Over Emphatic Negatives Always Suggest That What

Trouble Defies The Law Of Gravity. It's Easier To Pick Up Than To Drop.

Living In Cities Is An Art, And We Need The Vocabulary Of Art, Of Style, To Describe The Peculiar Relationship Between Man And Material That Exists In The Continual Creative Play Of Urban Living. The City As We Imagine It, Then, Soft City Of Illusion, Myth, Aspiration, And Nightmare, Is As Real, Maybe More Real, Than The Hard City One Can Locate On Maps In Statistics, In Monographs On Urban Sociology And Demography And Architecture.

It's Been So Long Since A Talented Writer Last Occupied The White House; No Wonder, Then, That American Writers Have Been Among The Most Prominent Of All The Demographic Groups Claiming A Piece Of Barack Obama For Themselves.

'dreams From My Father' Reveals More About Obama Than Is Usually Known About Political Leaders Until After They're Dead. Perhaps More Than It Intends, It Shows His Mind Working, In Real Time, Sentence By Sentence, In What Feels Like A Private Audience With The Reader.

The [travel] Writer, Looking Back At The Journey From A Distance Of A Year Or Two (or Three), Is A Different Character From The Hapless Character Who Undertook The Trip: Wise After The Event, With The Leisure To Tease Out Meanings From The Experience That The Distracted Traveler Never Had, And Often Impatient With His Alter Ego's Blinkered And Unsatisfactory Version Of Things.