Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday January 31, 2011
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UNLESS IT MOVES THE HUMAN HEART: The Craft and Art of Writing
Roger Rosenblatt
Ecco
ISBN 978-0061965616
155 pages
$13.99
Reviewed by Yvonne Zipp
Making your living with words has become a precarious profession. The second-biggest bookstore chain in the United States can't pay its bills. Jobs for journalists are drying up faster than grape juice in a Sham-Wow. So students are fleeing creative-writing courses, right?
Nope. The number of creative-writing programs has increased by 800 percent since 1975, writes Roger Rosenblatt, author of "Unless It Moves the Human Heart." (The title is florid; the rest of the book is not.) "So here we go again -- another writing class. ... All over America, students ranging in age from their early twenties to their eighties hunker down at seminar tables ... avid to join a profession that practically guarantees them rejection, poverty, and failure."
For those eager to embark on their own journey of downward mobility, "Unless It Moves the Human Heart" is right up there with Natalie Goldberg's "Writing Down the Bones," although less Zen, and Anne Lamott's "Bird by Bird," although less confessional.
It takes the form of a memoir that recreates classes in which Rosenblatt and his students tried to answer the question, Why write?
Rosenblatt sees something heroic and defiant in his students, from 22-year-old Jasmine, who believes that John Donne is overrated, to 59-year-old George, a limousine driver "cursed with an enormous vocabulary." And while acknowledging "the childish romanticism" of the writer, he still believes in the craft's inherent nobility. "I have never known a great writer who did not believe in decency and right action," he writes, "however earnestly he or his characters strayed from it."
If it takes an act of faith to want to be a writer, how much more must it require to teach, as Rosenblatt has done for 40 years. The Stony Brook University professor has won an Emmy, a Peabody and two Polk Awards, and his books include both fiction and nonfiction bestsellers. So he's more than qualified to teach "Writing Everything," the course described here.
The book is filled with humor and practical advice -- not all of it from Rosenblatt. One of his students gave me a new insight:
"So in effect you begin a short story by saying, 'We've come to this.'" Rosenblatt quotes poet Tom Lux, who calls poetry "mixed feelings expressed clearly."
Rosenblatt believes in thinking big and writing small. "I believe in spare writing. Precise and restrained writing. I like short sentences. Fragmented sentences, sometimes." His students joke that his course more properly could be called Writing Everything Like Him. As readers of his poignant memoir "Making Toast" (2010) can attest, one could do worse.
As he says in the beginning, Rosenblatt can't make his students professional writers. But he can teach them -- and anyone reading this book -- to write better.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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SUPER RICH: A Guide to Having it All
Russell Simmons with Chris Morrow
Gotham
ISBN 978-1592405879
197 pages
$22.50
Reviewed by Dan Charnas
The transformation of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons from the recreational drug-using, model-chasing manager of seminal 1980s rap artists Run-DMC, LL Cool J and Will Smith into a serene 21st-century prophet of veganism and meditation may be surreal, but it's also quite real. Even in his dark days of excess, Simmons had a lot of light around him. As 1990s entrepreneurs like Suge Knight made the rap business virtually synonymous with invective and violence, Simmons stood above them as a relative paragon of virtue, achieving unmatched success with humor and hustle rather than brutality. As he matured and embraced his holistic lifestyle, Simmons became "Uncle Rush," purveyor of hip-hop brands but also philanthropist and father-figure.
Simmons takes his mentoring role seriously. In 2007, he wrote his first self-help book, a go-get-'em career primer called "Do You." Now, he issues his follow-up, "Super Rich," a slim, succinct and sagacious volume about the true meaning of wealth (spoiler alert: It ain't about the money).
While Americans easily welcome advice from wealthy men, could anything be more obnoxious than a rich guy telling the aspiring masses, as Simmons does, that "there's no difference between being broke and being a millionaire"? But Simmons knows this and spends the first passages of "Super Rich" front-loading his explanation: There's nothing shameful in enjoying the worldly fruits of your labor, he argues. But it's the labor, and not its fruits, that brings happiness.
This isn't some spiritual sleight-of-hand or mystical mumbo-jumbo. Simmons may be a multi-millionaire, but his real love hasnever been the dough; it has always been his work, which in his life has always seemed more like the yogic concept of "leela," or divine play. In "Super Rich," the philosophy is sound -- articulated in simple prose with assistance from journalist Chris Morrow, but filled with anecdotes, humor and raw language that are unmistakably Simmons'.
Simmons reworks the "Bhagavad Gita" as if Arjuna and Lord Krishna were two guys from his neighborhood in Hollis, Queens. These moments might read like blasphemy, but they sit atop a foundation of real knowledge and practice. Simmons does more than talk: He teaches, providing meditation tools for the reader to put his concepts into action.
Hip-hop and spirituality might seem to have little in common. But like yogic philosophy, hip-hop is all about the power of vibration, the power of the word. In "Super Rich," Simmons emerges as the first influential voice to make that connection for a new generation.
Charnas, author of "The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop," is a certified Kundalini Yoga instructor.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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