In the early years of the 20th Century, Albert Schweitzer was already a well-known European intellectual and concert musician when he decided to change his life and enroll in medical school. With his medical degree, Dr. Schweitzer would move to what was then French Equatorial Africa (now Gabon) where for many years he ran a
Author: Mark T. Harris
“All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.” —Andre Breton 1. John Downey is used to waking up early. It is his habit to get up before dawn, often rising as early as 4:30 in the morning. As a college student John is frequently at the old Franklin Library building
The memories seem all black-and-white eight-millimeter movies now, a grainy montage of scenes from his earlier life. They comfort him in ways the doctors cannot see, as if the struggling mind by some instinct knows there’s fortitude in the familiar and the old. There are the neighborhood children gathered around the old backyard picnic table,
Surprisingly, the clerk behind the window at the local police station doesn’t find my request strange. I am looking for the scene of a very old car accident, I tell her. I do not have an address, just an old police report with a brief description of a farmhouse a few miles east of Whitewater
Curtis White is a retired English professor, novelist and literary and cultural critic. Mostly, he is an intellectual troublemaker. This is a good thing. In his 2003 book, The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves, White offered a uniquely scathing critique of the state of critical imagination in popular American culture. The Middle Mind remains
MARK HARRIS 