Kirjahaku

It's in August of 1969 that Michael Dugan, still in his late 20s and bedecked with laurels and degrees, has an encounter that changes his life. Though he's come home jauntily thinking he knows a lot, he doesn't yet know what he doesn't know about war, race, love, and himself-which are things he's going to learn in the course of what several who knew him back then would probably have called "the belated education of a white southern liberal male." Two women assist and preside over that painfully ludicrous process, one of whom summons it up nearly a half-century later. . . after Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize (he's the source of the novel's title along with a good deal else)." Ben Dunlap, introduced for his 2007 TED Talk as "a master storyteller," has been a writer, teacher, dancer, and television producer, as well as a Rhodes Scholar. This is his first novel, Number 4 in The Divers Collection. The cover art is based on a painting by Jack Freeman.

Doolittle, thou shouldst be living at this hour Geniuses appear in every species because that's how evolution works. But how would we know if an Einstein among calves turned up on a ranch in Abilene or a Mozart among squabs in Central Park? Sunshine Bell: The Autobiography of a Genius is the story of a uniquely gifted hen and two young boys in Chapel Hill who furnish her with a means of communicating-with them at first and now with us in this witty and useful edition. Readers of every age and any taxonomy will thrill at Sunshine's many close calls and find that sharing her wise and radiant view of the world is like stepping into a vast and glittering work by Faberg . This book is number 6 in the Divers Collection. Cover art by Helen Berggruen.

Though born, as Ben Dunlap confesses, with one foot on the accelerator while fumbling about for the brakes, he deftly steers his way through this exuberant, self-effacing, and often wildly comical account of the first half of his collision-prone career. One of his constant themes is how mistaken it always is to count anybody out, with striking examples drawn from his own experience, including little-known heroes as well as one or two who may have saved his life.It'll be a rare reader who's not charmed and amused by the variety and depth of these reminiscences or by the portraits they contain, not least of the author himself who, as an only slightly savvier 20th-century Candide, has often been described as "a walking contradiction"-though with all due apologies to Kris Kristofferson, who makes several appearances in the book, nothing that Dunlap recounts is "partly fiction." All of it is true.In addition to youthful stints as a poulterer, taxidermist, bus driver, biker, beatnik, and part of a saber drill team whose Fifth Avenue debacle was witnessed coast-to-coast, Dunlap has also been a successful author, teacher, actor, dancer, and college president as well as a Rhodes Scholar, a Harvard professor, an Emmy-nominated writer-producer-presenter for PBS, a longtime Aspen Institute Senior Moderator, and the recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees. He currently lives more or less sedately in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in Western North Carolina.