By Mary Ellen Hannibal Recently I sat in on a book group where The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Freidan, was under discussion. The participants were members of the Smith Club of the Peninsula; Smith is Freidan’s alma mater, and her classmates from the class of 1942 were the anonymous respondents to the questionnaire that forms [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Amazing how things turn out. Don Lattin‘s best seller, The Harvard Psychedelic Club, catches a group of remarkable individuals at that seminal crossroads known as the seventies. While maybe an onlooker could have predicted how things would turn out for the merry prankster himself-Timothy Leary-who could have seen the future Dr. [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal For those of us sitting in coffee shops or behind desks most of the day, the furious controversy that rages across the West concerning wolves seems bizarre and esoteric. On the one side are some ranchers and hunters who would seemingly like to eliminate wolves from the face of the earth; [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Well, there’s no requisite position for absorbing a sustained narrative, but sitting still helps.  Does nobody hunker down with a big, long book anymore?  Why have we turned into such grazers and twitchers and surface assessors? In The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, Los Angeles [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal American history has been looked at every which way, and the questions we ask about our past will no doubt continue to change as our sensibilities do.  Eric Jay Dolin has written a highly engaging chronology of European incursion through these parts in Fur, Fortune, and Empire–focusing on yes, the fur [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal The word “graphic” has both Latin and Greek roots and also bridges the concepts of “writing” and “drawing.”  The graphic novel thus fulfills its etymology.  Belle Yang’s memoir, Forget Sorrow, likewise bridges two very different worlds – the past and the present—finding through lines not only of loss but also of [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal It’s kind of paradoxical, but sometimes when I really need to escape into fiction it isn’t the beach read or the legal thriller that really does it for me but something mandarin, puzzling, interior, a work that you must give yourself to in order to sit with it at all.  In [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Travel writing is one of literature’s great categories, opening up the world to readers through distinct sensibilities, delivering a time and a place along the trajectory of lived experience. Jeff Greenwald has been at this art for quite some years and many readers probably know his frequent journalism contributions to probably [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Like all art forms, including history and science, poetry is ultimately a long conversation.  Current practitioners take on inherited formats, respond to them, answer them, contradict them, and so on, usually. As we are singular in so many ways, it is fitting that Bay Area host one of the most vital [...]

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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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