Word: essayed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Essay [April 5], Roger Rosenblatt suggests there is no effective way to discourage the book borrower; I submit there is. When someone wants one of my books, I will willingly oblige-but the borrower must first give me a deposit of $50. He gets his money back when he returns the book. Are some people insulted? Of course-the very ones who would never have returned the book otherwise...
...Your Essay hit home. As a teacher and book collector, I liked to share knowledge. But in Colombia, South America, I learned a proverb that translates as "It is not known who is dumber, he who lends a book or he who returns...
...Women and Men." Hoagland sets about the uneasy task of trying to assess the changing character of sex roles today. Typically, a Hoagland essay is not an argument but a ramble over the terrain, and this essay's apparent meandering belies its thoughtfulness. Jumping adroitly from a concern that old male heroes may soon lapse from memory to a thankfulness that barriers to equal treatment under the law are falling to a meditation on the wondrous attraction of the sexes. Hoagland appears an artful stone-stepper in the twins streams of technology and women's liberation. He muses. "Technology...
...Ridge-Slope Fox and the Knife Thrower" in both the book's best and most freewheeling essay. In it Hoagland seems more than anything else to meditate simply and carefully on the complexity of life. Again leaping from one topic to the next, he exults in his sightings of animals while wondering if he will catch a glimpse of the fox and then considers what an ordeal solitude actually is, despite its perverse and mostly pseudo-intellectual glamour. Then he considers the differences of life in the city and the country (it is not exactly that life is slow...
NONE OF THE PIECES are without merit. Even the weakest essay, a biographical essay of Johnny Appleseed cozily entitled "The Mushpan Man," though a sort of Readers Digest version of the weird ascetic's life, has its strengths. Most notably, it recalls to mind a forgotten geography of places with names like Chillicothe and Bucyrus and rivers with names like Broken Straw Creek, the Kokosing and White Woman's Creek. It is a geography far afield from our familiar one of ambition--of graduate degrees, mammoth corporations, fat salaries, and prestigious universities--and one well worth remembering...