not being young, and of having used up a series of people who loved me. One person makes a declaration of love and the other remains relaxed and gently affectionate…

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Neiman, Susan. Why Grow Up? (Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2014 (231pp.,$25) Philosophy, in all its daunting simplicity, seeks answers to humble questions that turn out to be puzzling when our assumptions, biases, predispositions and laziness get jettisoned….

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McGuane, Thomas. Crow Fair: Stories, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015 (267pp. $25.95) Tom McGuane lives on a ranch outside McLeod, Montana where he raises horses and is an accomplished trainer and rider. He’s lived there for many years, having purchased the property after a…

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The typesetter who sets my book is as important to cultural life as I am. B. Traven

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Levy, Andrew. Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped His Masterpiece, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2015 (342pp.$25). In tandem with Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and Melville’s Moby Dick, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn stands as the oft acknowledged foundation…

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