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August 18th, 2008

on The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health, by Nena Baker (North Point Press)

On August 15, the New York Times ran an AP wire story reporting that the FDA has reaffirmed its contention that “the trace amounts of bisphenol A that leach out of food containers were not a threat to infants or adults.” Had I not just completed my reading of Nena Baker’s new book, the broad

August 14th, 2008

on The Collected Lyric Poems of Luís de Camões, tr. by Landeg White (Princeton University Press)

In “Scorn Not the Sonnet,” William Wordsworth honored the great practitioners of the form: “with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody / Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound; / a thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; / with it Camöens soothed an exile’s grief …” Then he added Dante, Spenser and Milton.

August 13th, 2008

on Minding the Store: Great Writing About Business, edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge (The New Press)

In 2000, The Institute of Economic Affairs, a British think tank of free-marketeers, published "The Representation of Business in English Literature," a paper covering literature from the eighteenth century to the present. The final chapter by Dr.

August 5th, 2008

on Clear All the Rest of the Way, poems by Warren Woessner (The Backwaters Press)

One of the occupational hazards of the poet is that even as one expresses with candor the feelings that inspire the poems, one’s language may begin to lag behind. Aging and the settled life seem to exact a price. The courage of one’s emotions stays potent but draws a diminishing energy from the words chosen to give those emotions shape.

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