Made by Masha Zur Glozman and Yonathan Zur, Amos Oz: the Nature of Dreams is yet another of the great docos I’ve seen this film festival that manage to grip and inspire. Amos Oz comes across as a prolific writer and thinker, and his peculiar role in Israeli society – loved yet reviled for being [...]
A secondary pleasure with The Landscape of History (see my earlier comments) is its instructive, encompassing set of references, from which I have extracted two for onward reading. My guiding criteria were that each should be relatively recent and usable as a ‘how to’ (beyond its main purpose): Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals edited by [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
Eric Maisel is special to the numerous struggling creators, successful or not, who have used his many creativity books to motivate them and improve their art. I am one of them. My favourite Maisel books, to which I return often, are The Van Gogh Blues and Coaching the Artist Within. Anyone who has read Maisel’s last [...]
The writing craft is as impossible to master as quantum mechanics. Genetics endows some blessed souls with instinctive mastery; the rest of us struggle and struggle some more. I’m a sucker for ‘how to write’ books, the more the better. Most add little, reflecting, I sometimes reflect, more on my stubborn brain than on the [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
Nonfiction books on aspects of the workings of the brain make up a busy genre these days, one that I rarely read unless guaranteed something special. Swirling word of mouth led me to read The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Norman Doidge. I [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
I’ve been attending this for six or seven years, although I did stand out for a couple of years because it is such an intense experience. Unfortunately, I cannot make myself attend just one or two sessions – as soon as I work through the program I grow too excited for modest exposure. This year, [...]
Mark Sarvas, he of the excellent literary blog The Elegant Variation, has a concise, spot-on article in The Huffington Post on this issue. To fulminate against Kindle is, I agree with Mark, pointless. As I noted in a comment to his article: ‘What will be, will be and it’s our love of the word and [...]
This is a bit dated but I was intrigued by a May 11 Library of Congress news item that a south Russian court awarded US$1,000 (why wasn’t the award in roubles?) to a writer who claimed he experienced ‘chest pains, headache, and elevated blood pressure’ upon reading an adverse review in a local newspaper. I guess this [...]
You often read about the power of ‘word of mouth’ in publishing, but you rarely witness it in action. Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science was published in 2007. Last year, I received gushing recommendations from two friends, so I gave it to my [...]
Also posted in Nonfiction |
Far more interesting than Matisse’s physical life is the unfolding of his creative life. Here is Hilary Spurling writing (on page 192 of her highly recommended first biography) about Matisse, not yet aged thirty: Matisse himself was reluctantly seduced that summer by a collection of exotic butterflies on display in the window of a postcard merchant [...]