I don’t know if I’ll ever need to understand the perspective of Bangladeshi immigrants living in London, but this book brought this totally foreign view much closer, and made the opportunities and pitfalls awaiting these people tangible. Glad Ann recommended it to me.

I’m still not sure how the author did it, but I greedily consumed this account of his adventures following the migrations of peregrine falcons. His love of nature and birds is contagious, and I found myself paying more attention to the world around me, which I think is high praise for any book.

Much like his autobiographical books, Chronicles, this movie flirts with the personal life of Bob Dylan as a way of drawing our attention elsewhere. The real focus is on the swirling mythic interaction of his music and its audience, and that subject really is pretty fascinating. Dylan is played by multiple actors who all do…

The subject of love and war in a Civil War setting are not my usual interests, and so it took some effort to get into the story. The effort was rewarded with a telling full of finely crafted details. A reverence for the natural world permeates the writing and resonates with me, even though the…

I’d like to make reading Joseph Campbell a habit. Ideally every two years or less, I think. Some part of my psyche, hungry for juicy mythologies to consume, is deeply satisfied by his expressions. This book is a compilation of lectures he gave at the Cooper Union during the 1960’s and early 70’s. He’s a…

I’ve been eating vegan for well over a year, and still haven’t been to a fully vegan restaurant. Today we get on the bikes and head for my first. Ah, I never realized what a nice feeling it is to consider an entire menu freely. I guess it’s not surprising that many of the items…

I’m very fortunate to have helped Paula Constant with her website (where you can order her books), because it would be too easy to miss out on her journey, and that would be a real loss. The thing that makes this book so gripping (aside from plain good writing) is that when Paula begins, she…

This book kind of leaves me speechless. The setting is so bleak, it’s tempting to give up on it, but the characters don’t give up so I didn’t. Maybe that’s what it’s about – removing all reason to hope, looking at one father-son relationship, and seeing what’s left. And being forced to admit that hope…

In a series of portraits of avant-garde artists, Lehrer lays out his take on the stormy relationship between Art and Science. I felt like the book taught me many things, due in large part to Lehrer’s crystal clear interpretations of ideas that seem murky or impenetrable in their original expressions. It boils down to the…

Being someone who enjoys the occasional solo outing, even though I haven’t started canyoneering, gives this story an extra grip on me. (Aron amputated his lower arm after a boulder pinned his hand to the wall of a slot canyon in the Canyonlands of Utah). It’s a fascinating survival tale, which Aron tells candidly in…