author of Walking Through Walls: A Memoir
It never fails. On every author’s book tour, every interviewer, every moderator, every talk show host always asks the same question, especially when the room goes silent and they need to rescue the interview — “Why did you write your book?” This is a failsafe method to get the author chatting again. Hopefully, after the author spends the next three minutes answering this question, other people will finally be inspired or emboldened to ask yet another question to keep the momentum going. I’m sure most authors have a compelling answer for why they invested so much of their precious time in putting words on a page.
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Alternate Realism & the Death of New Age
The remarkable election of an African American junior senator to the highest office in the land speaks volumes to our collective desire for a radical departure from the politics of the last eight years. Barack Obama’s “change” mantra, not new to the American campaign lexicon, took on a palpable urgency this season. A tangle of emotions: hope, pride, outrage and fear, swept the long shot candidate to victory and at the outset of 2009 the world watches and waits anxiously to learn exactly what mode of reality we are substituting the former one for. In this time of peril and destabilization, a critical re-examination of our definitive terms and their underlying principles seems to be in order.