When he discovers that his father worked on missiles for a defense contractor, Jeff Porter is inspired to revisit America's atomic past and our fallen heroes, in particular J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. The result, ""Oppenheimer Is Watching Me"", takes readers back to the cold war, when men in lab coats toyed with the properties of matter and fears of national security troubled our sleep. With an eye for strange symmetries, Porter traces how one panicky moment shaped the lives of a generation. All the figures in this masterful work are caught in a web of coincidences and paranoias, the chapters strewn with the icons of American material culture of a bygone era - vintage Pontiacs, Fizzie sodas, Geiger counters, latex girdles, and, of course, Fat Man and Little Boy. Readers also encounter noteworthy figures from the era, including Francis Gary Powers, whose U2 spy plane was shot out from under him in the skies over the Soviet Union, and Fidel Castro, whom the CIA plotted to kill or, at least, strip of his beard. Seamlessly weaving historical events played out on a grand stage with day-to-day activities of childhood, ""Oppenheimer Is Watching Me"" is a heady mix of personal memoir and cold war history.

ORIGINALLY published in the June 11, 1984, "New Yorker, this lengthy essay is a sharp-edged inquiry into the generational institutions of our national life. With the same iconoclastic spirit and multi-layered prose that he interwove in his classic "Within the Context of No Context, George Trow tells the story of upstate New York's Black Rock Forest--a thirty-eight-hundred-acre site overlooking the Hudson River--through the lives of the men who were connected to it and through the larger histories of Harvard University, US. conservation policies, and physics and biology. The men: banker James Stillman; his son, Ernest Stillman, a medical doctor who inherited the land that would become the Black Rock Forest in 1928 and who wanted to make it healthy and useful; the legendary Gifford Pinchot, appointed chief forester of the U.S. in 1898; and Richard Thornton Fisher, for many years the head of the Harvard Forest and the man who suggested to Ernest Stillman that he turn his inherited land into another demonstration forest. Harvard University: a more financially focused, less collegial environment than the one that had accepted the gift of the forest in 1949, now looking to shed responsibility for the forest without shedding the money its sale would bring. The challenge: how to manage, "how to value, a wilderness area of great biological diversity. In his brilliantly elastic fashion, Trow maneuvers images, symbols, ambiguities, ethics, journalistic wordplay, advertising tricks, and corporate doublespeak to create an intensely perceptive analysis of the cultural, political, and scientific communities. His richly developed story of the Harvard Black Rock Forest is ultimately a symbolic tale thatbears upon some of the most significant institutions, professions, and legacies in contemporary American life. A publisher's note reveals the fate of the forest.

The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied source book for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present-many of which have not previously been anthologised or translated-as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay. From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists' thinking about their genre-a collective poetics of the essay-to the detailed head notes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologised selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to everyone who cares about the form. This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre-used primarily to write about other more "literary" genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay's storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.

"A veteran writer's ruminations about a key transition point in life that has gotten surprisingly little literary attention: retirement. . . . The quiet testimony of a man whose ongoing writing, editing, reading, gardening, traveling and ceaseless quest for self-knowledge make him much less retired than many people half his age." -Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost

The Ninth Decade is a path-breaking and timely book on aging: the first to focus explicitly and at length on eighty-somethings, the fastest-growing demographic in the industrialized world. Covering eight years in lively six-month installments, Klaus tells a vivid story not only of his own ninth decade and survival routines, but also of his loving companion, Jackie, who is strikingly different from him in her physical well-being, practical outlook, sociable temperament, and vigorous workouts. Cameos of their octogenarian friends and relatives near and far add to a wide-ranging and revelatory portrayal of advanced aging, as do bios of notable octogenarians. The multi-year scope of his chronicle reveals the numerous physical and mental problems that arise during octogenarian life and how eighty-year-olds have dealt with those challenges. The Ninth Decade is a unique, first-hand source of information for anyone in their sixties, seventies, or eighties, as well as for persons devoted to care of the aged. Though the challenges of octogenarian life often require specialized care, The Ninth Decade also shows the pleasures of it to be so special as to have inspired Lillian Hellman's paradoxical description of "longer life" as "the happy problem of our time."

Confident or fretful, solemn or sassy, tough or tender, casual or formal: the self you project in writing--your persona--is the byproduct of numerous decisions you make about what to say and how to say it. Though any single word or phrase or sentence might make little difference within the scope of an entire essay or book, collectively they create an impression of who you are or seem to be--an impression that's sure to influence how readers respond to your work. Thus it's essential to take charge of how you come across on the page, to craft an appropriate persona for whatever you're writing, whether it's a personal essay, a blog, a technical report, a letter to the editor, or a memoir. In this wise and ingenious little guide, noted essayist Carl Klaus shows you how to adapt your self to the needs of such varied nonfiction, by varying his own persona to illustrate the distinctive effect produced by each aspect and element of writing.
Klaus divides his book into two parts: first, an introduction to the nature and function of a persona, then a survey of the most important elements of writing that contribute to the character of a persona, from point of view and organization to diction and sentence structure. Both parts contain exercises that will give you practice in developing a persona of your choice. Challenging and stimulating, each of his exercises focuses on a distinctly different aspect of composition and style, so as to help you develop the skills of a versatile and personable writer. By focusing on the most important ways of projecting your self in nonfiction prose, you can learn to craft a distinctive self in your writing.

Originally published in 1956, "The Great Chain of Life" brings a humanist's keen eye and ear to one of the great questions of the ages: "What am I?" Originally a scholar of literature and theater, toward the end of his career Joseph Wood Krutch turned to the study of the natural world. Bringing his keen intellect to bear on the places around him, Krutch crafted some of the most memorable and important works of nature writing extant.
Whether anticipating the arguments of biologists who now ascribe high levels of cognition to the so-called lower animals, recognizing the importance of nature for a well-lived life, or seeing nature as an elaborately interconnected, interdependent network, Krutch's seminal work contains lessons just as resonant today as they were when the book was first written.
Lavishly illustrated with thirteen beautiful woodcuts by Paul Landacre, an all-but-lost yet important Los Angeles artist whom Rockwell Kent called "the best American wood engraver working," "The Great Chain of Life" will be cherished by new generations of readers.

[Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky] is, in fact, the most intelligent, thoughtful, original, challenging, and highly entertaining work of nature writing since Barry Lopez's Artic Dreams. . . . It is her broad scope of contemplation, combined with her fiercely beautiful and detailed renderings of passion, natural and human, that give Trudy Dittmar's first but fully mature book its remarkable originality and considerable power. --Robert Finch, Los Angeles Times Book ReviewHonest self-scrutiny is irresistible, especially when told with a knack for diction of place, as this author demonstrates on every page. She is both of the landscape and an informed observer of it, willing to examine her conflicts between the experiences that play in her imagination and the scientific knowledge she's gleaned through training and reading. --The Bloomsbury ReviewTrudy Dittmar is an elegant stylist and an acute observer. She's read everything there is to read about the physics of rainbows, the habits of the porcupine, the winter survival skills of the moose and the orbits of the planets, but even her learning is outdistanced by her patient powers of looking, smelling, hearing, touching and tasting. Her originality arises out of this patience. And, magically, she is able to read into and out of the rich, endangered natural world an Emersonian understanding of self. This is at once the most objective and subjective book I have ever read. --Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own StoryDittmar writes about life with the precision of a scientist and the introspective lyricism of a poet, illuminating for us those parts of the world we barely remember to notice...from the complex emotional lives of cows and pronghorns to the dazzling leaves of a silver maple to the teeming hidden pools of bright salamanders. Reading this book is like finding a geode in a stream bed--crack it open and it sparkleso--Jo Ann Beard Dittmar, who won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer' Award in 2000 and whose writings have appeared in numerous publications . . . provides a fascinating look at natural and personal history in these ten essays on animals, plants, and other natural phenomena. . . . An excellent choice for both public and academic libraries. --Library JournalIn essays with settings that range from the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, to the mountain town of Leadville, Colorado, to the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, Trudy Dittmar weaves personal experience with diverse threads of subject matter to create unexpected connections between human nature and nature at large. Life stories, elegantly combined with mindful observations of animals, plants, landscape and the skies, theories in natural science, environmental considerations, and touches of art criticism and popular culture, offer insights into the linked analogies of nature and soul. A glacial pond teeming with salamanders in arrested development is cause for reflection on the limits of a life that knows only bounty. The hot blue lights of celestial phenomena are a metaphor for fast, flashy men--he loves of a life--and a romantic career is interpreted. Watching a pronghorn buck battling for, and ultimately losing, his harem leads to a meditation on a kind of immortality.Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky is testimony to the bearing and consequence of nature in one life, and to the richness of understanding it can bring to all human lives.Trudy Dittmar was born and raised in New Jersey farm country. In addition to holding an MA in English literature from the University of Chicago, she is a graduate of Columbia University's MFA program in writing and the founder and former director of a writing program at Brookdale Community College in New Jersey. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Norton Book of Nature Writing, Pushcart XXI, Georgia Review, and Orion. She divides her time between her family home in New Jersey and her cabin in Wyoming

The author reminds readers that the season of brown twigs and icy gales is just as much a part of the year as the time when the tulips open and tomatoes thrive. He keeps track of snow falling, birds flocking, soups simmering, garden catalogues arriving, buds swelling and seed trays coming to life.