Most Popular Books by Roger Rosenblatt

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People never learn. They make the same mistakes generation after generation. So here are the things that everyone should learn about life, then hope to remember. With a wry sense of humour, Rules for Ageing presents the most realistic, practical, pleasurable and, most importantly, painless advice you will ever receive. This book offers timeless advice for anyone still young enough to learn, and richly amusing reflections on life for those who have seen it all before.

From one of America''s most thoughtful and provocative social commentators comes a new collection of essays, reportage, and criticism. Featuring Rosenblatt''s most memorable writing in years, this sampling includes his "Man of the Year" profile of Ronald Reagan for Time.

Consider this paradox: Ecologists estimate that it would take three planets Earth to provide an American standard of living to the entire world. Yet it is that standard of living to which the whole world aspires.In Consuming Desires, award-winning writer and social commentator Roger Rosenblatt brings together a brilliant collection of thinkers and writers to shed light on the triumphs and tragedies of that disturbing paradox. The book represents a captivating salon, offering a rich and varied dialogue on the underlying roots of consumer culture and its pervasive impact on ourselves and the world around us. Each author offers a unique perspective, their layers of thoughts and insights building together to create a striking, multifaceted picture of our society and culture.Jane Smiley probes the roots of consumerism in the emancipation of women from household drudgery afforded by labor-saving devices and technological innovation; Alex Kotlowitz describes the mutual reinforcement of fashion trends as poor inner-city kids and rich suburban kids strive to imitate each other; Bill McKibben discusses the significance, and the irony, of defining yourself not by what you buy, but by what you don''t buy.The essays range widely, but two ideas are central to nearly all of them: that consumption is driven by yearning and desire -- often unspoken, seemingly insatiable -- and that what prevents us from keeping our consumptive impulse in check is the western concept of self, the solitary and restless self, entitled to all it can pay for.As Rosenblatt explains in his insightful introduction: "Individualism and desire are what makes us great and what makes us small. Freedom is our dream and our enemy. The essays touch on these paradoxes, and while all are too nuanced and graceful to preach easy reform, they give an idea of what reform means, where it is possible, and, in some cases, where it may not be as desirable as it appears."

In these 30 essays, Roger Rosenblatt draws on his 27 years of reporting and commenting on America to reaffirm the core values of our complex and wonderful country. Famous for his ability to put wise and important ideas into witty and instructive prose, the prize-winning journalist and commentator provides comfort and resolve for Americans in a time of threat. With his charm and humor, Rosenblatt reminds us of the fundamental political and moral strengths of America. During the last 30 years, Rosenblatt believes, we have been living outside history in a bubble of wealth and power. The events of September 11, 2001, have given us a chance to reacquaint ourselves with what the country stands for and what it should become. If we have lost our way as a country, it is because we have lost sight of the idealism on which America was founded. The fundamentals of American justice and society are more than America''s virtues—they are standards by which a civilization measures its worth.

“A painfully beautiful memoir….Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive.” —E. L. Doctorow A revered, many times honored (George Polk, Peabody, and Emmy Award winner, to name but a few) journalist, novelist, and playwright, Roger Rosenblatt shares the unforgettable story of the tragedy that changed his life and his family. A book that grew out of his popular December 2008 essay in The New Yorker, Making Toast is a moving account of unexpected loss and recovery in the powerful tradition of About Alice and The Year of Magical Thinking. Writer Ann Beattie offers high praise to the acclaimed author of Lapham Rising and Beet for a memoir that is, “written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you’re a part of this family.”

Roger Rosenblatt’s dazzling comic gifts are on enviable display....Beet will settle the issue: is Roger Rosenblatt our most audacious comic visionary,or our most audacious visionary comic?”—Joyce Carol Oates Beet College is doomed...and nobody really cares. The Board of Trustees, led by developer Joel Bollovate, has squandered the endowment. Debutante-cum-self-styled-poet Matha Polite, an indiscriminate radical with a four-student following, wants to bring the institution down. Sweet-tempered terrorist hopeful Akim Ben Ladin (né Arthur Horowitz) sits in his off-campus cave and dreams about blowing Beet up. Faculty members are too busy concocting useless, trendy courses to do anything about it. Not to mention that American higher education is going down the tubes, one less lesser school isn’t going to matter. So why is Professor Peace Porterfield trying to save Beet? Beats us. “Rosenblatt [applies] his sharp wit to elite education.”—Wall Street Journal

In this illuminating book Roger Rosenblatt offers both sensitive analyses of individual works and a provocative and compelling thesis. He argues that black fiction has a unity deriving not from any chronological sequence, or simply from its black authorship, but from a particular cyclical conception of history on which practically every significant black American novel and short story is based. Marked for oppression by an external physical characteristic, black characters struggle constantly against and within a hostile world. Rosenblatt''s analysis of the way black protagonists try to break historical patterns provides an integrated and sustained interpretation of motives and methods in black fiction. The black hero, after starting on a circular track, may try to change direction by means of his youth, love, education, or humor; or he may try to escape into his own elusive and vague history. But, as Rosenblatt demonstrates, these attempts all fail. And the black hero discovers in the failure of his attempts that the society which caused all this failure is not only unattainable but undesirable. Neither a sociological study nor a routine survey, this is distinctly a work of literary criticism which concentrates on black fiction as literature.

A look at the human comedy from a prize-winning writer who is “bright, funny and tells it like it is” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch). In this insightful collection, an accomplished essayist and humorist offers a class in “Tyranny for Beginners;” warns about the snares of dinner parties; explains the mind-set of barbarians; suggests the perfect gift for Mother—a wildebeest—and tells what happens when his dog’s barking drives him to thoughts of murder. Roger Rosenblatt forces us to laugh at the silliness of the world we have created, refocuses our minds on what really matters, and alerts us to the injustice and cruelty that lie just below the skin. A recipient of a Peabody Award, an Emmy, and two Polk Awards, and the author of Rules for Aging and Making Toast, he offers an entertaining and enlightening read filled with his “trademark droll wit” (Tulsa World). “The best thing about reading an essay by Rosenblatt is that he makes you think.” —Town & Country

The acclaimed, award-winning essayist and memoirist returns to fiction with this reflective, bittersweet tale that introduces the irrepressible aging poet Thomas Murphy—a paean to the mystery, tragedy and wonder of life. Trying his best to weasel out of an appointment with the neurologist his only child, Máire, has cornered him into, the poet Thomas Murphy—singer of the oldies, friend of the down-and-out, card sharp, raconteur, piano bar player, bon vivant, tough and honest and all-around good guy—contemplates his sunset years. Máire worries that Murph is losing his memory. Murph wonders what to do with the rest of his life. The older mind is at issue, and Murph’s jumps from fact to memory to fancy, conjuring the islands that have shaped him—Inishmaan, a rocky gumdrop off the Irish coast where he was born, and New York, his longtime home. He muses on the living, his daughter and precocious grandson William, and on the dead, his dear wife Oona, and Greenberg, his best friend. Now, into Murphy’s world comes the lovely Sarah, a blind woman less than half his age, who sees into his heart, as he sees into hers. Brought together under the most unlikely circumstance, Murph and Sarah begin in friendship and wind up in impossible possible love. An Irishman, a dreamer, a poet, Murph, like Whitman, sings lustily of himself and of everyone. Through his often-extravagant behavior and observations, both hilarious and profound, we see the world in all its strange glory, equally beautiful and ridiculous. With memory at the center of his thoughts, he contemplates its power and accuracy and meaning. Our life begins in dreams, but does not stay with them, Murph reminds us. What use shall we make of the past? Ultimately, he asks, are relationships our noblest reason for living? Behold the charming, wistful, vibrant, aging Thomas Murphy, whose story celebrates the ageless confusion that is this dreadful, gorgeous life.

Harry March is something of a wreck and more than half nuts. Up until now, he has lived peacefully on an island in the Hamptons with his talking dog, Hector, a born-again Evangelical and unapologetic capitalist. But March’s life starts to completely unravel when Lapham—an ostentatious multimillionaire who made his fortune on asparagus tongs—begins construction of a gargantuan mansion just across the way. To Harry, Lapham’s monstrosity-to-be represents the fetid and corrupt excess that has ruined modern civilization. Which means, quite simply, that this is war.

The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt''s Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author''s childhood in New York City, suffused with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit. Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life and the life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York of the 1950s; the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that nourished the city with water before it nourished it with books, and the Empire State Building, which, in Rosenblatt''s imagination, vibrates sympathetically with the oversize loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from me." As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy detective on the case. Just as Rosenblatt invented a world for himself as a child, he creates one on this night—the writer a detective still, the chief suspect in the case of his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.

The beloved New York Times bestselling author Making Toast and Kayak Morning returns with a powerful meditation on a universal subject: love. In The Book of Love, Roger Rosenblatt explores love in all its moods and variations—romantic love, courtship, battle, mystery, marriage, heartbreak, fury, confusion, melancholy, delirium, ecstasy; love of family, of friends; love of home, of country, of work, of writing, of solitude, of art; love of nature; love of life itself. Rosenblatt is on a quest to illuminate this elusive and essential emotion, to define this thing called love. Cleverly using lines from love songs to create a flowing ballad—as infectious and engaging as a jazz riff—he intersperses fictional vignettes that capture lovers in different situations, ages, and temperaments along with notes addressed to “you,” his wife of fifty years. “The story I have to tell is of you. Of others, too. Other people, other things. But mainly of you. It begins and ends with you. It always comes back to you.” Lively yet profound, poignant yet joyous, The Book of Love is a triumph of intellect and imagination: a personal discourse on love that is both novel and timeless.

Multiple award-winner Roger Rosenblatt has received glowing critical acclaim for his exceptional literary works—from the hilarious novels Lapham Rising and Beet to his poignant, heartbreaking, ultimately inspiring memoir Making Toast. With Unless It Moves the Human Heart, the revered novelist, essayist, playwright, and respected writing teacher offers a guidebook for aspiring authors, a memoir, and an impassioned argument for the necessity of writing in our world. In the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Rosenblatt’s Unless It Moves the Human Heart provides practical insights and advice on the craft, exquisitely presented by one of contemporary literature’s living treasures.

From Roger Rosenblatt, author of the bestsellers Making Toast and Unless It Moves the Human Heart, comes a moving meditation on the passages of grief, the solace of solitude, and the redemptive power of love In Making Toast, Roger Rosenblatt shared the story of his family in the days and months after the death of his thirty-eight-year-old daughter, Amy. Now, in Kayak Morning, he offers a personal meditation on grief itself. “Everybody grieves,” he writes. From that terse, melancholy observation emerges a work of art that addresses the universal experience of loss. On a quiet Sunday morning, two and a half years after Amy’s death, Roger heads out in his kayak. He observes,“You can’t always make your way in the world by moving up. Or down, for that matter. Boats move laterally on water, which levels everything. It is one of the two great levelers.” Part elegy, part quest, Kayak Morning explores Roger’s years as a journalist, the comforts of literature, and the value of solitude, poignantly reminding us that grief is not apart from life but encompasses it. In recalling to us what we have lost, grief by necessity resurrects what we have had.

"In Life Itself, Roger Rosenblatt redefines the debate on abortion and offers a resolution." "Through columns in leading publications and his on-air essays for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Rosenblatt has become widely recognized as America''s preeminent commentator on social and moral issues. In this book, he turns to the most bitterly divisive social question of our time." ""Give abortion five seconds of thought and it quickly spirals down in the mind to the most basic questions about human life, to the mysteries of birth and our relationship with our souls," he writes. "It is difficult to disentangle, much less express, the feelings it engenders."" "Yet what we have seen in this country over the past twenty years has been the political warfare of extremists, not honest discussion among ordinary citizens with differing views." "Life Itself attempts to establish an "uncommon ground" on abortion by using the deep ambivalence the great majority of Americans feel about the problem toward its resolution. We live in uncomfortable but manageable conflict on a number of important national issues, Rosenblatt writes. It is time to learn to live with conflicted feelings on abortion as well." "To make his case, Rosenblatt traces the 4,000-year history of abortion, demonstrating that all civilizations have dealt with conflict on the issue, and have fashioned their resolutions to meet their particular structure and needs." "Why then do Americans alone in history have so hard a time doing the same? Rosenblatt answers this provocative question by examining specific American characteristics of thought that have become particularly explosive when touched by abortion." "Finally, through a series of interviews and speculations, Rosenblatt determines that the country is more united in its attitudes about abortion than the political warriors would have us believe. In the end, he presents a formula by which we may begin to recognize and live with one another on this matter in spite of, and within, our divided views:" ""To create a society in which abortion is permitted and its gravity appreciated is to create but another of the many useful frictions of a democracy. Such a society does not devalue life by allowing abortion; it takes life with utmost seriousness, and is, by the depth of its conflicts and the richness of its difficulties, a reflection of life itself.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Rosenblatt''s hymn to our noblest qualities: embracing life, sharing love, and accepting responsibility toward one another.

A collection of soft-focus color photographs of toys staged to re-enact the Holocaust.

The Years of Zero-Coming of Age Under the Khmer Rouge is a survivor''s account of the Cambodian genocide carried out by Pol Pot''s sadistic and terrifying Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s. It follows the author, Seng Ty, from the age of seven as he is plucked from his comfortable, middle-class home in a Phnom Penh suburb, marched along a blistering, black strip of highway into the jungle, and thrust headlong into the unspeakable barbarities of an agricultural labor camp. Seng''s mother was worked to death while his siblings succumbed to starvation. His oldest brother was brought back from France and tortured in the secret prison of Tuol Sleng. His family''s only survivor and a mere child, Seng was forced to fend for himself, navigating the brainwashing campaigns and random depravities of the Khmer Rouge, determined to survive so he could bear witness to what happened in the camp. The Years of Zero guides the reader through the author''s long, desperate periods of harrowing darkness, each chapter a painting of cruelty, caprice, and courage. It follows Seng as he sneaks mice and other living food from the rice paddies where he labors, knowing that the penalty for such defiance is death. It tracks him as he tries to escape into the jungle, only to be dragged back to his camp and severely beaten. Through it all, Seng finds a way to remain whole both in body and in mind. He rallies past torture, betrayal, disease and despair, refusing at every juncture to surrender to the murderers who have stolen everything he had. As The Years of Zero concludes, the reader will have lived what Seng lived, risked what he risked, endured what he endured, and finally celebrate with him his unlikeliest of triumphs.

On the afternoon of April 9, 1969, Roger Rosenblatt, then a young English instructor at Harvard, stepped out of his classroom building. There, across the Yard, he saw students hanging out of the windows of the main administrative building, waving revolutionary flags and chanting. The student uprisings that were rocking the country had finally come to America''s most prestigious university. In short order, the demonstrators forcibly ejected deans from their offices. Less than twenty-four hours later - in an act unprecedented in Harvard''s history - the University president invited local police to storm the Yard, and in riot gear, they attacked the students with tear gas and truncheons. In the turbulent weeks that followed, Rosenblatt soon found himself at the center of the chaos. As the Senior Tutor in an undergraduate House, he sat up night after night counseling angry, frightened students. As a member of the faculty committee formed to investigate the takeover and determine punishments, he saw just how fragile the bonds were that held the University together. For himself, Rosenblatt gained a very special Harvard education. Drawing on the recollections of faculty - Archibald Cox, Derek Bok, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Dunlop, James Q. Wilson, and Martin Peretz - and of students - Al Gore, Michael Kinsley, James Fallows, Frank Rich, Christopher Durang, and Mark Helprin - Rosenblatt has written an eloquent, often ironic, sometimes funny memoir that can be read as modern history and as a moral tale about a time when people persuaded themselves that they could fix things by taking them apart.

For those who write and those who want to, a book on the joys and fascinations of the literary life by an author whose work has pleased millions.

Prize-winning essayist Roger Rosenblatt offers readers a survival manual comprised of 54 gems of funny, brilliant, wise, and indispensable advice.

Photographs of Mormons taken by 50 of the world''s most talented photographers during the course of one year, on six continents, recording missions, weddings, funerals, family home evenings, home and community life.

A comprehensive view of the effects of the atomic bomb, covering a broad spectrum of areas--diplomacy, foreign policy, and politics--and assesses the consequences of nuclear technology

Brief biographies of twelve Afro-American poets with examples of their best-known works, from Jupiter Hammon of the eighteenth century to today''s Arna Bontemps and Gwendolyn Brooks.