Four in the Morning

Product Details

A former New Yorker, hippie and newspaper reporter, Safransky moved to North Carolina and founded the Sun, a thoughtful monthly magazine. This collection of 30 essays written over 10 years, each composed before dawn, shows a graceful writer struggling to live an ethical life, though he is hardly free of ambitions, fears and needs. Safransky writes how, under the spell of Carlos Castaneda's Don Juan and filled with a desire to rid himself of an unhappy past, he once burned his scrapbooks and writings; now, in retrospect, he sees that act as "less like an act of liberation than of oppression." Safransky takes pleasure in pornography, which he first discovered tucked away in his father's closet; part civil libertarian, part self-loathing male, he suggests most people's sexual imaginations are "a little haunted." Still struggling with his appetite and memories of his fat youth, the author lacerates himself not for his extra weight but for his self-hatred over that weight. While Safransky's New Age politics sometimes grow woozy--he chooses to blame greed on individuals rather than institutions--he is mostly a worthy companion.

Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.