Download or read book Waltzing the Magpies written by Sam Pickering and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011-03-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 it more than a pennyworth of happiness and a life well lived." ---Kirkus Reviews The movie Dead Poets Society is where most Americans first met Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor. Robin Williams plays the lead character (loosely based on Pickering), an idiosyncratic instructor who employs some over-the-top teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning. Fewer know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the author-Sam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters. Like the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson, you can spot Pickering's writing a mile away; there's no mistaking the Pickering pen. As an ample demonstration of the author's literary gifts, Waltzing the Magpies is his unabashedly lush and Technicolor travelogue from Down Under. On the face of it, Waltzing is the chronicle of a sabbatical year spent with family in Australia. Yet beneath the surface Pickering's big themes-family, nature, seizing the moment-move in a powerful current that frequently bursts out in moments of ecstatic revelation and intense sensual flourish. Through it all Pickering weaves stories from his fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, especially when the goings of the outside world get rough. Waltzing the Magpies is classic Pickering at the height of his literary powers, and places him in the company of such great American essayists as E. B. White and James Thurber, but with an irony and observational prowess that is pure Pickering.
Download or read book All My Days Are Saturdays written by Sam Pickering and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2014-07-05 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times article once stated that “the art of the essay as delivered by [Sam] Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble.” As Pickering himself puts it, “Well, I have gotten considerably older, and humor has come to mean more and more to me. And if I’m on the front porch, I am in a rocking chair.” All My Days Are Saturdays offers fifteen new pieces in which he ponders a world that has changed and, in new ways, still delights him. This collection features Pickering writing about teaching and his recent retirement, visits to various locales, and, as he tell us, “the many people I meet...who tell me their stories, small tales that make one laugh and sigh.” Distinctive and unmistakable, Pickering’s style deftly mixes the colloquial language of everyday life with references to a lifetime of extensive reading. The seamless blend of these two worlds in his writing is indicative of how they fuse together in his daily life. As Pickering puts it, “All my life I have roamed libraries, almost as much as I have roamed the natural world. I try to get at many truths, but when I tell the truth, I ‘tell it slant.’ I do so to describe life as it is and indeed celebrate that ‘as it is.’” “Pickering is a master of his craft, one of the finest of personal essayists around, and these essays bear many of the characteristics of his other volumes—reflections on his everyday activities and on individuals around him, humorous exchanges with his wife, and so forth. But this volume seems to have something else as well. We find here a thoughtful meditation on time and self and relative old age demonstrating a close attention to the natural world—a tone not unlike Thoreau’s at times.” -- Fred C. Hobson, Professor of English, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and author or editor of fourteen books, most recently A Southern Enigma: Essays on the U.S. South
Download or read book Waltzing the Magpies written by JoJo Publishing and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Truth written by Sam Pickering and published by Madville Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This summer Sam Pickering and his wife Vicki attended a pro-fessional wrestling match in a small arena in Nova Scotia. They sat in folding chairs on the front row. They ate “Montreal Sausages” drowning in ketchup and awash with onions. They cheered heroes and laughed at villains. In the middle of one match, a naughty wrestler leaned over the ropes and staring at Sam, said, “If you keep laughing that hard, old-timer, you’ll have a heart attack.” “What?” Sam said to Vicki. “Old-timer? Not me. That poor man had better see an eye doctor before he gets hurt.”
Download or read book World Was My Garden Too written by Sam Pickering and published by Madville Publishing. This book was released on 2019-05-15 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: He roams New England, Arkansas, the Caribbean, Nova Scotia and the familiar and odd plots of mind and thought. He explores shorelines and climbs "hillish" mountains. He sits on porches and talks to passersby and their dogs. He meets strange and delightful people, most of whom are real.
Download or read book Dreamtime written by Sam Pickering and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2012-06-05 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweeping in and out of real and imagined places, Dreamtime highlights the curious character of an unconventional teacher, writer, traveler, husband, and father as he takes stock of his multifaceted life. Sam Pickering—the inspiration for the main character in Dead Poets Society—guides us on a journey through his reflections on retirement, aging, gardening, and travel. He describes the pleasures of domesticity, summers spent in Nova Scotia, and the joy of sharing a simple life with his wife of almost forty years. "Life is a tiresome journey," Pickering muses, "and when a man arrives at the end, he is generally out of breath." Although Pickering is now more likely to shuffle than gallop, he isn't yet out of breath, ideas, or ink. The refreshing and reflective substance of these essays shines through a patina of wit in Pickering's characteristically evocative and sincere prose. The separate events depicted in Dreamtime invite the reader into Pickering's personal experiences as well as into his viewpoints on teaching and encounters with former students. In "Spring Pruning," Pickering describes the precarious tumor in his parathyroid and the possibility of cancer affecting his daily life. In a refreshingly honest tone Pickering says, "Moreover the funeral had become a staple of chat, so much so I'd recently mulled having the raucous, insolent ringer on my telephone replaced by the recording of taps." Appealing to creative writers and readers who enjoy an adventurous account of travels through life, Dreamtime accentuates the lifestyle of a longtime master teacher whose experiences take him from sunny days in the classroom to falling headfirst over a fence after running a half-marathon. Unpredictable, spontaneous, and always enlightening, Pickering's idiosyncratic approach and companionable charm will delight anyone who shares his intoxication with all the surprising treasures that might furnish a life with happiness.
Download or read book Terrible Sanity written by Sam Pickering and published by Madville Publishing. This book was released on 2021-01-08 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Terrible Sanity is wondrous sanity. Pickering's essays are acetaminophen for hippish days. "Life doesn't have a neat beginning and a tidy end," Roger, a character in V. S. Naipaul's Half a Life, says. "Life is always going on." In this collection, Pickering depicts the joy and sadness of life's going on. He observes that great knowledge often brings small pleasure while the small knowledge that all people experience brings great pleasure. A dental hygienist tells him that every day patients greet her on the street and in stores. "Their faces are always unfamiliar, and I never recognize them," she says, "but if they opened their mouths wide, I'd know them immediately." For the record she also volunteers that in twenty years of tooth-scrubbing, she had only been bitten once"--
Download or read book Aesop s Fables written by Aesop and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exclusive Signet Classic edition contains 203 of Aesop’s most enduring and popular fables, translated into readable, modern American English and beautifully illustrated with classic woodcuts by the great French artist J. J. Grandville. 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, fearsome lions, and foolish humans to describe the reality of a harsh world, Aesop created narratives that are appealing, funny, politically astute, and profoundly true. And Aesop’s truth—often summed up in the pithy “moral of the story”—retains an awesome power to affect us, reaching us through both our intellects and our hearts. Including: “The Fox and the Grapes” “The Ants and the Grasshopper” “The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse” …and 200 Other Famous Fables Edited and with an Afterword by Jack Zipes With an Introduction by Sam Pickering
Download or read book One Grand Sweet Song written by Sam Pickering and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2016-10-15 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One Grand, Sweet Song is a collection of familiar essays in which Sam Pickering explores libraries and woods and fields. He wanders over hills and far away—to Caribbean and Canada—but he always returns to the local, to Connecticut and his memories of a Southern childhood. He ponders writing and aging, joy and lunacy. He celebrates family and Christmas. He laughs and tells terrible lies, and jokes. He runs half-marathons, and on a farm in Nova Scotia, he tries to write his Walden. “O World, I cannot hold thee close enough!” Edna St. Vincent Millay once exclaimed. In these pages Pickering embraces his world with great love, wrapping it in words and pulling it and the reader unforgettably close. Pickering has written 28 books and 100s of articles. The subject matter of the books ranges. Three are scholarly studies, two of which focus on 18th century children’s literature. Four are travel books, three of these describing his family’s meanderings in Australia. One book mulls teaching, and another is a memoir. The rest of Pickering’s books are collections of familiar essays, providing his take or perhaps “untake” on things. “Reading Pickering,” a reviewer wrote in the Smithsonian, “is like taking a walk with your oldest, wittiest friend.”
Download or read book A Comfortable Boy written by Sam Pickering and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Long before he became a celebrity by being depicted as John Keating in the Dead Poets Society, Sam Pickering lived an ordinary childhood in the South. This memoir, extraordinarily told, is Pickering?s crowning moment to his long, literary career. Told with honesty, warmth, and integrity, he tells his story through his eighth grade year, focusing on family, growing up, and centers on finding his self. For Pickering, family is everything. Happiness is precious. For some people happiness is hard-won, slowly distilled from the grit of rasping days. For others, like Sam Pickering, happiness has come easily. In A comfortable boy, Pickering describes the early years of childhood, rolling back through time on the wheels of anecdotal memory. With an eye peeled for detail, he recalls family and places. He meanders farm and school, roaming Tennessee and Virginia. He notices things that others sometimes miss or at least neglect. Recently, he wrote that he saw two stickers on the rear window of a rusting Pontiac, the warning 'Baby on Board' inexplicably beside the command 'Drive It Like You Stole It'. He owns three dogs, all mongrels rescued from the streets of Hartford, and he calls the trowel he uses to scoop up their droppings 'Excalibur'. For Pickering life's pleasures are endless, lurking amid the wildflowers of field and wood or sprouting in paragraphs written to his great-grandmother during the Civil War. In part A comfortable boy reveals what made Pickering a successful teacher and writer, not the wound of the suffering Romantic but instead the simple joy and gratitude for being born in the South at a certain time in a particular place and in a specific family among people, he writes, 'whom it was impossible not to love and not to laugh at and with'"--From publisher's description.
Download or read book Letters to a Teacher written by Sam Pickering and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspirational reflections on the art of teaching from the acclaimed essayist and teacher who inspired Dead Poets Society. Sam Pickering has been teaching for more than forty years. As a young English teacher at Montgomery Bell Academy in Tennessee, his musings on literature and his maverick pedagogy touched a student named Tommy Schulman, who later wrote the screenplay for Dead Poets Society. Pickering went on to teach at Dartmouth and the University of Connecticut, where he has been for twenty-five years. His acclaimed essays have established him as a nimble thinker with a unique way of enlightening us through the quotidian. Letters to a Teacher is a welcome reminder that teaching is a joy and an art. In ten letters addressed to teachers of all types, Pickering shares compelling, funny, always illuminating anecdotes from a lifetime in the classrooms of schools and universities. His observations touch on topics such as competition, curiosity, enthusiasm, and truth, and are leavened throughout with stories—whether from the family breakfast table, his revelatory nature walks, or his time teaching in Australia and Syria. More than a how-to guide, Letters to a Teacher is an invitation into the hearts and minds of an extraordinary educator and his students, and an irresistible call to reflection for the teacher who knows he or she must be compassionate, optimistic, respectful, firm, and above all, dynamic. “Perhaps the most poetic–even elegiac writing about education published in the past year.” —Library Journal
Download or read book Autumn Spring written by Sam Pickering and published by Univ. of Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "No one creates so many memorable, saucy aphorisms-piquant, bitter-sweet, arousing." -Pat C. Hoy II, New York University Sam Pickering's essays are funny and wise-and always intoxicating, eggnog to warm glazed winter nights and juleps to cool sweltering summer days. He wanders Connecticut, Canada, and the South, seeding his old farm in Nova Scotia with words and scattering paragraphs in and about classrooms at the University of Connecticut. He describes the great flowerings of summers and falls. He mulls over vanishing friendships, then hunts for buried treasure in a library. He endures a massage, ponders the genteel, and explores shadowy alcoves and books. For him home is where heart and heartache thrive together. Students make him laugh and weep, and in part his book is a teaching manual crammed with anecdotal good sense. He buries his old dog George and picks up Bert, a rescue dachshund addicted to unmentionable munchies and cloddish doggy behavior, an animal who obstinately refuses to cross the Rainbow Bridge. Pickering runs road races, although he says anyone in a motorized walker could leave him far behind. In "Premortem" he anatomizes his vanishing muscles and then decides to have a knee operation in hopes of shuffling fast enough to keep a heeltap ahead of the pale rider on the white horse. This is a book about love and happiness-a restorative collection that shows readers how to enjoy life's small glories even among its indignities. When the going gets sour, Pickering tells a joke and transforms the sour into sweet delight. Sam Pickering teaches English at the University of Connecticut. The inspiration for the teacher in the movie Dead Poets Society, Pickering is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a master of the essay form. Among his dozen collections of essays are A Little Fling and The Last Book, both published by the University of Tennessee Press.
Download or read book Gate in the Garden Wall written by Sam Pickering and published by Madville Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Familiar essays by Sam Pickering, who has written more than thirty books and barrows of articles. When not at his desk, he was in the classroom, the last thirty-five years teaching English at the University of Connecticut.
Download or read book A Tramp s Wallet written by Sam Pickering and published by Mercer University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Tramp's Wallet, Sam Pickering spends six months roaming Australia and New Zealand, tramping landscapes pocked by sheep stations, art galleries and bakeries, and always libraries, their dusty shelves troves quick with life and literature. The saunterings of one of America's best and most popular essayists stretch the seams of A Tramp's Wallet. Far from the hoes and saws that prune days into convention, life flourishes, and this book is weedy and rankly rich with thought and description. "Lord," St. Odo of Cluny said on his deathbed, "I have loved the beauty of thy house." Pickering records his love of that house, and, if truth must out, his love for a few neglected out buildings-barns and backhouses, even the ramshackled huts of thought.
Download or read book A Nest of Magpies written by Sybil Marshall and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1994-10-15 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Fran moves back to her old village, she expects to find the village of her childhood. Instead, she encounters discontent in every walk of life. A first novel from former schoolteacher and local historian.
Download or read book The Best of Pickering written by Sam Pickering and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2004-03-02 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than two dozen essays visit the author's great themes -- family, nature, seizing the day, and the strange goings-on in Carthage, Tennessee
Download or read book Time s Magpie written by Myla Goldberg and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sometimes a city can be like a bird. Just as the magpie is an inveterate collector, hoarding beautiful eclectic bits to line its nest, so Prague retains fragments from bygone regimes and centuries past to create a city of juxtaposition that is alternately exquisite and bizarre. Prague’s personality is expressed as much by its obvious beauty as by its overlooked details. This unforgettable place is brought to life by acclaimed author Myla Goldberg, a former Prague expat, whose first novel, Bee Season, captivated so many with its unique voice and exhilarating prose. Myla Goldberg lived in Prague in 1993, just as the process of Westernization was getting under way, the city straddling a past it wished to shed and a future it was eager to embrace. In 2003, she returned to see what the pursuit of capitalism had wrought and to observe the integral ways in which Prague’s character had endured. In Time’s Magpie, Goldberg explores a city where centuries-old buildings have become receptacles for Western values and a generation defined by the Communist regime coexists with a generation for whom Communism is a rapidly fading memory. Wander through the narrow alleyways and cobblestone streets to places most tourists never see—to a neighborhood eerily transformed by the devastating flood of 2002; to an anachronistic amusement park that is home to a discomfiting array of Technicolor confections; and to the cabinets of curiosity in the Strahov Monastery, where hidden among deceptively modest displays of butterfly specimens and ladies’ fans are creatures that defy the laws of taxidermy. This imaginative, individualistic journey will show you the odd and unique corners of a city often seeking to erase what its very stones will not allow it to forget.
