I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead is sort of an extended wake for its subject. There’s very little biographical narrative per se; instead, the book compiles a massive array of anecdotes, memories, and opinions from dozens upon dozens of the people who knew him, from engineers, girlfriends, and backing musicians to a fairly astounding variety of celebrities who spent time with Zevon.
The universe appears to have cheated Rupert Everett. By rights, he belongs to the Edwardian age, the gay with a capital “G” nineties, Oscar Wilde and the pursuit of beauty, art for arts sake, and to hell with propriety.
Sheep wallows eventually became sand traps and the first greens were nothing more than somewhat level overgrazed patches of grass that were often covered with the residue of the feeding rabbits.
What is heartening is that, as Professor Michael Vorenberg stresses in his essay, Lincoln’s thinking about race did evolve, especially during the war.
Flannery O’Connor was Catholic and Southern, and that combined with her genius produced a writer whose works have become something of a cottage industry.
He was a discoverer and an inventor, a physicist and a chemist, intensely focused on his own research and equally involved in disseminating rational awareness among the laity, a champion of scientific outlook and devoutly attached to organized religion.
Doug Peacock’s reputation frequently precedes him as does that of his late, larger-than-life friend and father figure Edward Abbey.
Although this is a sly, sidelong-glance kind of book that repeatedly takes you to a different place from where you thought you were headed, Rafi Zabor doesn’t keep the reader in suspense about its odd title.
McDonald’s memoir is very good because Professor McDonald writes for those of us who delight in history; he does not write for his colleagues.
This is a beautiful book. The author is a professor of English at Middlebury College whose writing has centered on our natural environment.
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