In these few hundred words, I can only offer a fleeting impression of Beezelbub’s Tales to his Grandson by G I Gurdjieff. It’s such a complex and perplexing book. This work of a thousand plus pages carries the subtitle An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man. It is here on the very first …
I’ve been tapping away each day on my latest project, a collection of poems focused on inventors of energy machines and some questions about science that this field raises. The working title is Canaries in the Sunshine (A Celebration of the Coming Century of Radiant Energy). I set myself the goal of chronicling a few …
Over Chinese New Year this year, I received as a gift a copy of a book called Our Colourful World. It’s a collection of 54 short stories by mainland Chinese writer, Ling Dingnian. On the cover of the book, he, or perhaps his publisher, describes his writings as mini-novels. That really doesn’t translate well into …
After reading Against the Day, I can reaffirm Thomas Pynchon as a writer on the leading edge, one with enormous creative muscle and a masterly control of the English language, one who can delight and entertain us with a universe of crazy details in so many different fields of human endeavour, but particularly in science, …
Thrillers are about characters who are in ‘terrible trouble,’ writes Dean Koontz. Peter Gray does appear to have cracked the thriller formula with Rough Cut, for on the very first page his character is indeed in ‘terrible trouble’. We are immediately drawn into the story of how Charlie Robertson came to be in that trouble …
John McPhee is one those writers with whom I feel I am never wasting a moment when I read him. Time spent with him is always a good investment. I first heard his name when I was sitting in a dining room on a cruise ship somewhere on our way to Alaska from San Francisco. …
Alibaba The House That Jack Ma Built by Duncan Clark is a good case for why we should take a work on its merits and not push it too hastily into any particular genre or subgenre. This is indeed a story of the birth and growth of Alibaba. But it also shapes as a biography …
I tracked this work down seeking to gain clarification on a current project of mine. A book with the title of The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making it Real sounded exactly like the book for me. The working title of my project is ‘Taiji: Use Mind and Not Force’. Having begun studying taiji health exercise in …
Along the Way, The Journey of a Father and Son, a co-autobiography by Martin Sheen and his son Emilio Estevez, was published in 2012. While it has a strong focus on the scripting, directing, acting and general activity behind the scenes of their 2009 collaborative movie The Way, an account of a father’s epic walk …
In the final analysis, this is a book review. But I also have to tell the story about how I found the author and the book. So it’s not any simple review. I have been reviewing a whole range of biographical writings lately as I prepare for my next project which is a personal account …
