Moongate-Wanderings

At the beginning of each day’s reading session, Bill will ask the audience if they have any particular selections they would like to hear that day, such as a chapter on a certain president from The American President or a certain time period during the twentieth century from The Century. After reading each selection, Bill will invite the audience to comment on what was read, giving, for instance, your views on a certain presidency or your remembrances from a certain period during the twentieth century.

Here are edited reviews of the books from amazon.com.

First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, Willa Cather's My Ántonia is a tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land. Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier. As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves.

The Singing Wilderness “has to do with the calling of loons, with northern lights, and the great silences of land lying northwest of Lake Superior. It is concerned with the simple joys, the timelessness and perspective found in a way of life which is close to the past. I have heard the singing in many places, but I seem to hear it best in the wilderness lake country of the Quetico-Superior, where travel is still by pack and canoe over the ancient trails of the Indians and voyageurs.” Thus the author sets the theme and tone of this enthralling book of discovery about one of the few great primitive areas in our country which have withstood the pressures of civilization. Acute natural perceptivity and a profound knowledge of the relationships to be found in nature combine here in vivid evocations of the sights, the sounds, the vast stillnesses, and the events of the wilderness as the seasons succeed each other. But Mr. Olson is not content merely to "describe; he probes for meanings that will lead the reader to a different and more revealing way of looking at the out-of-doors and to a deeper sense of its eternal values. In each of the thirty-four chapters of The Singing Wilderness he has sought to capture an essential quality of our magnificent lake and forest heritage. He shows us what can be read from the rocks of the great Canadian Shield; he offers a delightful essay on the virtues of pine knots as fuel; he writes of the ways of a canoe, of flashing trout in the pools of the Isabella, of tamarack bogs, caribou moss, the flight of wild geese, timber wolves, and the birds of the ski trails. And much more, with something to satisfy every taste for wilderness experience.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury -- a hundred of his best stories, selected by the author himself -- is the definitive collection of one of the greatest fantasists the world has ever known. Published in 1980, the volume contains stories selected from the first four decades of Bradbury's career. There are his unique stories of Mars, which later landed in The Martian Chronicles. There are nostalgic stories of Green Town, Illinois, which Bradbury later brewed into Dandelion Wine. The treasures here also include his regional tales of Ireland and of rural Mexico, classic science fiction such as "The Fog Horn," and the rarely reprinted novella "Frost and Fire." Among the half dozen previously uncollected stories are a few of his earliest--and most terrifying. These include the unforgettable "October Game" (which the author regards as perhaps his most shocking story amongst the thousand that he's written), and "Black Ferris," later to be transformed into the classic Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The American President has the smarts of an academic tome and the readability of a novel, full of interesting and little-known facts about the first 41 chief executives of the United States. (Bill Clinton was the 42nd president, but Grover Cleveland was elected president twice, before and after Benjamin Harrison, making him the 22nd and 24th president.) Something that sets the book apart from countless others on the presidents is its unique organization. The presidents are not presented in chronological order, but grouped instead according to characteristics that personified them and their presidencies. For example, Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson are brought together in a chapter on professional politicians, John Adams and Jimmy Carter share space for their "Independent Cast of Mind," and Theodore Roosevelt and Richard Nixon are noted for "Expanding Power."

In The Century, Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster write that “We have sought to distinguish our story from other histories by holding each chapter up to a litmus test: Have we looked at this time from the perspective of someone who lived through it? And in doing so, have we captured a sense not only of the events of a particular era, but of the mood, the prevailing attitudes?" Thus, the experiences of ordinary men and women come to life in sidebars that appear throughout The Century. Sharpe James, the mayor of Newark, New Jersey, recalls the sense of excitement and possibility he felt when Jackie Robinson became the first black ballplayer in the major leagues. Gilles Ryan remembers what it was like to be a high-school student in Dayton, Tennessee, during the Scopes Trial. And Connie Chang talks about emigrating to the United States from Korea and establishing a liquor store in Los Angeles, only to have it destroyed in the civil unrest.