Wendell Berry depicts the decline of rural America before the forces of greed.
His narrator, a small-town barber named Jayber Crow, sees his friends and neighbors trying to hold on to meaning and dignity in the face of their impending economic obsolescence. Every character is vividly human; every situation is particular and yet universal.
I love this book on its own terms, and I treasure it as a sympathetic perspective on the themes in my poetry.
“This is a book about Heaven,” says Jayber Crow, “but I must say too that . . . I have wondered sometimes if it would not finally turn out to be a book about Hell.” It is 1932 and he has returned to his native Port William to become the town's barber.
Orphaned at age ten, Jayber Crow’s acquaintance with loneliness and want have made him a patient observer of the human animal, in both its goodness and frailty.
He began his search as a "pre-ministerial student" at Pigeonville College. There, freedom met with new burdens and a young man…
This book gives the lie to a vision we may have of an idealized American past.
Egan narrates the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in small-town (and sometimes big-city) America in the 1920s, when ordinary, “decent” people supported an organization that subverted the principles of decency, democracy, and justice.
In my poetry, I strive to temper the beauty of our lives by recognizing the ugliness that often infects the human heart. I hope that my poems, like this book, offer an antidote to self-delusion.
"With narrative elan, Egan gives us a riveting saga of how a predatory con man became one of the most powerful people in 1920s America, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, with a plan to rule the country—and how a grisly murder of a woman brought him down. Compelling and chillingly resonant with our own time." —Erik Larson, author of The Splendid and the Vile
“Riveting…Egan is a brilliant researcher and lucid writer.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of…
Winchester brings a long life of research to this study of the ways we have striven over millennia to preserve and disseminate knowledge, from the earliest writing to books to the internet. He sees knowledge as the force for good and recounts how evil can seek to suppress, subvert, or misuse it.
In my poems, I try to question our ideas of progress. The good we achieve is fragile, always dependent on an endless dialogue of self-awareness.
“A delightful compendium of the kind of facts you immediately want to share with anyone you encounter . . . . Simon Winchester has firmly earned his place in history . . . as a promulgator of knowledge of every variety, perhaps the last of the famous explorers who crisscrossed the now-vanished British Empire and reported what they found to an astonished world.” — New York Times
From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes—this is award winning writer Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass…
