Raritan Skiff Books – serie

In 2015, Ben Miller and the poet Anne Pierson Wiese moved from New York City to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to explore their midwestern roots and to focus on their writing careers. Working a day job in a hospital, Miller had a front-row seat to the COVID-19 pandemic as it moved from the coasts to the urban Midwest. Pandemonium Logs casts an unflinching eye on the state of the worker in the US health-care system during a global pandemic, giving voice to the doctors, nurses, support staff, patients, and families caught in the complex swirl of daily dilemmas and crucial choices. In unsparing yet sympathetic prose, Ben Miller creates an intimate portrait of the impact of COVID on the diverse people of South Dakota. Through a wide range of characters-from understandably confused patients to quietly competent nurses-he explores the human complexities of the crisis: a doctor based in Mumbai who treats critically ill patients in the Dakotas via a tenuous hodgepodge of telehealth apparatus, a Hydra of six workplace trainers who together cannot train one employee to do one job, a vice president of corporate hospitality who lives to rip down safety signs as fast as nurses post them, a ninety-year-old hospital volunteer who pushes wheelchairs containing patients half his age. In Pandemonium Logs, Miller provides precise and moving observations of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

In 2015, Ben Miller and the poet Anne Pierson Wiese moved from New York City to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to explore their midwestern roots and to focus on their writing careers. Working a day job in a hospital, Miller had a front-row seat to the COVID-19 pandemic as it moved from the coasts to the urban Midwest. Pandemonium Logs casts an unflinching eye on the state of the worker in the US health-care system during a global pandemic, giving voice to the doctors, nurses, support staff, patients, and families caught in the complex swirl of daily dilemmas and crucial choices. In unsparing yet sympathetic prose, Ben Miller creates an intimate portrait of the impact of COVID on the diverse people of South Dakota. Through a wide range of characters-from understandably confused patients to quietly competent nurses-he explores the human complexities of the crisis: a doctor based in Mumbai who treats critically ill patients in the Dakotas via a tenuous hodgepodge of telehealth apparatus, a Hydra of six workplace trainers who together cannot train one employee to do one job, a vice president of corporate hospitality who lives to rip down safety signs as fast as nurses post them, a ninety-year-old hospital volunteer who pushes wheelchairs containing patients half his age. In Pandemonium Logs, Miller provides precise and moving observations of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

We are, once again, a world at war. Geopolitical elites are deploying the implacable forces of ethnocentric hatred and religious nationalism; ordinary people are paying a fearful price. Not for the first time: this has been the characteristic pattern of war for more than a century. Every selection in this anthology (except for the timeless Aeneid) casts light on modern war, observed or directly experienced. Most are grounded in particular places-Stalingrad, Halberstadt, Budapest, Baghdad, Algiers, the Tamil ghost towns of Sri Lanka, the six-by-twelve-foot cell in Belmarsh maximum security prison where Julian Assange is held without bail for the act of revealing U.S. war crimes. Some recapture the actual look and feel of war-the sight of a seven-year-old girl clutching her mother's hand, dodging explosions in the Halberstadt public square; the sound of a Mozart concerto in D Minor, heard by a family hiding in a cave, played on their own piano by a Serbian sniper. Others take aim at the vast and vapid abstractions used to justify armed conflict, down to and including the use of nuclear weapons.Raritan on War collects some of the finest writing on that troubling subject published in Raritan Quarterly between 2003 and 2022. The editors, Jackson Lears and Karen Parker Lears, have selected work that typifies Raritan's wide-ranging sensibility, focusing on a topic that is aesthetically rich, intellectually challenging, and morally disturbing. Ultimately, Raritan on War reveals the power of art and reflection to sustain humane ways of being in the world, even amid constant global violence.Contributors: C. Felix Amerasinghe; Andrew J. Bacevich; Victoria De Grazia; Tamas Dobozy; David Ferry; M. Fortuna; Cai Guo-Qiang; Emma Dodge Hanson; Jochen Hellbeck; Karl Kirchwey; Ray Klimek; Peter LaBier; Patrick Lawrence; d. mark levitt; Michael Miller; Lyle Jeremy Rubin; Elizabeth D. Samet; Sherod Santos; Robert Westbrook