I, on the other hand, believe that books, maps, scissors, and Scotch tape dispensers are all unreliable vagrants, likely to take off for parts unknown unless strictly confined to quarters.
High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the bumps, sand off the sharp corners.
But like balloons, they were excessively buoyant, and if you weren't careful, they floated away.
A dark imagination is, perhaps, more appealing before you know anything about darkness.
You mean we're going chronological order within each author? he gasped. But no one even knows for sure when Shakespeare wrote his plays!Well, I blustered, we know he wrote Romeo and Juliet before The...
I have always felt that the action most worth watching is not at the center of things but where edges meet. I like shorelines, weather fronts, international borders. There are interesting frictions an...
When you think about Laos and about not having enough food and those dirty and torn-up clothes, you don't want to think. Here it is a great country. You are comfortable. You have something to eat. But...
When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly thereafter, the decorator met with a fatal automobile accident. I confess that when this s...
When the corpses of [Sir John] Franklin's officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monog...
The same doctors who listen to Continuing Medical Education audiocassettes on their car stereos, intent on keeping up with every innovation that might improve their outcome statistics, may regard cros...
The action most worth watching is not at the center of things, but where edges meet.
Some friends of theirs had rented their house for several months to an interior decorator. When they returned, they discovered that their entire library had been reorganized by color and size. Shortly...
It is well known that involuntary migrants, no matter what pot they are thrown into, tend not to melt.
In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
Conquergood considered his relationship with the Hmong to be a form of barter, a productive and mutually invigorating dialog, with neither side dominating or winning out. In his opinion, the physician...
So, if you're a doctor, how can you recognize that you're having a feeling? Some tips from Dr. Zinn:Most emotions have physical counterparts. Anxiety may be associated with a tightness of the abdomen...
One night when I was pregnant with Henry, I lay in bed thinking for some reason, about Treasure Island. I realized that from the entire book there was only one sentence I remembered verbatim, somethin...
It was also true that if the Lees were still in Laos, Lia would probably have died before she was out of infancy, from a prolonged bout of untreated status epilepticus. American medicine had both pres...
Every illness is not a set of pathologies but a personal story
After a few months went by, Dee started leaving her own baby with Foua when she took Lia to medical appointments-perhaps the first instance in the history of Child Protective Services that a foster mo...