American Writers (One Hundred Pages at a Time)

In this episode, I look at "Summary of the Rights of British America" by Thomas Jefferson. I also jump into the first half of "Notes on the State of Virginia". So let's begin exploring his political ideas as well as what his thoughts on science, nature, the "Columbian Exchange" and Native Americans.

Part two of my thoughts on "A Maze of Death" by Philip K. Dick. Things start to get dark quickly.

The autobiography of Thomas Jefferson was written in 1821 and covers his life from the 1760s to his return from Paris. It has some interesting things to say about his views of slavery, the French Revolution, and the writing of the "Declaration of Independence". We kick off a new series on American political writing with this interesting, if unessential work.

Now for the antithesis to "Galactic Pot-Healer". "A Maze of Death" by Philip K. Dick asks some of the same questions as GPH but comes to very different and bleaker answers. What to make of this?

In Philip K. Dick's final story from the 1960s, "The Electric Ant" we get a mixture of reality bending metaphysics and android anxt.

The conclusion of my thoughts on Philip K. Dick's greatest novel "Galactic Pot-Healer". We are coming to the end of this very long series on Dick's publications of the 1960s. Excited to move into the 1970s with "Maze of Death", the antithesis novel of GPH.

This podcast is the third in my series on "Galactic Pot-Healer" by Philip K. Dick. In this part of the novel, we explore the theme of entropy. What does it have to do with meaningful work?

Part 2 of my review of my favorite Philip K. Dick novel "Galactic Pot-healer". Joe Fernwright is guided by the Glimmung to a new life with an actual purpose.

We get to the end of Herman Melville's prose writing with our look at "Billy Budd", published in 1924. It is a great little novel on power, the law, and duty.

Let's raise Heldscalla! "Galactic Pot-Healer" is my favorite Philip K. Dick novel. Let me tell you why.

Part two of my review of "The Confidence Man" by Herman Melville. Maybe we will get the final answer to the age old question: should you trust your neighbor?

Part one of Herman Melville's exploration of America's market economy, "The Confidence Man." Can the economy work without confidence and charity? We will explore these and other questions in this review.

The quite bleak finale of "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick. It is not entirely clear what is going on as this novel closes. You will either love it or hate it, but in my view it does not ruin a fascinating novel.

Joe Chip, our story's hero, tries to make sense of a world in which everything decays and even technologies revert to earlier forms, in part three of our look a Philip K. Dick's "Ubik". Maybe the secret is that everyone is dead.

We finish up looking at Herman Melville's short fiction in this episode. Some great tales about class, family, and technology. These may not all be known as Melville's greatest works of short fiction, but they are mostly all entertaining and rich in meaning.

In this episode, I look at an assortment of Herman Melville's assorted short prose: some book reviews and short stories. Part one of a two part series on these uncollected works.

This is part two of my review of "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick. With an android bomb, the posthuman industrial spying plot winds down as we find our characters in a world of decay and entropy. We will struggle with them to find out footing.

The first part of my review of Philip K. Dick's "Ubik". This novel would have been great it if was just about industrial espionage and post-humanism, which is what we think we are getting in the beginning of the story.

"Not By Its Cover" by Philip K. Dick looks at religious texts, preservation, reproduction and authenticity. It is a nice story that is firmly in Dick's period of religious speculation, but it may be more significant for what it says about knowledge preservation in a digital age.

This episode is the second in my review of Herman Melville's "The Piazza Tales". Two of these stories are quite strange, but "The Encantadas" is a brilliant quasi-historical account of the changing Pacific. Read it!

Poor Deckard. Doomed to be kipple, but maybe he can find some meaning in an electronic frog. Let's read the final chapters of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" and move onto a book with a much shorter title.

We reach the climax of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". How will Deckard do his job when he realizes that he has developed empathy for androids?

A few of Melville's most famous tales are "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby the Scrivener". They make up the first half of the collection, "The Piazza Tales". Lots to discuss in these important works.

In this part of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" our bounty hunter Deckard runs into a fake police station and learns something important about himself. 

Part two of my review of Herman Melville's "Israel Potter", in which we experience most of his 50 years of exile.