Imperial
By Clara Germani | 11.19.09
Warning: I know someone who curiously picked up William T. Vollmann’s hefty 1,300-page Imperial, took a minute to read a page at random, and then exhaled a whimper of incomprehension as he thunked it down in disbelief. Maybe it was the sheer weight (three pounds) that distressed, or maybe it was that random page, which probably contained a gonzo-conglomeration of bolded text, exclamation points, and 90-plus-word sentences. (more…)
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Eating Animals
By Michael O'Donnell | 11.16.09
The birth of his first child posed a painful quandary for novelist Jonathan Safran Foer: Would he serve turkey at his son’s first Thanksgiving?
In Eating Animals, a work of nonfiction, Foer (author of “Everything is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”) confesses to a lifelong ambivalence toward eating meat. Yet he cherishes memories of childhood meals at his grandmother’s house. At what point, he wonders, should ethical decisionmaking supplement, rather than supersede, rich and important traditions at table? (more…)
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Crude World
By Brian Black | 11.10.09
Look who just turned 150 – without looking a day over 10,000! August marked the anniversary of the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania – or, at least, of our recognition of its usefulness. Journalist Peter Maass uses the occasion to throw a massive bucket of water on the flames of human exuberance for crude. (more…)
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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
By Kate Vander Wiede | 10.15.09
If you thought physics was tough to grasp in high school, William Kamkwamba will seem like a hero to you. And really, he is. Forced to drop out of secondary school when his family couldn’t afford school fees, 14-year-old Kamkwamba used his free time to build a windmill that operated on principles of physics he managed to teach himself. (more…)
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Hope for Animals and Their World
By Marjorie Kehe | 10.14.09
Throughout the course of her 75 years, Jane Goodall has communed with humankind’s closest wild relatives and watched them, as a species, tumble almost to oblivion. Along with chimpanzees, with which her name is famously synonymous, Goodall has witnessed the forces of modernity push dozens of other animals to the edge of their vanishing points. (more…)
