Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted... but to weigh and consider.

Francis Bacon

I've always been a voracious reader, and as I get older there is even more of an urgency to read. While I believe in stick-to-it-tivness, I'm unashamed to admit that on occasion a book doesn't engage me as anticipated, and I react by letting lie fallow on a table or bookshelf somewhere hoping that I'll be sufficiently renergized to benefit from the ideas the next time it makes it into rotation.

Some Choices

Bill McKibben's, Deep Economy and Paul Collier's The Bottom Billion are providing lots to think abou, as did Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Melville: His World and Work - a fairly new bio that made an excellent companion to my re-reading, first critical read of Melville's magnum opus. Delblanco describes Melville life as a “symmetrical tale of artistic triumph and public failure about a writer who earned little more than $10,000 over his lifetime. So all you writers should keep writing! Leo Marx's, Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, makes a good companion. I find that older works become more available to us when we reconstruct the milieu in which they were created. I suspect that without doing so makes much literature courses dreadful stuff to the majority of us who believe we have already constructed our literary tastes!

Moby Dick - My son liked the graphic novel version, which he encountered a few years back. Perhaps that version was the original intent in Melville's head/soul before the book swallowed him. Page skimmers weary of “The Try-Works” before these prosodic, hopeful and restorative lines:

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar. (328)

The Long Emergency - I teach a few business courses at Cambridge's Graduate School of Business and I always try to move beyond the mainstream canon. I am expecting spirited debate and brilliant essays from my students in my Political, Social and Economic Aspects of Business course.

After and Before the Lightning - The practice of journaling affords the writer the opportunity to acknowledge the inner space and its connectedness with the outer space. A viable hypothesis is to view the journal as a variant of a vision quest; the writer may find the margin between inner and outer producing troubling and quizzical feelings; or, sometimes a different outcome conjoins inner and outer in a serendipitous and sacred manner. Through the art of journaling we have a formal conversation internally that helps us find and follow our map. In After and Before the Lightning, Ortiz’s fidelity to native peoples and their homelands are paramount: the peoples, their lands and all the galaxies are inexorably joined together in sacred oneness. After and Before the Lightning is Ortiz’s map of his journey as it occupies the inner and outer space of the Rosebud reservation in winter. This is his journey to reconnect and rediscover reality. I love this earnest, heartfelt poetry.

Three Junes - I was late coming to this wonderful work from Julia Glass. A good, succinct review may be read here .

1215: The Year of the Magna Carta- I read this because I love examining small swatches from everyday life in the past. Historians, proper historians, are quick to dismiss pop history, but I think books like these can spark curiosity to learn more while being a fun read.

Pagan Spain- The transcendent years of Wright’s exilic experiences in Paris combine with the discoveries of Spain to create a new epistemology for Wright, expanding his view and writings beyond his earlier successes in exposing the plight of the black man in America oppressed by racist white Americans, to a Western intellectual, a humanist who seeks to combat the corruption of the less fortunate people, represented in Pagan Spain, by the women of Spain. A much under-read gem that combines Wright's powerful prose with his serious interest in the social sciences, particularly, sociology.

The Better Angel- Morris reports on the poet's involvement with the Civil War and paints a distinctive portrait of the Washington hospitals... contrasts nicely when co-reading with a traditional history book. An excellent Whitman resource is found here.

Saving Daylight - Jim Harrison has long been a personal favorite of mine and is a true American treasure. This latest poetry volume is full of 'old guy' insight, nature and mortality.

Learning, Creating and Using Knowledge - I use this text as an anchor in a Graduate School of Education course entitled. Problem Solving and Thinking Skills. Too much teaching is based on old models that don't afford the chance for the learner to learn anything in a meaningful and memorable way. How many A's on your transcripts are the result of some rote learning that got you the grade at the time but resulted in the information gone the way of the venerable if disappeared, steam engine?