"Kindness is seldom wasted." --from "The Lion and the Mouse"
It is both amazing and wonderful that so much of the richness of our language and our moral education still owes a huge debt to a Greek slave who was executed more than two thousand years ago. Yet "sour grapes," "crying 'wolf, '" "actions speak louder than words," "honesty is the best policy," and literally hundreds of other metaphors, axioms, and ideas that are now woven into the very fabric of Western culture all came from Aesop's Fables. An extraordinary storyteller who used cunning foxes, surly dogs, clever mice,...
"Kindness is seldom wasted." --from "The Lion and the Mouse"
It is both amazing and wonderful that so much of the richness of our language...
Praise for Sam Pickering: "The art of the essay as delivered by Mr. Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble." ---The New York Times Book Review
"Reading Pickering . . . is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend." ---Smithsonian "What a joy it is to 'mess around' with Professor Sam Pickering " ---The Chattanooga Times "Pickering is a barefoot observer of the quotidian who revels in the spectacle and its gift for surprise, prefers the rumpled to the starched, has raised puttering and messing about to an art form, and wrings from...
Praise for Sam Pickering: "The art of the essay as delivered by Mr. Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble." ---The New York Times B...
Praise for Sam Pickering: "Pickering has all of Thurber's humor, and he writes as well as E. B. White. He writes with passion, wit, and a strange personal note of self-mockery; he is humanely educated, wise, and capable of a wide range of stylistic effects." ----Jay Parini ." . . he writes in the tradition of Montaigne hammering together a ramshackle affair of surprising nooks, crannies and additions-all under the same roof." ---The Oxford American "Pickering has the natural essayist's intimate yet distanced take on the world that combines a devotion to particulars ....
Praise for Sam Pickering: "Pickering has all of Thurber's humor, and he writes as well as E. B. White. He writes with passion, wit, and a strange ...
An English teacher at a boys' school in Tennessee, Pickering was the inspiration for the film "Dead Poets Society." In ten eloquent essays addressed to teachers of all types, Pickering shares compelling, funny, always elucidating anecdotes from his more than 40 years in the classroom.
An English teacher at a boys' school in Tennessee, Pickering was the inspiration for the film "Dead Poets Society." In ten eloquent essays addressed t...
Reading Pickering is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend, said "Smithsonian magazine. Living to Prowl, Sam Pickering's ninth collection of essays, finds the acclaimed author walking familiar paths, taking time to enjoy family, friends, nature, and other simple pleasures." "" "Like Pickering's earlier books, this collection records in highly personal and idiosyncratic terms a year in the life of a man with a tenacious commitment to pausing and wondering. Moving easily between humor and seriousness, the mundane and the philosophical, stark truth and evocative fictions,...
Reading Pickering is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend, said "Smithsonian magazine. Living to Prowl, Sam Pickering's ninth colle...
In this, his tenth book of essays, renowned raconteur Sam Pickering wanders from Nova Scotia to Tennessee, from a middle school athletic field to an English department. He tells stories about people named Googoo and Loppie. He examines trees and flowers. He watches a daughter play soccer and a son row. He attends funerals and remembers the past and imagines the future. His is the ordinary world observed closely. But reading Pickering makes life blossom. Suddenly the small and the neglected bloom and charm. He is opinionated, too. Foolishness in low places, as a reviewer put it, is also...
In this, his tenth book of essays, renowned raconteur Sam Pickering wanders from Nova Scotia to Tennessee, from a middle school athletic field to an E...
In A Tramp's Wallet, Sam Pickering spends six months roaming Australia and New Zealand, tramping landscapes pocked by sheep stations, mountains rip-rapped by scree, art galleries and bakeries, and always libraries. Pickering lectures on a cruise ship, travels the Murray River on a paddle wheeler, and rides the train from Sydney to Perth.
The saunterings of one of America's best and most popular essayists stretch the seams of A Tramp's Wallet, the coins of the page being six months spent alone in Australia and New Zealand. Far from the hoes and saws that prune days into convention, life...
In A Tramp's Wallet, Sam Pickering spends six months roaming Australia and New Zealand, tramping landscapes pocked by sheep stations, mountains rip-ra...
This is one of the most important works by the most important American philosopher: Henry David Thoreau, vital figure in the Transcendentalist movement, hero to environmentalists and ecologists, profound thinker on humanity's happiness. First published in 1854, Walden collects the penetrating reflections from the two years Thoreau lived in solitude on the shores of Massachusetts' Walden Pond. In lucid, poetic prose, Thoreau ponders the beauty of living simply and in communion with nature. It is a work of pastoral magnificence and wisdom that has moved generations of readers. Writer and...
This is one of the most important works by the most important American philosopher: Henry David Thoreau, vital figure in the Transcendentalist movemen...