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Chapters: Martin Gardner, R. A. Lafferty, Ralph Ellison, John Berryman, C. J. Cherryh, Tony Hillerman, Sarah Vowell, Joe Haldeman, Wilma Mankiller, Sarah Hudson-Pierce, Michael Wilson, Chad Sweeney, Robert Wright, S. E. Hinton, Carolyn Hart, Ted Berrigan, Ally Carter, Don Blanding, Hastings Shade, Skip Bayless, Steven E. Wedel, Larry Winget, Robert B. Wyatt, Merlyn Mantle, Linda Hogan, Ron Padgett, Victor Milan, Michael Paul Mason, Pamela Harrison, Judith Moore, Joe Mcguff, Rilla Askew, Matt Braun, Jack Bickham, Anna Lee Walters, Benjamin Vogt, Eddie Chuculate, Jay Cronley, Laura Misch, Dwight V. Swain, Dennis Hunter, Kyle Williams, Cindy Chupack, Joyce Carol Thomas, Joseph E. Kelleam. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 198. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 May 22, 2010) was an American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981, and published over 70 books. Martin Gardner grew up in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma, and he attended college at the University of Chicago, where he earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy. During World War II, he served for several years in the U.S. Navy as a yeoman (the ship's secretary) on board the destroyer escort USS Pope (DE-134) in the Atlantic. His ship was still in the Atlantic when the war came to an end with the surrender of Japan in August 1945. After the war, Gardner attended college at the University of Chicago again. He also attended graduate school for a year there, but he did not earn an advanced degree. For many decades, Gardner, his wife Cha...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=20435 ... Read more

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Prefaced by an account of the early days of Berryman studies by bibliographer and scholar Richard J. Kelly, "After thirty Falls" is the first collection of essays to be published on the American poet John Berryman (1914-1972) in over a decade. The book seeks to provoke new interest in this important figure with a group of original essays and appraisals by scholars from Ireland, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, and the United States.Exploring such areas as the poet's engagements with Shakespeare and the American sonnet tradition, his use of the Trickster figure and the idea of performance in his poetics, it expands the interpretive framework by which Berryman may be evaluated and studied, and it will be of interest to students of modern American poetry at all levels.What makes the collection particularly valuable is its inclusion of previously unpublished material - including a translation of a poem by Catullus and excerpts from the poet's detailed notes on the life of Christ - thereby providing new contexts for future assessments of Berryman's contribution to the development of poetry, poetics, and the relationship between scholarship and other forms of writing in the twentieth century. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Not what they were after
The purpose of this book, says its editor, is to rekindle scholarly interest in John Berryman's work. So a group of Ph.D.s (mostly) in Literature, who have mined Berryman in various ways for years, assemble a book of critical essays to protect their brand. The effort ligitimates them, in their own eyes at least, but does little more than emphasize each one's favorite critical approach. They eschew linking his poems with his life, and, doing so, miss what Berryman was up to: Writing briography as intellectual history, intellectual history as biography, and the reaction to both by self passing through a particular time.

The contributors miss significance in Berryman's suicide, death by bridge; the importance of bridge as symbol for Berryman, connecting two worlds (vicarious and real, Europe and America, all the dualities); and their connection to Berryman's interest in Hart Crane, where bridges loom large and also fail to span. They have no explanation for Dream Song 113, which has baffled everyone, but for which there's a simple explanation--his first encounter with Feminism (before a word was coined for it) among college women who were his intellectual peers. Or that The Ball Poem foreshadows all that Berryman wrote. Or how loss is inevitable once one chooses to live in vicarious experience, as the vicarious is ever being displaced by the real, or how making that choice leads to using art to avoid hurt, or how that habit mutates into the theme of Berryman's work, the horror of existence. "They never find you out," he said, secure in his opinion of intellectualizing critics, who overlook even the importance of his feeling Irish and his relation to Joyce. Without biography, Berryman's poetry sublimates like ice to vapor.

Being literary persons, the authors overlook other approaches. Berryman's poems and behavior can be viewed as manifestations of the mania of acute alcoholism, a well documented pathology. So mythic, monomythic, prosodic, and theodisic essays are found here, but none on Psychology. The literary approaches that are deployed aren't suitably audacious, given their subject: none tries to evaluate Berryman through a persona, as if Auden or Yeats. There's no fun here, duty only, so the authors fail to communicate their enthusiam and lapse to the pedestrian.

This book manifests what criticism has become--a line in the vita, self-indulgence or self-amusement by self-absorbed specialists--not illumination of a text. The parochial result will produce the opposite of what its contributors had in mind, revived interest in their speciality. What Berryman scholarship needs is a critical concordance that connects his work to his life. Without it, his poems will grow as obscure as his critics. ... Read more

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Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: John Allyn Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.) (October 25, 1914 January 7, 1972) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which are playful, witty, and morbid. Berryman committed suicide in 1972. Berryman graduated from Columbia University in 1936. A pamphlet entitled Poems was published in 1942 and his first proper book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.' His first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which appeared in Partisan Review in 1953 and was published as a book in 1956. Another pamphlet, His thought made pockets ... Read more

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Chapters: B. F. Skinner, John Bardeen, Otto Julius Zobel, Leonid Hurwicz, John Berryman, Patrick Mendis, John William Miller, John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, Gary Alan Fine, George A. Lundberg, Juan Rosai, Edward C. Prescott, James Rowland Angell, Mikhail Shifman, Arthur Caplan, Hisham Bizri, Wade Allison, Alvin Hansen, Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., Stefan E. Warschawski, John Joseph Bittner, Timothy L. Smith, Punyamurtula Kishore, John Caddy, Michele Boldrin, Carolyne M. Van Vliet, Joseph Gallian, Thomas J. Sargent, E. Adamson Hoebel, William S. Carlson, William Beeman, Nils Hasselmo, Wheelock Whitney, Jr., Daphne Berdahl, Luis Caffarelli, Melvin Hochster, G. David Tilman, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Michael de La Bédoyère, Charles Alan Wright, Jon Gjerde, Allen Buchanan, Bin He, Richard A. Swanson, Alvin C. Eurich, Erwin Marquit, Thomas Swiss, Ernst R. G. Eckert, Nina Etkin, Jack Zipes, Solon J. Buck, Willet M. Hays, Willem Jacob Luyten, Hillel Furstenberg, Herbert Feigl, Yousef Saad, Karen Clark, Gareth Matthews, Andrew Odlyzko, Jeffrey Edleson, Frank Wesbrook, Wayland Hand, John J. Cound, Arthur Milgram, Igor Pak, Daniel D. Joseph, Frederick Klaeber, Harry Hull, Jim Chen, Tom Bender, Lisa Norling, Maria L. Sanford, Derek Long, Robert Gilman, John A. Powell, Grace Carlson, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, Robert Sonkowsky, Warren Mackenzie, Ronald Giere, Ronald L. Phillips, Danny Quah, Frank Barnaby, Carl Elliott, Christopher A. Sims, James C. Anthony, Ephraim M. Sparrow, John Bessler, Alan G. Gross, Steven Ruggles, Neil Wallace, John Miller, Jr, C. Anthony Anderson, Michael Barnett, Philip Neville, Yuko Taniguchi, Ira Reiss, Kenneth H. Keller, V. V. Chari, Hans Weinberger, David Samuels, Edward Cussler, Geoffrey Hellman, David G. Mandelbaum, Carl Graffunder, Joseph E. Schwartzberg, Guy Stanton Ford, William Anderson, Thomas S. Lundgren, Darlyne Bailey, Herbert Mohring, Sheng He, Alan Donagan, Karen Ashe, John Geier, Mustafa Al'absi. Source: Wikipedia. Pa...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=4868 ... Read more