America's citizens seem plagued by despair and frustration, much deeper today than the "malaise" President Jimmy Carter noted twenty years ago. Our political and social cultures are driven by issues morally complex and yet presented with simple-minded hostility. What's the matter with Kansas? What has happened to the once proud leader of the free world? How secure is our future? Does the republic stand or have we lost it already?
Born in 1941, novelist, critic, and teacher Eric Larsen sees his own lifetime as paralleling the arc of a national dissolution, and in three penetrating essays he describes an increasingly desperate situation. A blindness has set in, he argues, producing writers no longer able to write, professors more harmful than helpful, a replacement virtually nation-wide of "thinking with "feeling while the population seems unable to grasp even the remotest outlines of such dangerous, radical change. In the tradition of George Orwell, Upton Sinclair, Paul Goodman, and Christopher Lasch, Larsen offers an impassioned critique of where we once were, where we are, and where we're very soon going if we don't watch out.

The increasing reliance of our educational system on standardized tests has precipitated a national debate. This debate, however, has proceeded with little attention to the tests themselves. This book makes a scholarly contribution to the debate by using the methods of discourse analysis to examine not only representative material from reading tests but also children's responses to it. The book is particularly attentive to the role of culture in shaping children's understanding of what they read.

One fever laid seeds on the glass and robins were too dry coming up for handling just out of view. CLP-4 cleans the action of drawers in many climates; large government contract, large eyes splashed to forgetting. Eyes larger than John Deere fog lights shuffling a deck in a corn field.

The vibration from each swing is reduced. But shopping for axes and their handles always has this come back into focus per how the head can't just go flying off into uncovered bystanders with one large swing.

What's the poetic device for forgetting someone? Is it the wear on tires measured with Abe's head on a penny upside down? If you can see the top of his head it's time to replace your tires.

Query if we re alive or dead. Check the credit union roofing and dial tone, night buoys, body s carbon copy. Pension signature of my body, your blood numbers station combusts in a house; a corner house. 737 dumped its fuel on us. Night ketosis blooms dead pilots of Everest and left behind a thimble. Phantom index finger taps your phone number again I remember everything we bought. Laid down heart attacks in glued beige, rolled out lichen. Brushed a windshield with baleen knuckles. Went back to the first apartment. Second.

Three sixteen in the afternoon. One hundred million years.

More than a century has passed since the collapse and extinction of the American Nation, that massive and unprecedented catastrophe brought about equally by arsonists' flames and by massive, long-term, internal decay. As everyone knows, the full history of this once-great nation's doom was first gathered in the 2110 CE multi-volume work of scholarship, The Decline and Fall of the American Nation. Subsequently, under the auspices of the Universities of Asia Press, Beijing, there arrived a new and updated edition. As it happens, volume sixteen of that great work, in both editions, consists of the collected writings of Eric Larsen, a figure unknown to history except through these extraordinarily rare surviving papers that include, most importantly, the internationally famous "Diary." Guided by abundant scholarly commentary, the reader of Volume Sixteen is offered "innumerable windows" through which to witness "a ghostly past" and otherwise lost scenes of "a daily life that has become by the time of the Late Ante-Penultimate], in almost equal degrees, villainous, pathetic, and risible." A chronology of the collapse may prove useful to the reader: Early Preliminary (1950-1964) Middle Preliminary (1964-1971) Late Preliminary (1971-1983) Early Ante-Penultimate (1983-1996) Middle Ante-Penultimate (1996-2000) Late Ante-Penultimate (2000-2006) Early Penultimate (2006-2012) Middle Penultimate (2013-2019) Late Penultimate (2020-2024) Early Ultimate (2025-2031) Middle Ultimate (2032-2037) Late Ultimate (2037-2041) The Collapse (2042-?)

Larsen stretches conventional fiction's reach with this story of a character whose childhood and coming-of-age consist of his gradual internalizing of history-as he puts it, his coming to understand "the mysteries of space and time." At first, he sees only glimpses of life-through the briefly-opened "windows" of eyesight in early childhood. Later on, everything begins serving as windows into the past-objects, locations, landscapes, the town he's born in, the people in it-even his aging great-aunts Marie and Lutie, whose origins are back in the 19th century. Through small things like a visit from his great-aunts one afternoon in 1944 (when he's four years old), a blimp cruising overhead in 1946, goldfish hovering beneath the surface of a pond, the sound of a train whistle in the night, Malcolm Reiner comes to understand that things can be related "horizontally," then also "vertically"-relationships that, when combined with the element of time itself, reveal history-that is, as life, followed by the absence of life-to be a web of such intricate complexity that it can't ever be understood. And yet Reiner dedicates his life to exactly this "study of the mysteries of space and time." In his "studies" he finds a sweep of time includes the history of West Tree, Minnesota; of the "Epoch of Walking"; and of his own "years of perfect seeing," the period when, living on a farm outside West Tree, he's able, with a poetic vividness rare in fiction, to sense and see what America once was.

The increasing reliance of our educational system on standardized tests has precipitated a national debate. This debate, however, has proceeded with little attention to the tests themselves. This book makes a scholarly contribution to the debate by using the methods of discourse analysis to examine not only representative material from reading tests but also children's responses to it. The book is particularly attentive to the role of culture in shaping children's understanding of what they read.

In March 2014, Eric Larsen and Ryan Waters set out to traverse nearly 500 miles across the melting Arctic Ocean, unsupported, from Northern Ellesmere Island to the geographic North Pole. Despite being one of the most cold and hostile environments on the planet, the Arctic Ocean has seen a steady and significant reduction of sea ice over the past seven years due to climate change. Because of this, Larsen's and Waters' trip-dubbed the "Last North Expedition"-is expected to be the last human-powered trek to the North Pole, ever. Filled with stunning, full-color photos and GPS maps plotting his progress, On Thin Ice is Larsen's first-person account of this historic two-man expedition. Traveling across the retreating sea ice on skis, snowshoes, and even swimming through semi-frozen arctic slush, Larsen and Waters each pulled over 320 pounds of gear behind them on sleds through temperatures that plummeted to nearly 70 degrees below zero. At times, they covered little over a mile a day. They were stalked by polar bears and ran out of food. It was, in Larsen's words, "easily one of the most difficult expeditions in the world." More than just a heart-stopping adventure narrative, however, On Thin Ice offers an intimate and haunting look at the rapidly changing face of the Arctic due to global climate change.