I walked into the classroom hopped up on caffeine and adrenaline. I’d gotten to the room early—a drab box on the second floor of of our largest academic building—with the intent of staking out my territory well in advance of the freshmen, but a few of them had already beaten me. Looks like I wasn’t the only one who wanted to get a jumpstart on the first day of class.

Impressed at their early arrival, I looked at the clock on the wall only to discover that no clocks hung on any of the walls. Over the chalkboard hung a Franciscan crucifix—a Cross of San Damiano—and that was all.

“They don’t care if you know what time it is,” I said to the few students in the room, “but they sure want us to know that Christ died for our sins, I guess.”

One of the students—a non-traditional student by the looks of him, and an international student, to boot—grinned politely at my wise-ass comment. Brother Mario, his named turned out to be, was from Peru. He was a Franciscan friar, dressed in plainclothes instead of his brown robes. So much for my smart-ass remark about crucifixes.

Another of the students who had arrived early sat almost in the back, two rows away from the large windows that overlooked the main part of campus. The warm morning sun of late August spilled in generously, but the girl looked pallid and queasy. I asked her her name and if she was okay. She wasn’t. “I’m really homesick,” she told me. I thought she was going to hyperventilate. “I’m not going to be able to do this.”

I tried to offer words of reassurance, but what the hell did I know? After all, I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do this. As it would turn out, the girl would be gone by the end of the week.

I took a seat on a front corner of the narrow metal table at the front of the room as more students filed in. I wanted them all to see my Cat in the Hat tie, my blue jeans, my one-liter bottle of Diet Mountain Dew. I wanted those things to challenge their expectations right away. I wanted those things to let the students know I was human. I even underscored that in my syllabus, which explicitly said on page one, “Call me Chris.”

Everyone generally looked chipper for 8:30 in the morning. It hadn’t been too long ago, as high schoolers, that they’d been starting school even earlier, so an 8:30 class must’ve almost been like sleeping in. It wouldn’t be until later in the semester, or maybe even next semester, before the odd-houred daily schedule of a real college student would hit them and they’d suddenly see anything before ten a.m. as being far too early in the day for doing schoolwork. The bad habits hadn’t set in yet.

A genial looking kid sat in the front-row seat closest to the door. His name was Matt, he said, and he was from New Jersey. He’d come to St. Bonaventure to major in history. Later that week, he would write an essay about how lucky he was to have the best girlfriend in the world waiting for him back home and how they were going to be together forever. They’d actually make it until mid-October; she’d break up with him over midterm break. Matt would eventually end up gaining about thirty or forty pounds by the time he graduated. By that time, he’d be a journalism major and I’d be his adviser, and we’d have a lot of inside jokes and I’d call him “The General.”

My Composition & Critical Thinking class consisted of students from a variety of majors on campus. It would be the only semester I would teach students unaffiliated with the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Later in the year, my colleagues and I would decide to have all JMC freshmen take Comp & Crit only from JMC profs, which meant the registrar would populate my sections with only JMC majors. I’d be able to treat Comp & Crit like “writing bootcamp” for our students, which would become great fun.

For now, I was eager to teach basic composition and critical thinking skills to this wide cross-section of students. I had a second section, too, scheduled for 1:30 that afternoon—with kids named Chris Broadhead and Melissa Rasey and Annie Tulley and others. I’d have a lot of fun with those kids. I would keep in touch with them throughout school and even a little bit after they graduated, but I eventually lost touch with all of them—the first of many students whose company I enjoyed but who would eventually fade out of my life. Loss, I would come to learn, is an ever-present part of a professor’s life as he lets go of his children and sends them out into the world. It would be one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned, and it came from those first Comp & Crit kids, four years after they first walked into my classroom.

Between my two sections of Comp & Crit, I had two sections of Intro to the Mass Media at 9:30 and 10:30. By the second section of Intro, I found myself saying things and wondering if was inadvertently repeating myself or if I was just experiencing déjà vu from the first section. The back-to-back-to-back sections would keep my adrenaline pumped, but afterward I would deflate a little and have to struggle to get my mojo back for 1:30. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, with no classes, I’d be able to decompress.

All this lay ahead of me, though, as I sat there, perched on the metal table, surveying the students who trickled in. I had twenty or so. I hoped they were as excited as I was.

I’d taught college classes before, as an adjunct at the University of Pittsburgh during the previous five years while I worked there in the P.R. office—a couple sections of freshman composition, a class on newspaper feature writing, a class on short fiction. Then a call came, out of the blue, from the dean of the journalism school at St. Bonaventure, offering me a full-time job as a professor.

And now I was here, teaching Composition and Critical Thinking on the morning of Monday, August 28, 2000.

I checked my watch: 8:30. Time.

I took a final swig of my Diet Mountain Dew. “So,” I asked as I screwed the lid back onto my soda, “for how many of you is this the first college class you’ve ever taken?”

All of their hands went into the air, some with enthusiasm, some with trepidation. That same mixture was playing out inside my very gut.

“Well,” I said, “let me apologize to you right up front that you’ve ended up with me as your very first college professor.” The smile on my face let them know it was okay to laugh. “Hey, I have a Dr. Seuss tie on—I can’t be all that bad, right?”

Welcome to the first day of the rest of my life.

Or so I hoped.

“Why do you want to be a storyteller?” I asked my freshmen.

It was the second time I had asked. The first time had been on the second day of class, an eternity earlier, during the last week of August.

Then, most of them looked at me quizzically. A couple of them looked downright bored. They weren’t here to be storytellers, they told me; they were here to be journalists and public relations executives and television reporters and magazine writers.

“That’s not storytelling?” I asked.

Storytellers come from an ancient tradition—and when I say ancient, I mean really ancient. Prehistoric. Picture two cavemen, Oog and Loog, sitting around the fire at the end of the day. They didn’t have language yet, but Loog still wanted to know where Oog had come up with the delicious mastodon steak they were chewing on for dinner. Oog had to act out the story of the day’s hunt.

Theater sprang from this storytelling tradition. Believe it or not, so did journalism. After all, as Oog acted out his tale of the hunt, wasn’t he providing a recap of the day’s big event? There’s a reason we refer to pieces of news as news “stories.”

When my freshmen heard the word “stories,” though, most of them, of course, thought of fiction—made-up stories by novelists or short-story writers.

As it happens, I’ve been writing a lot of fiction lately, which is something I’ve not really done since graduate school fifteen years ago. But as a kid, I got my start as a writer writing stories. I wrote creepy tales of goblins and aliens, and I tried to give everything a Twilight Zone-like twist at the end. None of it was any good, I don’t think, but it was thrilling. Writing stories invigorated me, energized me, excited me!

And it kept me writing.

I gave up fiction for journalism and playwriting and, most recently, history writing. With history, the story has already happened, and the challenge rests in finding a new way to tell it. But good stories never grow old, no matter how long ago they took place. It just becomes a matter of finding the right words to tell them.

Telling stories is a gift—and it’s not just the gift storytellers have for spinning their tales. Telling a story is giving a gift. It’s a way of sharing ideas, information, emotions, perspectives. Good storytellers put a piece of themselves into their stories, so that’s something they share, too.

Such effort can be hard and, frequently, thankless. I think about my colleagues still working in the news business who have to crank out thousands of words a day under deadline. They have to conduct interviews and do research. They have to search for information and dig and follow dead-ends. They have to make sense from chaos—and not only make it readable but also relevant to their readers.

Newspaper reporters have one set of tools they get to use; television reporters have another set of tools; radio reporters have another set of tools. You choose your field depending on how you like to tell your stories.

People who write for the internet have yet a different set of tools—and a different set of rules. The “objective” journalism of newspapers doesn’t exist for many online news sources. That doesn’t make the stories online any less important or valid. They just follow different conventions.

The same is true with, say, advertising or public relations, where the story focuses on a product or a company or a client. It’s still all storytelling.

Playwriting may be the most interesting form of storytelling I’ve done. Writing a script is an individual act of intense privacy, yet a playwright has to collaborate with a director and a cast and crew to make those words truly come to life, and it ultimately has to happen in front of an audience. So much for the privacy of the playwright’s writing den!

From August until December, I spent the semester showing my students how all these forms of writing were, in fact, forms of storytelling. On the last day, I posed to them the same question I’d posed on day two: “Why do you want to be a storyteller?”

“[B]eing a storyteller is not limited to one specific job title,” one of them wrote. “If you know how to write—that is, write well—then you can do almost anything.”

Indeed, that focus on strong writing is one of the key foundations of our entire program (the other being ethics). The world is full of lousy writers, which is why it’s important to be one of the good ones.

Another student evoked a quote I’d given them from the novelist Laurence Stern: “What a large volume of adventures my be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything.”

“The particular quote changed my perspective on life,” the student wrote, “because it makes me consider that we can have many adventures in our life if we experience things with an open mind. Life is too short to not take advantage of every opportunity offered. I want my storytelling to have that type of effect on others’ lives.”

I want their storytelling to have that kind of effect, too.

A good storyteller can make a difference by teaching us things, by showing us the world in ways we’d never dreamed, by prompting us to think and feel. For those reasons, a good storyteller will always be in demand.

And there will never be a shortage of stories—past, present, and imagined. Those stories deserve to be shared. They deserve to be told.

As soon as I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I wanted to call a “time out” from life and put everything on pause so I could do nothing but read, read, read this unrelenting book.

McCarthy pens a powerful tale of devotion and love set in a post-apocalyptic world of despair and hopelessness, as stripped down and bare as McCarthy’s spare, elegiac prose. I mean, he’s writing bare-bones, devoid of commas and apostrophes and, frequently, even complete sentences. But oh, does he capture images and emotions! It’s almost stream-of-despondent-consciousness from characters who wish they were unconscious.

The story follows a father and young son as they make their way across the barren landscape toward the sea. They’re ostensibly traveling there in the hope of finding better living conditions, but this is, after all, a world without hope.
Look, for instance, at the world through the father’s eyes as he wakes up one morning on their journey. “He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment of the world,” McCarthy writes. “The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”

And the world only gets more bleak from there.

This is an ash-covered world scraped clean by some man-made catastrophe that annihilated all life. The few humans left a decade later are mostly lone animals, hunted by roving bands of cannibalistic thugs; others hole up in bunker-like communes. No travelers are safe. Anywhere.

And yet father and son move on, finally driven from the relatively safety of their home in the north by unknown forces. The novel begins some time after they’ve begun their migration. McCarthy immediately puts readers on the road with the two of them, and with no spectacle or theatrics, begins to ratchet up the tension. It doesn’t take long for a reader’s nerves to get as edgy as father’s and son’s. And with each page, each section, the novel’s iron fist slowly keeps squeezing the reader’s heart.

The plot never lets up, not once, never rests–after all, the characters themselves must be ever-moving, ever-vigilant–but The Road proves that the best characterization comes through action. This is a love story between father and son. The pain and fear and love they share is fearfully palpable and true.

The Road is one of those rare masterpieces that made me read it. I suspect it will continue to haunt me for a long, long time.

(I originally wrote this review in October 2006, when the novel first came out, and I just finished my fifth re-read. Since its release, The Road has since won accolades ranging from the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction to selection in the Oprah Book Club. I thought it worthwhile to dig out my original review in light of the new movie adaptation now playing in theaters. See the movie, but absolutely read the book.)

“Christmas tree a la mode.” That’s how my grandfather, Bill Mackowski, described it to his wife, LaVerne, back in December of 1944.

Bill was stationed in Belgium, part of the 330th infantry regiment of the 83rd Army Division. The world was embroiled in war and, at that 
time, the Battle of the Bulge had been raging for a week.

But the night of December 24 was quiet along the front. The men were sitting around, talking about their girls back home, missing their families. “I just kept thinking how foolish most of them were not be married or not to have someone like you,” Bill had written to Verne just a few days earlier, after a similar bout of homesickness had befallen him and his buddies.

It was Bill’s third Christmas in the army. In December of 1942, when he was still learning to cope with the homesickness, he treasured the cards and packages sent to him. “Funny, but before I always just looked to see who sent the cards [and] the pictures, but now I read everyword & feel good that people do remember me,” he wrote.

He worried that people back home would think less of him because he wasn’t able to reciprocate. “Gosh, I haven’t sent a card or bought a thing for Christmas,” he admitted. “I hope everyone understands & believes I haven’t turned into a Scrooge.”

By 1944, with the war still on, men had learned to cope with the homesickness a little better even if they didn’t like it at all. That December twenty-fourth evening in Belgium, with the wistful Christmas spirit sunk deep in their bones, my grandfather and his buddies decided to find a way to celebrate on their own.

“You might think you’re the only ones with a Christmas tree, but you can’t take Christmas away from us, thanks to the Air Corps & G. I. ingenuity,” Bill wrote to Verne. “We decided we’d have a tree in our tent or bust, so we did.”

The Air Corps provided the inspiration. “It seems they drop long strips of tinfoil to offset enemy radar, so after chasing bunches of it we got our tinsel. We found by running our finger nails down it, it curled like those icicles we use to buy,” he wrote.

Next, they had to procure a tree. “It was kinda nasty to steal a little evergreen tree from around behind the church, but it was just the right size & shape,” he wrote. “We found a bush with red berries on it & made loops out of the tin foil to hang them up with.

“We cut a star out of the bottom of a tin can & with a piece of dental floss & a band aid we hung it from the slope of the tent down to the top of the tree.

“We made a white base out of toilet paper and then ripped open a couple of our first aid bandages & made snow out of the cotton and also found it would stick on the side of the tent. So we formed the letters Merry Xmas above the tree & dobs of cotton around it like a snow storm.”

One of the officers asked a local woman for some colored yarn—red, orange, green, yellow, and blue—which they strung on the tree.

“Then off of some of the tomato cans we cut out the red circles & hung them on,” Bill wrote. “Then to top it off, we all put our wives, girls & babies pictures on it. The only trouble was that brought on a few drops of water to the eyes.”

The mood turned lighter when a chaplain broke out a book of hymns. “We sat around and sang Christmas Carols,” Bill wrote. “We had all the nice carols & really sang them out.”

It reminded him of the carols sung that afternoon in the nearby town’s little church when he visited. The church, he wrote, “was decorated real nice & the choir sang carols & really put us in the mood. They did kinda choke me up when they tossed in an ‘Ave Maria,’ but it always did get me a little, it’s super pretty. Oh me, here I go getting sentimental again.”

As the twenty-fourth of December turned into the twenty-fifth, the men in Bill’s company huddled around a radio to listen to Midnight Mass. “I guess all in all,” wrote Bill, “we’re pretty lucky after all. There are a lot of guys with a lot less. Tomorrow we’re going into town again for church, so we’ll have a good day in spite of the Germans.”

But it was the tree, decorated with Air Corps tinsel and tomato-can circles that meant the most to those men that Christmas. “Now that it’s finished,” Bill wrote, “we all wonder if it helped our morale or made us twice as homesick.

“But it really looks nice and Christmassy as any I’ve seen. I’m telling you, we all just sit around & stare at it & never say a word for minutes at a time.”

The moon rose high that night. It was, Bill wrote, as bright as could be. “[A]nd in the west…was a star that shone the brightest I’ve ever seen,” he added. “We could almost see the points & just when I was thinking it, one of the officers said aloud, ‘I hope my wife is looking at that tonight.’”

This holiday season, please remember our men and women in uniform, especially those separated from their families. May they find Christmas tree a la mode of their own.

In the introduction to Last Chance – Preserving Life on Earth, author Larry J. Schweiger, the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, comes right out and says that he’s not trying to change minds with this book. Instead, it’s his hope that the book will motivate millions of people to transform their concerns over global warming into activism.

There are three sections to the book that can be summarized as follows. First, the latest science says that disruptions due to climate change will be worse and happen faster than the best estimates of even a couple of years ago. Second, there are a few global ecosystems that are more sensitive than even average, and there are people who don’t want you to know that and who actively work to keep you ignorant of the facts. And third, there are a few things we can do to help ourselves and the Earth.

People who are familiar with the state of climate science will not read much new in the first section of Last Chance. It briefly recounts key moments in the history of climate science – the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and it’s four Assessment Reports, the discovery of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) by Scripps Scientist Charles Keeling, the concern over climate “tipping points.” As a result of global warming, Schweiger points out that we are likely facing an irrecoverable loss in Arctic sea ice, the potential for massive methane hydrate releases, and the loss of millions of acres of forests to insects like the pine beetle and to massive drought-induced forest fires. Furthermore, Schweiger points out that the increasing global temperatures are causing massive losses in Greenland ice and, as a result, raising the global sea level.

And Schweiger supports all his claims with references to peer-reviewed papers, sections of the NASA, NOAA, and EPA websites, and media reports.

In recounting the devastation that has already happened, and thus is representative of what will likely happen in the future, Schweiger focuses on invasive species in Lake Erie and the political machinations that polar bear supporters have endured in the process of trying to get the bears listed as an Endangered Species. And he calls out to the outdoorsmen in all of us with his descriptions of changes in the life cycles of horseshoe crab, sea turtles, and pronghorn antelope, all of which are seriously threatened by global warming.

But he doesn’t stop there. Schweiger fingers journalists and the mainstream news media as being complicit in the world’s unwillingness to address global warming. He believes that advertising dollars and short-term-profit hungry media companies are making editorial decisions about what stories to run based on perceptions of whether the ensuing controversy is worth the loss of advertising revenue. In addition, Schweiger suggests that newsroom cuts to experienced journalists and expensive investigative reporters are coupling with a loss of “public interest” reporting to essentially dumb down media just as global warming is heating up to a level that calls out for experienced communicators.

Schweiger wraps up his book with a detailed call to action. Support electric cars powered over a smart grid from renewable sources of electricity. Make your homes and workplaces as energy efficient as possible. And support those politicians who act on these issues with money and your vote. Schweiger also condemns industrial farming as being destructive to the topsoil and recommends that people support local, small and mid-size farms that farm using sustainable agricultural practices that keep soil nutritious and alive. And finally, he calls for the reader to educate themselves and those around them – family, friends, coworkers, media sources, even political representatives – about the real dangers of global warming.

Last Chance isn’t a catastrophe tale, even though Schweiger makes it clear that catastrophe will very likely be in our future if we don’t address global warming. Instead, it’s a call to action for those readers who recognize how much global warming will change their lives and the lives of their descendants for many generations to come. And Schweiger provides recommended action plans to ease implementing the various recommendations that he makes throughout Last Chance.

All in all, Last Chance is a good book for those readers who are already convinced of the seriousness of global warming, want to have their understanding reinforced, and who want to take more action but don’t know how. But it’s not a book to convince anyone to do something they weren’t already inclined to do.

Yeah, there’s a book called Zombie Haiku, and it’s exactly what you think it is—and I bought it anyway.

Zombies have overridden some nameless city, and a hapless poet falls victim to the plague. As he transforms into the undead, the poet recounts his experience using haiku, three-line poems with five, seven, and five syllables:

Blood is really warm.
It’s like drinking hot chocolate
but with more screaming.

When dealing with zombies, one has to suspend disbelief to begin with, but Zombie Haiku takes that suspension to a whole new level. The basic conceit of the book—that a rampaging zombie can somehow write haiku as he’s rampaging—is a tough conceit to accept, even for readers eager and willing to embrace the humor the book offers.

But once a reader gets past that, the book is loads of fun.

The book replicates the poet’s journal, which he’d been using to chronicle “the earthly beauty which can be so overwhelming that I sometimes feel like I’m going to burst open.” The journal contains the kind of ridiculously sappy haiku one would expect from a single, middle-aged man who was probably teased mercilessly and called “Nature Boy” when he was in high school:

The bird flew away
with more than just my bread crumbs.
He took my sorrow.

Fortunately, the schlock doesn’t last. Instead of being a collection of bad nature poems, the haiku begin to recount the unusual events of the poet’s day, when radio stations stop playing music and 911 offers a busy signal. He eventually gets trapped by zombies and bitten, and he turns into a shambling nightmare—and the haiku continue to provide play-by-play.

Go along with the concept for a moment and forget that zombies can’t write or think. Seeing the world from a zombie-eyed view is darkly funny.

Getting trampled on
used to eventually kill you.
Now it just annoys.

The book never gets into details about why there are zombies or how big the plague is or anything like that. Ultimately, story doesn’t matter one single lick. It’s all about

brains, BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS.
BraiNs, brains, Brains, BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS.
BRAINS, Brains, brains, BRAINS, brains.

The book is designed to look like the poet’s battered, blood-stained journal. Snazzy-looking Polaroids of shambling undead are taped to pages throughout. While professionally done, with excellent make-up and shredded costumes, the pictures still have the feel of a beer-infused weekend when author Ryan Mecum got together with a bunch of his buddies to take pictures for his zombie haiku book. Someone, right now, is looking at those pictures and saying, “It seemed like a good idea at the time….”

The haiku, the photos, the slick design work—it generally all holds up as a really good gag, which can be hard to do with a book-length work. The zombie haiku are of uneven quality, although most of the jokes are good and, on the whole, pretty amusing.

You might kick yourself for even buying something called Zombie Haiku—but if you nonetheless find yourself irresistibly drawn to the book the way a zombie is drawn to brains, then it’s likely you’ll find this a fun little feast.

It’s one of those days of American history that lives in infamy: April 20, 1999, the day Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris went on a shooting rampage at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, killing twelve students and a teacher, and inuring twenty-four others, before turning their guns on themselves.

Say “Columbine” today, and nearly anyone can tell you what it means. But as journalist Dave Cullen says in his new book on the tragedy, the real story of Columbine is only now starting to become clear. Media sensationalism, police cover-ups, scapegoating, and mythmaking have all distorted the story. Cullen’s Columbine, then, represents an important historical and journalistic effort to shed light on what really happened.

Cullen starts the book by recounting the massacre from the perspective of those who lived through it. He writes a gripping narrative, showing the confusion of events without falling prey to it. He finishes the book in a similar vein, but this time he recounts events from the perspective of the shooters. The result is a retelling of a story—twice—that many readers might think they already remember from the headlines and news clips.

But the real meat of the book comes in between in all the myth-busting Cullen does. For instance, media reports painted the shooters as two misunderstood high schoolers who’d been bullied to the point that they finally snapped. Cullen demonstrates that the two hadn’t been bullied at all, and that the shooters weren’t, for instance, targeting jocks or popular kids.

Nor did the shooters “snap.” Cullen lays out evidence suggesting that Klebold and Harris had been planning the attack for nearly a year. They’d already engaged in an escalating series of vandalism missions and acts of criminal mischief. Friends heard rumors that the pair had been shooting guns and making pipe bombs. The pair leaked other clues, including an explicit short story, which no one pieced together until everyone had the lens of hindsight to look through.

Cullen delves into the personal journals the two shooters kept as well as a series of “basement tapes” they recorded. Harris, in his journal—which he called “The Book of God”—expressed festering contempt for other people and frequently spoke about extinction fantasies. Cullen provides chilling details about the true extent of the duo’s plans, which would’ve made the actual outcome of their massacre seem merciful.

Harris and Klebold, says Cullen, wanted to perform an act of “performance violence” that would be seen as “mind-numbing, mesmerizing theater,” so stunning that it would top Timothy McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City. Harris and Klebold “didn’t have political agenda of terrorists but adopted their methods,” Cullen says.

While this all may seem straightforward, Cullen employs masterful storytelling techniques in his book that add powerful impact. For instance, he refers to the shooters throughout by their first names in order to personify them more vividly. He structures the book so that the story of their preparations leading to the attack is told in parallel with the stories of the community as it tries to recover and rebuild after the attack.

Cullen tells the story of Patrick Ireland, a student who crawled to safety from a second-story library window and overcame incredible odds to not only walk and talk again but to achieve his goal of being class valedictorian. He also tells the story of Cassie Bernall, who reportedly professed her faith in God to her killers just before they pulled the trigger—a story later proved false even after Cassie achieved international fame as a Christian martyr.

And there’s the story of Brooks Brown, a former friend of Harris’s. In the year prior to the shootings, Harris engaged in a campaign of harassment against Brown’s family because he thought Brown had turned on him. Despite numerous complaints against Harris, police did nothing until after the shooting—when they tried to implicate Brooks as part of the crime.

In fact, the Jefferson County Police Department comes off looking like a confederacy of fools and villains. Cullen details a decade-long cover-up by the department as it tried to hide the ways it mishandled the case.

Cullen at once captures the uplifting spirit of a community that pulls itself together after tragedy while also showing the sad, shattered pieces still left behind. The toll of the attacks aren’t just measured in lives lost but in marriages destroyed, in families broken, in public confidence broken and public anxiety heightened.

While some portions of the book are necessarily graphic, Cullen never gets gratuitous. He avoids sensationalism in an effort to show humanity. His book strives for insight and understanding—and that’s no small feat for a tragedy so hard to understand.

Woe be to the rest of America.

To a rational, thinking person, the rise of idiocy in America seems like a baffling phenomenon. People laugh in the face of logic and willfully ignore facts, preferring to listen to the gut instead of the brain. Intellectuals, experts, and scientists get vilified or dismissed for having expertise. Discussion gets shouted down by anyone able to shout nonsense loud enough.

Pierce plunges into the maddening crowd to explore this phenomenon in his new book, Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.

His adventures through idiocy take him, for instance, to a Creationism museum where dinosaurs have saddles. He visits a talk radio convention to listen to right-wing hosts pat each other on the back in the name of freedom. He looks at legal battles over textbook adoptions. He delves into conspiracy theories, Masons, and Templars. In an especially excellent chapter, Pierce explores behind the scenes of the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case from 2005, where emotional sensationalism and political grandstanding obscured the medical facts of Schiavo’s case.

“If we have abdicated our birthright to scientific progress,” Pierce says, “we have done so by moving empirical debate into the realms of political, cultural, and religious argument, where we all feel more comfortable, because there the Gut truly holds sway.”

The problem with trusting the Gut is that the Gut can’t always be trusted. “Good ol’ common sense is almost never common and it often fails to make sense,” Pierce says.

Pierce readily acknowledges the proud tradition America has for crack-pot ideas and cranks. In fact, such eccentricies are vital to the proper functioning of the Marketplace of Ideas. “Never has a nation so dedicated itself to the proposition that not only should people hold nutty ideas, but they should cultivate them, treasure them, shine them up, and put them right up there on the mantelpiece” Pierce says. “This is still the best country ever in which to peddle complete public lunacy. In fact, it’s the only country to enshrine that right in its founding documents.”

As one of the organizing conceits of his book, Pierce traces the career of great American crank Ignatius Donnelly—land settler, sometimes-politician, and believer of Atlantis and Ragnorak. Contrasted against that is the career of Founding Father James Madison, a disciple of the enlightenment who believed passionately in the protection of free speech. Both men thrived in America at opposite ends of the American spectrum; America had room for both.

But in Idiot America, Pierce says, the idiots have no patience for—and want to leave no room for—anyone with enlightened, educated minds. Nonsense rules, and Pierce says that’s a serious problem because it comes with “a dangerous denial of the consequences of believing nonsense.”

Whereas cranks like Donnelly peddled their ideas because they believed in those ideas, modern American Idiots peddle their ideas because those ideas move units or forward a political agenda. The ideas themselves don’t mean much so long as someone can make a buck or gain political leverage.

Pierce places the blame squarely on American conservatives. “If this book seems to concentrate on the doings of the modern American right,” he says, “that’s because it was the modern American right that consciously adopted irrationality as a tactic, and it succeeded very well.” Pierce does little to hide his left-leaning biases, which sometimes get to be a little much and too holier-than-thou. Perhaps it’s understandable, though, considering how palpable his frustration and anger are.

“It is, of course, television that has enabled Idiot America to run riot with modern politics and all forms of public discourse,” Pierce says, although he points a damning finger at talk radio as “the driving force in changing American debate into American argument.”

Pierce lambasts Idiot America for making a devil’s bargain, “exchanging (rather than mistaking) fact for fiction, and faith for reason, and believing itself shrewd to have made a good bargain with itself.”

Pierce doesn’t seem too hopeful that the problem will go away any time soon, but despite his obvious cynicism, the text carries an undercurrent of faith in the American system to eventually right itself. The alternative, he implies, would be an intellectual Armageddon that would cripple democracy itself.

Idiot America provides sympathetic audiences with the chance to vent alongside Pierce. Other readers will find well-researched investigation laced with snarkiness.

As for the idiots who won the culture wars—they will probably pick up Pierce’s book, look at the cover and get a Gut feeling that they wouldn’t like it. The people most in need of Pierce’s wake-up call will be the ones least likely to get it.

In his most recent collection of poems, Sestets, Charles Wright manages to capture more in six lines than most poets say in volumes.

The volume’s sixty-six poems, six lines each, read like dazzling meditations (believe me, if any poet is capable of such an oxymoron, it’s Wright). The six-line format gives each poem a haiku-like feel, although Wright doesn’t conform to the haiku meter. That sort of constraint would take away from Wright’s rustic charm—which comes across like a contemplative gentleman farmer sitting on the wide, wooden porch of his mountaintop home, looking out across uncut fields of hay toward the sunset at the far side of a valley. He takes a pipe from his mouth, and in a quiet, even voice, delivers a poem.

“There’s no way to describe how the light splays after the storm, under the clouds/Still piled like Armageddon/Back to the west, the northwest, intent on incursion,” he says in “Outscape.”

As ever, Wright’s poems find their power—subtle and sometimes sensuous—in description. Take, for instance, “Return of the Prodigal”: “Now comes summer, water clear, clouds heavy with weeping,/Tall grasses are silver-veined./Little puddles of sunlight collect in low places deep in the woods.”

From his poet’s porch, Wright describes “[t]he blank page of the sundown sky,” a half-moon “thin as a contact lens,” “the sundown light on that dog-haired lodgepole pine,” and a great blue heron with “huge head and cyclotron eyes focusing on the deep, slow currents of evening.”

Sestets swirls with its own deep, slow currents. He ruminates about death and about getting older. He writes about discontent and remorse—but he never sinks into despair or grief. Instead, he lets the melancholy sit lightly, like dew. “[The full moon is] not here yet, but give it an hour or so, then we,/bewildered, who want our poems to be clouds upholding the sour light of heaven,/Will pass our gray hair through our fingers and sigh just a little bit.”

Wright’s greatest strength as a poet has always been his ability to connect the things he sees in the natural world with his fears, doubts, hopes, and loves. Previous collections have also worked in allusions and references to classical and Eastern philosophy, which can sometimes make a reader feel disconnected from Wright’s poems. Sestets is largely devoid of such connections.

Instead, it couples the immediacy of observation with the resonating questions that come from deep reflection. The results are quiet and relaxing—and surprisingly comforting.

Poet Ben Doller has all the answers.

The questions are a different matter.

Doller’s poetry collection, FAQ:, from Ahsahta Press, features fifty-one “answers” to unknown questions. Each poem, titled “FAQ:,” begins with the line “Thank you for your question,” but the question hangs in the air unknown—and sometimes, based on Doller’s answers, unknowable.

“I can’t trust myself all night with this question,” Doller writes.

Doller’s answers aren’t tidy, either. The poems are more like quests for answers than answers themselves. They feel fragmented, but intentionally so. It’s as if the unnamed question-asker asks for clarity, but in a world of confusion, clear answers are impossible. They are too much to expect.

But Doller’s poems contain bursts of brilliant clarity that come in the midst of the searching. Doller doesn’t use his poems to catch clear snapshots of a particular moment; instead, his snapshots come in phrases, like moments of elucidation: A stunt cyclist seeks “To bludgeon gravity with speed.” A narrator laments that “Endless imagination is scourge, is bane, bare, self-immolient and spark, is accepting your invitation to, to take it to nowhere, notime….”

Clarity bogs down into confusion, but with Doller, the confusion comes across as artful. “A cliché, forced patiently, violently enough through tortuous enough a tube may become something solid again. Maybe a saying,” Doller writes. “So I have tried to impel it through these wires to you, you know that I need some of you to set the alarm clock, to increasingly sing in chorus with whatever oldie crows that the day should be beginning that the day should be beginning….”

Confusion sometimes breaks further down into chaos, but once there, Doller can find more clarity. For instance, he writes: “It’s just not my job to make the earth again, to celebrate my astonishment at the leaf as it all goes wrong leaf by leaf…”

Confusion doesn’t always equate to gloom, though. Doller finds humor, too. “Performing a word-find in the arrivals area: just one example of admirable behavior,” writes a traveler in one poem. “I can’t recall now why I was in the arrivals area. It’s a secret.”

Most of the poems look like short paragraphs in a helpful little manual. The two most notable exceptions, the collection’s only named poems, “Daisy” and “Same Problem,” stand out because of their couplet structure.

FAQ: fits perfectly as the twenty-seventh volume in Ahsahta Press’s “New Series” of innovative poetry collections. As with other volumes in the series, FAQ: will challenge a reader’s ideas about what is and isn’t poetry, both in form and content. The poems in Doller’s collection fulfill a similar function: The rumination is as important as the answer.