Archive of Essays & Reviews Archives - DON SILVER, Author

Jung, My Mother and Me

on June 9th, 2012 in Essays & Reviews by | Comments Off on Jung, My Mother and Me

My father was a terrible photographer. It was more a problem of intonation or intention than of technique. He could frame a shot and get the background and the lighting right, but it was like he was tone deaf with images, forever capturing people with mayonnaise on their faces, pursing…

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Transition Towns & Future Search

on April 19th, 2009 in Essays & Reviews by | Comments Off on Transition Towns & Future Search

In the late 1980s, Marv Weisbord, a pioneer in the field of organizational development began to develop from group psychology theories and his experience in business a process or technology for bringing disparate, often contentious groups together to act in coordination toward loftier, often previously obscured objectives. Marv and his…

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Robert H. Silver, 1934 – 2007

on May 9th, 2007 in Essays & Reviews by | 2 Comments

My dad passed away on Saturday, May 5, 2007. This is what I read to my kids, my niece and nephew: There are so many things I could tell people about your grandfather. So many things that were unique and interesting and special about him, so many things that drew…

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Stuck in Arizona with the Memphis Blues Again

on February 14th, 2007 in Essays & Reviews by | Comments Off on Stuck in Arizona with the Memphis Blues Again

Actually, it beats being home in Philadelphia being pelted with ice. UsAirways decided to dissuade passengers from flying east yesterday by offering to change reservations for free, so I moved my return to Friday and drove up to Sedona, land of red rocks, spas, restaurants and cheerful tourists. What an…

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An Inconvenient Truth

on January 22nd, 2007 in Essays & Reviews by | Comments Off on An Inconvenient Truth

Kudos to Al Gore for making an accessible and passionate presentation of what’s happening to our planet and for dropping the petulant, whiny flatness that characterized his campaign for the presidency, but he leaves out one very large fact that is really just too depressing to think about: The population…

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Sometimes A Man Stands Up During Supper

on December 16th, 2006 in Essays & Reviews by | Comments Off on Sometimes A Man Stands Up During Supper

Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And other man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes…

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Reflections on Bush and the American Character

on October 31st, 2006 in Essays & Reviews by | Comments Off on Reflections on Bush and the American Character

Last summer, at dinner, my dad, who’s 72, said that this administration will soon be viewed as the worst in a hundred years of American history. He described watching in a kind of mystified horror as Bush led our country and the world backwards in foreign, economic, and social policies,…

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Mark Twain on God

on September 25th, 2006 in Essays & Reviews by | Comments Off on Mark Twain on God

“It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God. However, when after much puzzling you get at the key to his disposition, you do at last arrive at a sort of understanding of it. With a most quaint and juvenile and astonishing frankness he has furnished that…

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Mansion of Gloom: Growing up with Poe

on September 15th, 2006 in Essays & Reviews by | Comments Off on Mansion of Gloom: Growing up with Poe

Poe was the first writer to take me seriously as a reader. Before him, it was the Hardy Boys, a predictable series about pre-adolescent brothers who helped their parents and local officials solve crimes; books about sports – The Lucky Baseball Bat, my favorite for an entire school year; and…

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Springsteen and Ritter: Something Good (finally) About America

on April 25th, 2006 in Essays & Reviews by | 1 Comment

A bit of happy flew into my life this week in the form of the new Josh Ritter album, Animal Years, and the new Bruce Springsteen album of Pete Seeger and Seeger-related tunes, We Shall Overcome. In his, Springsteen is working with an old-timey band with New Orelans style horns,…

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