About the Book
"Insouciant" and "irreverent" are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore's books-and, invariably, "hilarious." Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, "A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem," this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own. Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author's early life-the Kennedy assassination, Nixon's resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few-shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today's world for all of us who spent our formative years in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms-a coroner's report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan-aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Between Panic and Desire
Part One. Panic
1. Introduction: Hello, My Name Is _______
2. Son of Mr. Green Jeans: A Meditation on Missing Fathers
3. Double Vision
4. Son of Richard M. Nixon
5. Three Bad Trips, 1968-77
6. Questions and Activities before Continuing
Part Two. Paranoia
7. Introduction: Imagine That
8. Baseball, Hot Dogs, Mescaline, and Chevrolet
9. Number Nine
10. 1984
11. Questions and Activities before Continuing
Part Three. Desire
12. Introduction: Why Oprah Doesn't Call
13. Son of George McManus
14. Three Milestones
15. Leonard Koan
16. Son of a Bush
17. Three Days in September
18. What You Want, What You Get, What You Need: A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem
19. "Curtis Knows Best": Towering, Permanent, Perilous, and Soon to be Televised on a Widescreen Near You
20. The Final Chapter
Index
About the Author
About the Author :
Dinty W. Moore is a professor of English at Ohio University and the author of several books, including Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, and The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still.
Review :
"Hear that? That is the sweet sonic boom of the Baby Boom barrier being broken by this elegant flight of essays launched from the steely hand of Captain Dinty W. Moore in his remarkable memoir "Between Panic and Desire". Impossible, they said, to reveal this precisely that sense of time, place, and even space. Listen: Read, read, read. Words away! That's it. Exactly. Like that."---Michael Martone, author of "Michael Martone: Fictions" "Dinty W. Moore's prose is crisp and clean, his insights sparkle with biting clarity and magnetic charm. This is an unusual, joyful and compelling memoir."---Lee Gutkind, author of "Almost Human: Making Robots Think" and editor of "Creative Nonfiction" "This is a refreshing and invigorating book, taking the predictable memoir form in new directions---playfully, sincerely, and intelligently. This is a terrific book."---Bret Lott, author of "Jewel"
