Consumer Training–It Starts at Home–or Not

I’m not yet trained to drink coffee, eat icecream, and meals out on my nearby shopping street in the Central West End. City life, cafe life eludes me. I mostly still entertain at home…including entertaining myself. You’ve seen those little tykes in grocery stores with their tiny carts and the tall flags that say, “Shopper…

Amazon’s Democratic Jungle: Case study, Wole Soyinka’s new memoir “You Must Set Forth At Dawn” with 5 Amazon comments, dissassembled

First off, let me say I consider that the reader section on the Amazon book product pages are, for the most part, best termed as “comments” rather than “reviews”—which usually would be rather over-stating the case. Secondly, I am frequently appalled by the casual way in which readers in these comment sections reveal their ignorance,…

Medicine for Memoir Scandals: Truth or Consequences for Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones, and others suffering from genre confusion

Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud By MOTOKO RICH Click here to read about the author of “Love and Consequences” who confessed she “made up the memoir about her supposed life as a foster child in gang-infested South-Central Los Angeles, the focus turned to her publisher and the news organizations that helped publicize what…

“Burying the Secret: the road to ruin is paved with books about the law of attraction,” by Carol Rutter

Here’s a follow-on to my March 22, 2007 post “The Secret: Packaged In America.” Burying the Secret, by Carol Rutter Within the framework of responding to Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret,” Carol Rutter’s “Burying the Secret” weaves autobiography, expose, searching cultural commentary, and an analytical compendium of helpful books on important psychological and spiritual issues. If…

Learning Jingle Bells…quiet holiday spirit here…a child’s old-fashioned courtesy

Both my father and I are Holiday Drop-outs, lying low for the most part until after New Year’s Day when the world turns back to sanity. Our holiday spirit is a quiet one…dedicated to continuing to do the things we usually do…and keeping it all on a small, human scale. Last night was one of…

Africa is a continent, not a country: water from heaven, a vision

Tonight I just came back from a presentation at my local library; I caught the tail end, and that may have been one of the juicer parts, who can say? The audience was primarily African-American and they were firing questions at the speaker in a hunger to know more about the continent the African part…

Why the phrase “I know” destroys connections rather than creating connection

Velda Brotherton and I were chatting under the electronic shade tree, sipping lemonade, trading our pet language peeves one day when we decided we’d post and link on some of them at the same time. Velda’s started her list on her blog “On Being a Writer.” My top language peeve at the moment is the…