Curtis White – författare

Trained relentlessly to work and consume, we make daily lifestyle decisions that promote corporate profits more than our own well-being. We also find ourselves working more, living in fragmented communities, and neglecting our most basic spiritual and political values. As Curtis White puts it, “In order to live, you will be asked to do what is no good, what is absurd, trivial, demeaning, and soul killing.” Although we belong to the world’s most affluent society, somehow we never have the chance to ask: How shall we live?With his trademark humor and acerbic wit, White raises this impertinent question. He also debunks the conventional view that liberalism can answer it without drawing on spiritual values. Surveying American popular culture (including Office Space and The Da Vinci Code) to illustrate his points, White urges us to renew our commitment to “human fundamentals” as articulated by Henry David Thoreau-especially free time, home, and food-and to reclaim Thoreau’s spirit of disobedience.Seeking imaginative answers to his central questions, White also interviews John De Graaf (Affluenza), James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency) and Michael Ableman (Fields of Plenty) about their views of the good life in our time.

Smart, funny, and fresh, The Barbaric Heart argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by the same forms of crony capitalism and managerial technocracy that created the crisis in the first place. With his trademark wit, White argues that the solution might very well come from an unexpected quarter: the arts, religion, and the realm of the moral imagination.

Smart, funny, and fresh, The Barbaric Heart argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by the same forms of crony capitalism and managerial technocracy that created the crisis in the first place. With his trademark wit, White argues that the solution might very well come from an unexpected quarter: the arts, religion, and the realm of the moral imagination.

Smart, funny, and fresh, The Barbaric Heart argues that the present environmental crisis will not be resolved by the same forms of crony capitalism and managerial technocracy that created the crisis in the first place. With his trademark wit, White argues that the solution might very well come from an unexpected quarter: the arts, religion, and the realm of the moral imagination.

"Memories of My Father Watching TV" has as its protagonists television shows, around which the personalities of family members are shaped. The shows have a life of their own and become the arena of shared experience. And in Curtis White's hands, they become a son's projections of what he wants for himself and his father through characters in "Combat, " "Highway Patrol, " "Bonanza, " and other television shows (and one movie) from the 1950s and '60s. Comic in many ways, "Memories" is finally a sad lament of father-son relationship that is painful and tortured, displayed against a background of what they most shared, the watching of television, the universal American experience.

In Monstrous Possibility Curtis White creates a lucid perspective on what it means to be a writer and a human being in the so-called post-modern moment.

Filled with many compelling, outrageous, and comic voices, White's novel is disturbing, charming, and biting. Curtis White's new novel begins with Mann's "unassuming young man," Hans Castorp, visiting his cousin at a health retreat. In this book, though, the retreat is a spa for recovering alcoholics, totally unlike all other rehab centres. Rather than encouraging their patients to free themselves from addiction, the directors of The Elixir believe that sobriety isn't for everyone, that you must let alcohol work its way on you. It is about a weird and unlikely world that, nevertheless, is quite recognisable as our own.

Requiem is a darkly comic novel about what it means to be human in a culture obsessed with sex and death. With a structure loosely based on the Mass for the Dead, this ambitious novel includes letters-to-the-editor, an e-mail correspondence with a porn queen, scenes from the lives of classical musicians, and retellings of biblical stories. In the process, White charts the rise and fall of the Human from the Bible (pre-human), to the Enlightenment (the invention of the human), to the digital age (post-human). In an America where everyone keeps a secret website, and where a modern Prophet can only weep at the stories he hears, Requiem reveals our past, present and future with wit, sadness, and complete honesty.