James Salter recently won the prestigious 2011 Hadda Price from The Paris Review. I think of him more often as a New Yorker author, and find his latest story collection, Last Night (2005), and his memoir-ish first novel about the Korean War, The Hunters (1957), simply incredible. (Salter's A Sport and a Pastime raises the pulse like nothing else.) A writer's writer of course, up there with Yates, Carver, etc. April 2011 was designated James Salter month and I made a mental note to go back to some of his work that I have not had the chance to read yet. The link is for the series of interviews, reviews, essays, and stories that the Paris Review aggregated in April.
Stephen Brill's new overview of school reform seems to be dishing the same anti-parent and anti-teacher tropes that the boosters of charter schools and anti-unionism have been saying since the late 1980s. Looks like more of the same from the Waiting for Superman wing of school "reformers". I will say it again- as someone with experience founding a micro-academy in the South Bronx- great teachers undoubtedly make a difference in the lives of students but poverty reduction is the cure, everything else is simply dealing with the symptoms. Class Warfare, reviewed by Richard Rothstein in Slate, http://www.slate.com/id/2302578/pagenum/2
As an off again, on again, vegan, vegetarian, etc. since I was 16, I often find it very difficult to have meaningful conversations about the issue with people who aren't vegetarian. People who eat meat quite frequently start from a defensive position assuming that my choices are an indictment of theirs. Of course, some zealous vegetarians can be obnoxious in their propaghandizing, but Chad Lavin's discussion of his experiences teaching food ethics makes some wonderful points. The explanations- health, cruelty, environmental sustainablity, political grandstanding- yes, they are all a part of the motivation to be vegetarian, but few have added anything really thoughtful and new to the conversation for decades. I am not sure that Levin's column in the Chron is much, but despite the reality that being a vegetarian is easier than ever now, and although the number of vegetarians is also increasing, few who are not somehow pre-conditioned or sensitive to the stanrdard reasons for going off meat will actually confront the issue. http://chronicle.com/article/The-Vegetarian-Lesson/128562/
Neo-realism returns? Neo-neo-realism? Steinbeck? Pick up and dust off your Zola and Dreiser, my friends. I must say that although this link is to a review on Salon that initially went out earlier this week full of what (at best) appeared to be a cut and paste job from other trade publications and reviews (and at worst, ridiculous plagiarism by the author), nonetheless I do want to broaden attention to the themes of working class realities in regional literary fiction that are at the heart of this collective review.
Historian and recent AHA President Elaine Tyler May, author of the still incredible Great Expecations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (1980) and Homeward Bound (1990), provides some genuine, expert commentary in this PBS interview (in contrast to Blankenhorn of the nauseating Promise Keepers movement, the polite but unsubtly anti-feminist defendor of "marriage" who can barely disguise his frustration at the rise of non-traditional families, otherwise known as the real world). This probably isn't the place to start a new conversation about the consequence faith and poverty, but it's worth noting that the most "moral" regions of the U.S. are also the most poor, which is an unfortunate convergence pushing the young poor into unhappy marriages doomed to early divorce.
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