From Complicity to Contempt details the changing political views of an Army veteran of 21 years. From the opening of the "Global war on Terror," this writer-patriot saw that his beliefs about his country were no longer based on truth. The Constitution and Bill of Rights were being dismantled in plain sight and the majority of his fellow citizens were either unaware of it or failing to stop it. Gatto's book provides a highly personal but also powerful look into the frustration and anger of an American who came to see that everything he'd stood for throughout his whole life was being turned into a fraud. Tim Gatto was born in 1950 and grew up in the Cold War era. Idealistically, he enlisted in the Army in 1968, though the Vietnam War soon began shaping and changing his ideas about American foreign policy, much as it did for most of his generation. While still serving, he joined the protest against the war. And later, after witnessing the fraudulent run-up to the Iraq war engineered by the Bush administration, he became politically active all over again-and began writing, prolifically and for an ever-widening audience. He lives in South Carolina, a liberal in one of the reddest states in the country.

FROM COMPLICITY TO CONTEMPT

History

Gatto, Timothy V.

Military

THE OLIVER ARTS AND OPEN PRESS

If you've never read the Iliad, it's possible that this little book could be a way for you to get a start on it. If you remember  just hating the Iliad because it was taught by the most boring instructor that the imagination of all of the gods could ever have produced-well, this book can offer a second shot at the poem that's likely to work out better this time. And if, like so many others, you're just intimidated by the "great classics," Homer for Real is for you.  The writer Eric Larsen was like that. Bored to tears by his first classics prof, he could barely stand the Iliad. Later, as a professor  himself, he had to teach it-and did so for 40 years. Afterward, he decided to write a book about what it was that made him come to love the poem. He brings the epic alive by citing passages, then analyzing what's really going on and why. We not only learn about the culture of Homer's time, but also understand the action through present day analogies. That's the purpose and aim of Homer for Real, first of a series called Great Literature for Regular People: A Course of Readings Drawn from a Life in the Classroom. It's user-friendly but it doesn't simplify. Chances are good that it's a book for you.

HOMER FOR REAL: A READING OF THE ILIAD

Literature & Fiction

Larsen, Eric

History & Criticism

A cautionary note to you-yes, you, with this book in your hands, reading these words: If your ideas about poetry are in any way "frail," "gentle," "sweet-scented," or "meek," it's recommended strongly that you not open, buy, or read this book, Gregory Marszal's I Am Not Dead. Why the admonition? Well, it's not because Marszal's poetry is difficult (it isn't). It's not because it lacks beauty (it's filled with beauty). And it's not because it fails to be evocative, lyric, inventive, unusual, and surprising (it never fails in those ways). No. It's because Marszal's poetry is written, solely and only, out of and about the truth. And so, you ask? The truth about what? Well, let's put it this way: Marszal concerns himself solely and only with the truth about our existence-and as if that's not bad enough, after that he concerns himself solely with the truth of our being alive within that existence. Marszal writes: The poet, so to speak, must be able to disembody. He must practice, among other things, the art of inhabiting objects: Fences, broken beer bottles, shattered crab shells, splintered mountain stones, grasses, trees, stars, and the walls of ruined cities. He must practice this discipline: His consciousness, imaginative, rational, as well as emotional, must touch being empathetically by entering It; he must watch, he must witness, the universe of humankind and nature from its point of view. But also, he must feel its resistance to him, its otherness. The poet must begin with the particular and elongate, expand, consciousness to experience the conditions of other subjectivities. But he must not be deluded into believing that he has achieved this subjectivity. To avoid this typical totalitarian error, he must grasp that all otherness is what it is in light of its congenital resistance to assimilative conceptualizations. The silence will not tell you how to live, but it will grow an intractable tree with a wild shimmering crown of leaves inside of you; and when the wind heaves, it shall speak to you; and you shall survive every bomb, but one. "Take the sudden beauty of Wallace Stevens, mix in the wise weirdness of Ashbery, top it off with the somber naturalism of A.R. Ammons--and you get Gregory Marzsal"-Adam Engel Gregory Marszal is a native of New York City. He now lives with his wife of twenty years in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I Am Not Dead, Poetry

MARSZAL, GREGORY

Poetry

The most interesting and inventive "long-poem" I've read since Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red. -Adam Engel, author of Topiary, Cella Fantastik, and I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague

THE BOOK OF TRANSPARENCIES

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the THE OLIVER ARTS AND OPEN PRESS publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by THE OLIVER ARTS AND OPEN PRESS

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the THE OLIVER ARTS AND OPEN PRESS publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

FROM COMPLICITY TO CONTEMPT

HOMER FOR REAL: A READING OF THE ILIAD

I Am Not Dead, Poetry

THE BOOK OF TRANSPARENCIES