Not bad. The only one of these essays I really didn't care for was Allan Ginsberg's. It simply made no sense to me. I had no idea what point he was trying to make as he connected all different kinds of things. ( )

One of the four Zinsser-curated anthologies arising from lectures given at the New York Public Library. Once again, Zinsser asked his chosen speakers to discuss not so much the "how-to" as the "how I did". The result in this collection was for me a mixed bag. One of my favorite writers, Frederick Buechner, delivered a variation of his recurrent theme, the uniqueness and (as unlikely as it sometimes seems) godliness of each of our lives. Many of the other writers were new to me, I'm eager to read books by two of them, Patrica Hampl and Diane Ackerman. Two of the essays didn't exactly fulfil the assignment. In one case, this resulted in a very interesting look at three classics of spiritual autobiography (Augustine, Boethius, and John Henry Newman) by Jaroslav Pelikan; I felt this was valid, since these three authors are no longer around to speak for themselves. Don't know quite what to make of the other, by Allen Ginsburg. Rather than discuss the spiritual roots of his own work, he gave an erudite lecture on how the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness coincides with attention to the object itself in many streams of twentieth-century poetry. I would have preferred if he had spoken more personally. ( )