Gaylord Dold Author of The Mitch Roberts Series and More - page 18

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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What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse? Malcolm Lowry “Under the Volcano”

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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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Never write more clearly than you can think. Niehls Bohr

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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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Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetuated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves. Engels, Letter to Marx 4 September, 1870

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Fate and destiny run on invisible parallels towards the Western horizon, beyond which is the abyss of death. Fate, exhaling its foul breath of chance, is, well- represented in literature, poetry, and drama—and, in popular melodrama, tediously over-represented; destiny, which has as its subject the…

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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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