Leonore H. Dvorkin gives us a complex character, Elizabeth Nye, a 20-year-old student, developed along the lines of Jane Austen’s Emma. Only the latter was an unconsciously self-deceiving fool, while…
Author: Ernest Dempsey
The Cry for Myth
Renowned psychoanalyst Rollo May rediscovers the vitality of myth to our existence from a psychotherapist’s viewpoint in his The Cry for Myth (Norton and Co., 1991). Defining ‘myths’ as ‘narrative…
Why I’m Glad I had Breast Cancer
It is indeed the challenging title of Leonore H. Dvorkin’s latest nonfiction book Why I’m Glad I Had Breast Cancer (WildSide Press, September 2005) that drives one to go for…
Bringing Up Ziggy
Amusing, inspiring, guiding, and educational are only some of the adjectives I can use to describe Andrea Campbell’s Bringing Up Ziggy (1999, Renaissance Books, Los Angeles). In memoir fashion, Campbell…
Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe
Rare Earth (2000,Copernicus Press, New York) begins as a challenging book from its introduction which defines the Rare Earth Hypothesis as commonness of simple life and the rarity of complex…
Simple Pleasures of the Kitchen
The latest in Susannah Seton’s Simple Pleasures series is Simples Pleasures of the Kitchen (Conari Press, Boston, 2005). Seton gives us a wonderful anthology of food stories, recipes, crafts, quotes,…
The Virtual Community
‘Anyone interested in the next twenty years must read this book’ marks the Financial Times on the back cover of Howard Rheingold’s The Virtual Community (Secker & Werburg Limited, 1994).…
Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism: The Turn of the Screw
Priscilla L. Walton reminds us that The Turn of the Screw has been called the “small problem child” of Henry James’s fiction. We remember James for the intricacies of his…
Great Short Stories of the English Speaking World
Great Short Stories of the English Speaking World (Vol. 1) is one book that brings to readers ‘Best of the Best’ in the world of short fiction. Published first in…
A Curtain of Green and Other Stories
From the HBJ Modern Classic series comes Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green and Other Stories in hard cover, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers (Orlando, FL 1991). The book…