Alice Munro’s technique as a writer is clean, crisp, and plain spoken. No unnecessary frills dot her stodgy landscape, where the characters are ready to retire before they have reached their prime.
David Brooks takes the reader on a journey to the past, to a time when self-sacrifice conjoined with self-effacement created a moral ethos that was the de facto standard for the American culture. He homes-in on the principles of rendering good service, of doing what is good for the community, and paying homage to the greater good.
I was walking on 1st Avenue, south of the Pike Place Market, when I heard two men talking loudly. They were close enough to make me turn and look. The guys were burly, not in the best of shape, not old, but not young; it’s hard to tell someone’s age. What caught me by surprise was that they were making disparaging remarks about my city.
The blue-skied Seattle day is warm for February 8th. I walk across the freeway overpass on Madison Avenue and turn right onto 6th Avenue. A man is huddled on the steps leading up to the Plymouth Congregational Church. The building is the color of a white palace. The man is young, black, lean, but he takes up the entire landing at the bottom of the steps; his battered blue backpack is large and looks heavy. He is crying, sobbing into a blinding-white concrete buttress.
We get old and what is erased? If that is the philosophical question to be explored in this sweeping work (no pun intended), then Ivan Klima answers it. It is difficult to fall in love with “Love and Garbage.” The title alone feels like the author is intent on destroying love the same way one would toss garbage into a incinerator to watch it explode. The narrative covers the protagonist’s childhood through to his adulthood—he is a great literary writer reduced to being a street sweeper by the Czech Communist regime that censors his work.
On the surface, Ernaux’s work is unapologetically unsentimental, but on a deeper level, her finely crafted prose conjures many layers of raw emotion that have been stripped of all pretense.
The Reverend Anne Saunders almost died when she was a child. Scarlet fever ran rampant, afflicting children everywhere, regardless of the color of their skin or how much money their families had. In the late 1930s, most children stayed home to heal, but Anne Saunders was so sick that her father wanted to take her to the hospital. He was told that if he took her to the hospital, she wouldn’t be alive when she got there.
David Brooks explores a richly textured landscape far beyond the usual scope of his Sunday NYT oped piece. “When I was young, I wanted to be knowledgeable, but as I got older, I wanted to be wise,” he states. Brooks is not alone in his quest seeking wisdom. There is a great need to see a person for who he or she really is inasmuch as there is a deeply heartfelt desire to be loved for who we really are.
German economist E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful is more relevant today than when he wrote this gem of a book in the early 1970s. There is, without a doubt, a universal idolatry of gigantism (bigness). How big is big enough, one wonders. And ironically, once great size is achieved among nations, companies or portfolios, there is the ever pressing need to create smallness within the bigness, so the girth can be efficiently managed.
Peter Drucker emphasizes that all of us can separate the wheat from the chaff by focusing on the right priorities. Mega talent like DaVinci, Napoleon, Mozart have always managed themselves. With talent alone they would have fallen off the pages of history. We can all use a little help learning to manage ourselves.
