The Best of Pickering,Used

Praise for Sam Pickering:'Pickering has all of Thurber's humor, and he writes as well as E. B. White. He writes with passion, wit, and a strange personal note of selfmockery; he is humanely educated, wise, and capable of a wide range of stylistic effects.'Jay Parini'. . . he writes in the tradition of Montaigne hammering together a ramshackle affair of surprising nooks, crannies and additionsall under the same roof.'The Oxford American'Pickering has the natural essayist's intimate yet distanced take on the world that combines a devotion to particulars . . . with a nearindifference to the status and achievementmongering that marks modern life.'Publishers Weekly'Pickering writes with the sensitivity and craft of a poet, finding meaning in the commonplace and ordinary.'Library Journal'Pickering's genre is unique, but I'm not sure anyone else can write this stuff. I can live with that, as long as Pickering himself continues to wend through the forests, classrooms, airports, billiards championships, hometown parades, and his inner world of Tennessee gags and characters.'Hartford CourantHis writing is as unique and recognizable as the music of Mozart, the painting of Picasso, or the poetry of Dickinson. Yet most Americans likely know Sam Pickering, the University of Connecticut English professor, from the movie Dead Poets Society. In the film, Robin Williams plays an idiosyncratic instructorbased on Pickeringwho employs some overthetop teaching methods to keep his subjects fresh and his students learning.Fewer probably know that Pickering is the author of more than 16 books and nearly 200 articles, or that he's inspired thousands of university students to think in new ways. And, while Williams may have captured Pickering's madcap classroom antics, he didn't uncover the other side of the authorSam Pickering as one of our great American men of letters.The Best of Pickering amply demonstrates Pickering's amazing powers of perception, and gives us insight into the mind of a writer nearly obsessed with turning his back on the conventional trappings of American successa writer who seems to prefer lying squirrel'seyelevel next to a bed of daffodils in the spring or trespassing on someone else's property to pursue a jaunt through joepye weed and goldenrod. Indeed, Pickering's philosophy, at least on paper, may very well be 'Now is the only time.'If you haven't met Sam Pickering before, prepare to be surprised and delighted by these wry and sometimes selfdeprecating essays that are witty and elegant and concrete yet wander widely, and include Pickering's welltrod fictional Southern town of Carthage, Tennessee, full of strange goingson. This definitive collection of the best of Pickering is a must for Pickering fans and a fine introduction for the uninitiated to one of our greatest men of letters.