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HomeShop at BookSurgeHistoryModernGeneralFrom a Solitary Room: Stories and Essays |
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From this one wise man towards more... Jul 22, 2008
This book is a set of creative lectures and stories from the life of a retired Doctor -- his travels, his observations, his essays on life.
The book is roughly chronological, from a childhood in Red Wing, Minnesota, through his years travelling the world... with detours into art history, theology, and the wry observations of a percipient man looking at the sturm und drang of the modern world about him.
You have to laugh at an essay about the world's worst toilet. You wince when reading about the pains of travel, the worst smells and the greatest struggles. It is touching to read about some of war's greatest heroes, to live for awhile with the author and his youth, to see the life of a Mayo Clinic doctor as it expands from a small town on the Mississippi to encompass the world he travels within.
From a first cigarette to an essay on Michelangelo's David, from baseball and fishing with an Uncle to Paris and the Acropolis, this collection shows how far a kid from Minnesota can go in this crazy world. To travel during the 1950s in Europe must have been a wonderful thing; to bridge the World War II generation and the modern era is a fascinating span of time, one little commented on by essayists. Richard DeRemee remains throughout this book of wonderful essays the same open eyed kid from Red Wing, and wears his sophistication with wit and humility.
At one point, the author considers a theology of the resurrection that smacks the reader in the face like a glass of ice cold aquavit. I was gobsmacked, but not entirely convinced... the argument was enlivening in more than one sense.
In this small book there are stories, philosophical musings, there is music, there is laughter. The reader is moved to ponder their own life in the light of this man's time on earth. Alisdair MacIntyre once noted that the narrative of a person's life encompasses their moral universe, informs the choices they can and do make. This life of travel and laughter and learning is enjoyable, a set of stories that bridge a broad era within one man's life.
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