Ultra-Brief Reviews: Poetry / Multitasking [ Vol. 1, #47]

Ultra Brief Reviews – 12 December 2008

By Chris Smith

The poetry anthology, THE FOUR SEASONS, a part of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series, is one of the finest collections of poetry that I have seen this year.  It is a sturdy hardcover, perfectly sized to fit in a coat pocket, backpack or camera bag, and would make a great gift for the nature poet (or naturalist with poetic interests) in your life.  To paraphrase Liberty Hyde Bailey, how better to enjoy the wonderful seasonal nature poems of the ages (by poets ranging from Chaucer to Blake to Dickinson to Cummings) than to have a portable volume that you can take and enjoy outside in the weather of the season! 

Speaking of poetry, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Franz Wright’s volume God’s Silence was released in a paperback edition earlier this year.  These poems which topically run the gamut from sunflowers to writing to faith and faithlessness demonstrate why Wright is one of today’s finest poets.  There is a lovely earthiness here, as Wright struggles to comes to terms with the experiences of life and death and the ideologies (e.g., hell ) that we construct to help us process these common experiences.

I don’t read many business books, but the title of Dave Crenshaw’s The Myth of Multitasking: How ‘Doing it All’ Gets Nothing Done intrigued me and I requested a review copy.  This little book would be an excellent, very practical follow-up to Maggie Jackson’s DISTRACTED (reviewed in our issue #34).  Crenshaw crafts a direct, but somewhat hokey narrative to present his critique of multitasking.  This critique is grounded in the idea that we never actually multitask, but rather switchtask, and time-wise the switching costs between tasks are actually much greater than if we were able to maintain a singular focus on particular tasks in succession.   

In this review:

THE FOUR SEASONS

Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series

Hardcover: Knopf, 2008.

Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $10 ] [ Amazon ]

GOD’S SILENCE: POEMS

Franz Wright.

Paperback: Knopf, 2008.

Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $13 ] [ Amazon ]

THE MYTH OF MULTITASKING
Dave Crenshaw

Hardcover: Jossey-Bass, 2008

Buy now: [ Doulos Christou Books $16] [ Amazon ]

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