A big windstorm blew a massive tree trunk onto the beach. Looks like the stump of a redwood to me. After a good rain falls, the tree’s wet wood takes on the reddish glow of a slow flame. When the full sun appears in a dry blue sky, the wood turns grey and withers, throwing off splinters like wiry strands in an old man’s beard. In case you didn’t know, I’m standing with sand in my shoes on the windswept Oregon coast.
Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” depicts the world of over a hundred years ago, a world long gone. Told within the context of New York Society, circa 1870s, Oppression and Competition are the twin symptoms of the malaise of the times. Oppression rears its head in the form of pervasive social niceties–people are so nice and polite, but it’s all a sham. While people behave conventionally, their false fronts and facades conceal their true feelings that roil beneath the surface in a toxic stew of despair. Despite all of the fashionable frippery...
At PR for People The Connector, we encourage people to act as a stewards to protect this great gift of life that we have been given. And we also promise to make our voices heard whenever possible. In this month’s issue, we present the voices of people who are grappling with the reality of climate change.
Nick Licata’s latest book is a timely, relevant, and compelling narrative that draws us into the glory days of student activism during the 1960s.These are the halcyon days of citizen empowerment when groups like the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) flourished, imbuing many thousands of young people with a collective conscience to make a better world. At the very least, their attempt to make a better world became a laudable, good faith effort.
Each month, we profile a library: Large, small, urban, rural, post-modern, quaint or neo-classic. This month Patricia Vaccarino writes about a small school project that quickly grew into a national literacy initiative.
Mantel conjures the world under the reign of Henry VIII and delivers Thomas Cromwell, in all of his complexity, to us as a sort of gift that keeps giving. If we can understand Cromwell, then maybe we can learn to understand ourselves.
Life unfolds noisily at the warp speed of a page-turning mystery novel. With many nuances, twists and hairpin turns, you never know what is around the next bend.
