Essays After Eighty

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544286944
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Book Description
The former U.S. Poet Laureate contemplates life, death, and the view from his window in these “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny” essays (The New York Times). From an early age, Donald Hall dedicated his life to the written word. In his long and celebrated career, he was an accomplished poet, essayist, memoirist, dramatist, and children’s author. Now, in the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of very old age, his essays continue to startle, move, and delight. In Essays After Eighty, Hall ruminates on his past: “thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . .” He also addresses his present: “When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches.” Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him every day: “Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.” “Deliciously readable…Donald Hall, if abandoned by the muse of poetry, has wrought his prose to a keen autumnal edge.” —The Wall Street Journal

Essays After Eighty

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544287045
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
A former poet laureate presents a new collection of essays delivering an unexpected view from the vantage point of very old age.

Essays After Eighty

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0544286944
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Book Description
The former US Poet Laureate contemplates life, death, and the view from his window in these “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny” essays (New York Times). His entire life, Donald Hall dedicated himself to the written word, putting together a storied career as a poet, essayist, and memoirist. Here, in the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of very old age, his essays startle, move, and delight. In Essays After Eighty, Hall ruminates on his past: “thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . .” He also addresses his present: “When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches.” Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him every day: “Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.” “Alluring, inspirational hominess . . . Essays After Eighty is a treasure . . . balancing frankness about losses with humor and gratitude.”??—??Washington Post “A fine book of remembering all sorts of things past, Essays After Eighty is to be treasured.”??—??Boston Globe

A Carnival Of Losses

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1328826317
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Former poet laureate of the United States Donald Hall’s final collection of essays, from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny.”* *(New York Times) “Why should a nonagenarian hold anything back?” Donald Hall answers his own question in these self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both. Nearing ninety at the time of writing, he intersperses memories of exuberant days in his youth, with uncensored tales of literary friendships spanning decades—with James Wright, Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, and other luminaries. Cementing his place alongside Roger Angell and Joan Didion as a generous and profound chronicler of loss, this final work is as original and searing as anything Hall wrote during his extraordinary literary lifetime.

Unpacking the Boxes

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780547247946
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
Former United States poet laureate Donald Hall reflects on his life, discussing his childhood in Connecticut, the works that influenced him, his education, his success and failures as a writer and father, his friendships, and other related topics.

Info We Trust

Author: RJ Andrews
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119483905
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
How do we create new ways of looking at the world? Join award-winning data storyteller RJ Andrews as he pushes beyond the usual how-to, and takes you on an adventure into the rich art of informing. Creating Info We Trust is a craft that puts the world into forms that are strong and true. It begins with maps, diagrams, and charts — but must push further than dry defaults to be truly effective. How do we attract attention? How can we offer audiences valuable experiences worth their time? How can we help people access complexity? Dark and mysterious, but full of potential, data is the raw material from which new understanding can emerge. Become a hero of the information age as you learn how to dip into the chaos of data and emerge with new understanding that can entertain, improve, and inspire. Whether you call the craft data storytelling, data visualization, data journalism, dashboard design, or infographic creation — what matters is that you are courageously confronting the chaos of it all in order to improve how people see the world. Info We Trust is written for everyone who straddles the domains of data and people: data visualization professionals, analysts, and all who are enthusiastic for seeing the world in new ways. This book draws from the entirety of human experience, quantitative and poetic. It teaches advanced techniques, such as visual metaphor and data transformations, in order to create more human presentations of data. It also shows how we can learn from print advertising, engineering, museum curation, and mythology archetypes. This human-centered approach works with machines to design information for people. Advance your understanding beyond by learning from a broad tradition of putting things “in formation” to create new and wonderful ways of opening our eyes to the world. Info We Trust takes a thoroughly original point of attack on the art of informing. It builds on decades of best practices and adds the creative enthusiasm of a world-class data storyteller. Info We Trust is lavishly illustrated with hundreds of original compositions designed to illuminate the craft, delight the reader, and inspire a generation of data storytellers.

Life Work

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807095427
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
The revered American Poet Laureate reflects on the meaning of work, solitude, and love with “extraordinary nobility and wisdom” (The New York Times) When Donald Hall moved to his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm in 1975, his work as a writer and a life devoted to the literary arts must have seemed remote from the harsh physical labor of his ancestors. However, he reveals a similar kind of artistry in the lives of his grandparents, Kate and Wesley. From them, he learned that the devotion to craft—be it canning vegetables, writing poems, or carting manure—creates its own special discipline and an ‘absorbedness’ that no wage can compensate. In this “sustained meditation on work as the key to personal happiness” (Los Angeles Times), we see how the writer has modeled his own life on his family’s lives of work, solitude, and love. When Hall comes face to face with his own mortality halfway through writing this book, we understand both his obsession with work and its ultimate consolation.

Fathers Playing Catch with Sons

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 0865471681
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with the game -- Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall's prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how a game binds people together and bridges generations.

Without

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780395957653
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 100

Book Description
Hall's bestselling collection ever speaks of the death of his wife--his gift and testimony, his lament, and his celebration of loss and love.

At Eighty-two

Author: May Sarton
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393316223
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
Finished before her death, these entries reflect back on Sarton's life and on her years as a teacher, poet, author, lover, and friend.