Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

For nearly ten years John Griswold has been publishing his essays in Inside Higher Ed, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Brevity, Ninth Letter, and Adjunct Advocate, many under the pen name Oronte Churm. Churm's topics have ranged widely, exploring themes such as the writing life and the utility of creative-writing classes, race issues in a university town, and the beautiful, protective crocodiles that lie patiently waiting in the minds of fathers. Though Griswold recently entered the tenure stream, much of his experience, at a Big Ten university, has been as an adjunct lecturer--that tenuous and uncertain position so many now occupy in higher education. In Pirates You Don't Know, Griswold writes poignantly and hilariously about the contingent nature of this life, tying it to his birth in the last American enclave in Saigon during the Vietnam War, his upbringing in a coal town in southern Illinois, and his experience as an army deep-sea diver and frogman. He investigates class in America through four generations of his family and portrays the continuing joys and challenges of fatherhood while making a living, becoming literate, and staying open to the world. But Griswold's central concerns apply to everyone: What does it mean to be educated? What does it mean to think, feel, create, and be whole? What is the point of this particular journey? Pirates You Don't Know is Griswold's vital attempt at making sense of his life as a writer and now professor. The answers for him are both comic and profound: "Picture Long John Silver at the end of the movie, his dory filled with stolen gold, rowing and sinking; rowing, sinking, and gloating."

Literature & Fiction

Griswold, John

Essays & Correspondence

University of Georgia Press

Review\nThe Age of Clear Profit is an essay collection that coalesces into an artifact of compassion, clear-eyed analysis, humility, and willingness to journey with open eyes and an open heart. It is an indictment of prevalent elements of political and cultural America and a chronicling that draws from multiple threads of understanding, experience, and perspective to weave a narrative of wisdom and living insight. -- Aurelie J. Sheehan ― author of Once into the Night\nAcutely aware of the postindustrial landscape and the whitewashed distortion of American history, John Griswold sees beaches defaced by strip malls, the murky sky above the tree line, the dirty river next to the Serta factory, which happens to be where Emmett Till was tortured, executed. Details become stark metaphors. These dark, dispassionate dispatches from 'the green flash at the end of the world' are nearly anthropological. A chilling, necessary book, a tonic for blighted times. -- Debra Monroe ― author of It Takes a Worried Woman\nJohn Griswold has a wonderful eye, an acute ear, and an unerring appreciation for the ways we are simultaneously hopeful and absurd, or maybe how it is our hopes that make us absurd. The essays in The Age of Clear Profit are funny, sharp-elbowed, and wise, a series of indictments of a world that allows madness to reign by a writer who nonetheless never loses touch with his (and our) essential humanity. -- John Warner, editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency\nAt age fifty, when many hope to slow down, and what’s left, as the poet Kobayashi Issa once wrote, is “clear profit,” John Griswold was starting over―-again―-in a position he had worked decades to achieve. His family moved down the Mississippi Valley, expecting to create a good life with new friends.\nWhat they found instead was a society “organized tightly by race, church attendance, and family name,” which in its corruption, laissez-faire corporatism, gun love, and environmental degradation foretold the heightened problems of the United States in an era of deepening political division.\nTaking his cue from classical Asian poets such as Basho, Griswold begins to journey, to gain perspective, and to find his own narrow road. He travels around the rim of the Gulf of Mexico and to writers’ homes in Russia and New Mexico; attends the protests at Standing Rock; walks the Basho Trail in Japan; and reports on the wholesale slaughter of a Texas rattlesnake roundup and the cruel weirdness of the Angola Prison Rodeo.\nOver eight years, Griswold bears witness, pays homage, and finds he is able to define and speak with gratitude about what is most important to him: his children, wholeheartedness, and the act of trying. In the gap between complexity and a little peace and quiet, there is a way to profit anew.

The Age of Clear Profit: Essays on Home and the Narrow Road (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

This is the old edition of 'Ian Fleming’s James Bond: Annotations and Chronologies for Ian Fleming’s Bond Stories' which has gone out of print. 
The new edition has illustrations by George Almond, an additional Foreword by Raymond Benson, clearer translations of foreign terms, and new information such as: definitive, detailed information about the origin of Scaramanga name. IMPORTANT: The new edition has the date June 2006

Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations And Chronologies For Ian Fleming's Bond Stories

Contemporary

AuthorHouse

Herrin, Illinois, has seen many dramatic events unfold in the nearly two hundred years since it was a bell-shaped prairie on the frontier. Now, Herrin native John Griswold, a writer and teacher at the University of Illinois, provides the first comprehensive history of this most American city, a place that in its time became not just a melting pot, but a cauldron. Discover why the coal was so good in the Quality Circle and what happened to the boom that followed its discovery. Explore the roots of the vicious Herrin Massacre of 1922 and learn why the entire nation has focused its gaze on this small Midwestern city so many times. Incorporating the most recent scholarship, interviews, and classic histories and narratives, this brief and entertaining history is illustrated with more than seventy-five archival photos that help tell this important American story."

Herrin: The Brief History of an Infamous American City

History

Americas

History Press Library Editions

Herrin, Illinois, has seen many dramatic events unfold in the nearly two hundred years since it was a bell-shaped prairie on the frontier. Now, Herrin native John Griswold, a writer and teacher at the University of Illinois, provides the first comprehensive history of this most American city, a place that in its time became not just a melting pot, but a cauldron. Discover why the coal was so good in the “Quality Circle” and what happened to the boom that followed its discovery. Explore the roots of the vicious Herrin Massacre of 1922 and learn why the entire nation has focused its gaze on this small Midwestern city so many times. Incorporating the most recent scholarship, interviews, and classic histories and narratives, this brief and entertaining history is illustrated with more than seventy-five archival photos that help tell this important American story.

Arts & Photography

Photography & Video

The History Press

A Democracy of Ghosts is a love story of four couples, set against the backdrop of the real-life Herrin Massacre of 1922. This clash of miners and strikebreakers in Bloody Williamson County, in Southern Illinois, resulted in the deaths of 21 men -- 19 of them the "scabs" tortured and murdered by average men, women, and even children in what was once the most radical community in America. John Griswold has drawn from contemporary eyewitnesses and news accounts, an ethnography of the area, histories, and his own grandfather's letters to create the lives of four fictional couples whose ambitions, self-doubts, and social and sexual jealousies contribute to this great American violence that still echoes down through time.

A Democracy of Ghosts

Literary

Wordcraft

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Griswold, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Griswold, John

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Griswold, John. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

The Age of Clear Profit: Essays on Home and the Narrow Road (Crux: The Georgia Series in Literary Nonfiction)

Ian Fleming's James Bond: Annotations And Chronologies For Ian Fleming's Bond Stories

Herrin: The Brief History of an Infamous American City

Herrin: The Brief History of an Infamous American City

A Democracy of Ghosts