By Mary Ellen Hannibal Some books you love and read again and you kind of wish you hadn’t.  For years I put The Good Soldier, by Ford Maddox Ford, in my top five of all time favorites; reading it again fairly recently, I don’t know what on earth I ever saw in it. This is [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal The word “anthology” is from the Greek for “gathering of flowers,” and the poetry collections many of us were plied with in high school were indeed like bouquets of full-on blossoms.  The Place That Inhabits Us:  Poems of the San Francisco Bay Watershed is an anthology, yes, but it’s more like [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Wolverine, apparently, love the scent of women’s hair.  Doug Chadwick’s wife stayed calm, cool and collected as wolverine raised in captivity hungrily sniffed her scalp – this kind of thing must be in the job description that comes with partnering with a National Geographic writer. Chadwick’s book, The Wolverine Way, is [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Making an ecological difference:  it’s what we all need to be doing.   In Eco Barons, Pulitizer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes profiles a set of maverick individuals who are walking their talk. Some, like Doug Tompkins of Esprit fame, use their personal fortunes to buy critical pieces of land.  Others, like Kieran [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal We all know, and envy them; now, thanks to Gene Stone’s new book, The Secrets of People Who Never Get Sick, we can emulate them. MEH: Your book includes some time-honored strategies for staying well, including a killer recipe for chicken soup. You also have some outliers, like picking your nose [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Dean Rader’s day job is teaching at USF; the kaleidoscopic purview of his interests and accomplishments move far beyond the academy.  Dean’s first book of poetry, Works & Days, won the 2010 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize. MEH: How did you become a poet, and how do you stay one while working [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal To many of us, Tibet means the Dalai Lama, perhaps by way of Richard Gere.  Slipping along with our cultural assumptions, we have completely missed what Canyon Sam has carefully culled in Sky Train:  Tibetan Women on the Edge of History. Not only are the stories of Tibetan women more than [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Annie Dillard’s blurb for Carin Clevidence’s first novel captures it:  this is a book that reminds the reader what it is to surrender to a good read.  Dillard says it returns “literature to its roots in beauty,” and calls out Clevidence’s eye for “the loneliness of what is real.” MEH: Reading [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal What on earth are we looking for, I wonder, in the white male novelist?  If you have missed the twittering, check out Jody Piccoult and Jennifer Weiner’s irritation that only boys get the kind of praise lavished on Jonathan Franzen, whose new book is Freedom.  They are right and the numbers [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Brian Cohen’s debut novel is about a young corporate attorney who falls in love with a pro bono client; the resulting roller coaster ride yet results in a newfound balance for the protagonist. But that’s not the whole story here – life’s convulsions and hard-earned equanimities come streaming down the pike [...]

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