Category: Bellevue Literary Press

Review: A Wilder Time

9/1/2019

Wilderness and a Dissolution of Boundary
Review: A Wilder Time

Joe Gramigna

William Glassley
Nonfiction
Bellevue Literary Press, pp. 224
Cost: $18.00

Alan Watts

“You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here.” This Alan Watts quote prefaces William Glassley’s nonfiction book A Wilder Time.

Watts was a 20th century Buddhist and spiritual lecturer who talked about the non-existence of self and the necessity of a return to nature in order to dissolve artificial, man-made divisions.

Glassley, a geologist, takes his own Wattsian spiritual journey into the Greenland wilderness. Although Glassley’s scientific background comes across in his writing, it doesn’t outshine his poetic prose that captures the pristine, esoteric setting of an untouched land.

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Review: The Fevers of Reason

1/1/2019

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Community: In Sickness and In Health
Review: The Fevers of Reason

by Rachel Barton

Gerald Weissmann
Nonfiction essays
Bellevue Literary Press, pp. 272
Cost: $19.99

As I approached The Fevers of Reason, I did so with a foot in each river of influence—or rather, a leg in one and a toe in the other. Weissmann’s essays discuss the intersection of various issues within medicine and popular culture. As a student of literature, I have often written extensive essays and participated in lengthy discussions of multiple works, like Arrowsmith and Sherlock Holmes,that Weissmann includes. Until recently, my knowledge of science and medicine has been rather superficial—me as a nervous patient in the waiting room. As my study of literature, guided by Elaine Scarry and Rita Charon, has begun to dip into the interaction between literature and medicine I’ve become more confident about the relationship between the two. Wearing my budding knowledge of the relatively young field like swimmies, I jumped right in to Weissmann’s collection and found a rich layering of past, present, science, and literature to present diverse takes on the issue at hand.

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Review: A Wilder Time

Review: The Fevers of Reason

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