Month / July 2018

by Robert Gerst

Summer Reading, Angelika Festa: Various Works of Oliver Sacks, MD.

Portrait of Oliver Saks, Photo by Joost van den Broek

Below is Oliver Sacks’s last message to his readers of the New York Times. The message is titled: My Own Life: Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Cancer.

“I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight. I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work, and my friends.”

The New York Times, February 19, 2015.  Dr. Oliver Sacks died on August 30, 2015.

by Robert Gerst

Summer Reading, Angela Gerst: A God In Ruins (2015)

Dove On the Wire (Gerst)

From the NPR book review:

The moment in Kate Atkinson’s A God In Ruinswhen protagonist Teddy Todd lies to his granddaughter about an old photograph isn’t a grand climax. It happens in passing, in half a sentence: She asks about the stain on an image of Teddy and his long-dead wife Nancy. It’s actually the blood of one of his World War II air crew, who died in his arms after their plane was shot down. But Teddy claims it’s tea, “not because she wouldn’t have been interested but because it was a private thing.”

It’s only a tiny coda to the vivid story of the plane crash and the gunner’s death, but the exchange still feels central to A God In Ruins. Atkinson’s companion novel to her 2013 best-seller, Life After Life, brings back familiar characters and invents many new ones, but to different ends. Life After Lifeexplored human potential through a sophisticated version of a Choose Your Own Adventure story, with protagonist Ursula Todd dying over and over, then continuing through iterations of lives where she made different choices or had better luck.

A God In Ruins isn’t about the freedom of options, but about self-imposed barriers. Ursula’s brother Teddy, who died in the war in her story, gets his own chance to live an alternate life in this novel. But his stoic, British inability to open up to people shuts down many of his potential paths….

by Robert Gerst

Summer Reading, Lin Haire-Sargeant: Rules of Civility (2011)

Writes Lin Haire-Sargeant:

I’ve recently read two books by Amor Towles–Rules of Civility (set in NYC in 20s, 30s) and A Gentleman in Moscow (set in first half of 20th century). Both funny, engaging, full of accurate history and intriguing ideas, beautifully written, and absolutely delightful. Just finished a YA book by Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give, with an urban, female teen-age African American narrator, a problem novel with a police shooting of a black male at its center. Worth reading for the sharp, hip language alone.

New York Pier, 1937

“That’s the problem with living in New York. You’ve got no New York to run away to.”

― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility

Hal Kemp and his Orchestra, Vocal Chorus Bob Allen, Where Or When (1937)

by Robert Gerst

Summer Reading, Robert Gerst: Typhoon (1902)

J.M. Turner, Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842)

The far-off blackness ahead of the ship was like another night seen through the starry night of the earth—the starless night of the immensities beyond the created universe, revealed in its appalling stillness through a low fissure in the glittering sphere of which the earth is the kernel.

Joseph Conrad, Typhoon, Chapter Two

Gordon Bok, Turning Toward the Morning (2012)