Break, Blow, Burn
Author: Camille Paglia
The HSGP Book Club meets at the Mesa Library, Main Branch, 64 East 1st Street (East of Country Club Way at the intersection of N. Centennial Way -- N.W. corner)
From Publishers Weekly:
The still-vocal critic of Sexual Personae, a book that drew on poetry and painting for its de-deconstructions of gender, checks in with an anthology of 43 poems, along with her own close readings of them. Her introduction offers a jumble of justifications for undertaking such a project (though she is "unsure whether the West's chaotic personalism can prevail against the totalizing creeds that menace it," she hopes it will), but the readings themselves reveal Paglia's fascination with poetry, which she likens "to addiction or to the euphoria of being in love." The book's first half presents canonical work that Paglia has found "most successful in the classroom" (Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson, etc.). The second features mostly canonical modernist and confessional work (Stevens, Williams, Toomer, Roethke and Plath), with a few more recent pieces. Clocking in mostly at two to four pages, Paglia's readings sound a lot like classroom preambles to discussion—offering background, lingering over provocative lines, venturing provisional interpretations. Some of what she says comes off as grandiose (Roethke's " 'Cuttings' is a regrounding of modern English poetry in lost agrarian universals"), some as boilerplate, some as inspired. Though hit-and-miss, Paglia's picks and appraisals provide the requisite spark for jump-starting returns to poetry.
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| Past Selections |
07/20/08
The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
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06/08/08
The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Author: Kim Edwards
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05/11/08
On the Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
Author: Carl Sagan
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04/13/08
Persepolis
Author: Marjane Satrapi
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03/23/08
The Uncommon Reader
Author: Alan Bennett
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02/03/08
Atlas Shrugged
Author: Ayn Rand
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01/13/08
The World Without Us
Author: Alan Weisman
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11/11/07
Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know
Author: E. D. Hirsch Jr
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10/14/07
While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within
Author: Bruce Bawer
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09/16/07
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
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08/19/07
Three Cups of Tea
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07/15/07
Adam's Curse: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Destiny
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06/10/07
Suite Francaise
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05/13/07
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
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04/08/07
Crimes Against Logic
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03/11/07
John Adams
Author: David McCullough
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02/11/07
Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences
Author: John Allen Paulos
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01/14/07
Wake-Up Call: The Political Education of a 9/11 Widow
Author: Kristen Breitweiser
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11/12/06
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
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10/15/06
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Author: Malcolm Gladwell
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09/17/06
American Theocracy
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08/13/06
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your History Textbook Got Wrong
Author: James W. Loewen
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07/16/06
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Author: Thomas Friedman
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06/11/06
Ingersoll the Magnificent
Author: Joseph Lewis
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05/21/06
Ecotopia
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04/16/06
The Iron Heel
Author: Jack London
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03/26/06
State of War
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02/12/06
A Man Without a Country
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01/15/06
Guns, Germs and Steel
Author: Jared Diamond
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11/27/05
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
Author: Susan Jacoby
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10/23/05
The Truth About Jesus: Is He a Myth?
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09/18/05
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character
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08/28/05
The Plot Against America
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07/17/05
America Declares Independence
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06/18/05
In the Land of Second Chances
Author: George Shaffner
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05/29/05
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason
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04/24/05
Humanism as the Next Step
Author: Lloyd and Mary Morain
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03/27/05
Slant
Author: Greg Bear
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02/27/05
Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age
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01/16/05
The Kite Runner
Author: Khaled Hosseini
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11/28/04
I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away
Author: Bill Bryson
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10/17/04
The Moral Animal, Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
Author: Robert Wright
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08/29/04
Life of Pi: A Novel
Author: Yann Martel
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06/20/04
REASON Magazine
Author: Nick Gillespie, Editor-in-Chief
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05/23/04
Angels & Demons
Author: Dan Brown
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04/11/04
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Author: Azar Nafisi
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03/14/04
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith
Author: Jon Krakauer
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02/15/04
The Bubble of American Supremacy
Author: George Soros
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01/18/04
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Author: Carl Sagan
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