<DIV>In the tradition of essayists like Montaigne and Emerson, Gerald Stern reflects, with wit, pathos, rage, and tenderness, on eighty-five years of life, much of it spent engaged with literature and learning?as a major American poet, a longtime teacher at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, an insatiably broad reader, and a devoted friend to artists and writers. <br><BR>In seventy short, intermingling essays Stern moves nimbly between the past and the present, the personal and the philosophical. Creating the immediacy of dailiness, he writes with entertaining engagement about what he's reading at the moment, be it Spinoza, Maimonides, John Cage, Etheridge Knight, James Schuyler, or Lucille Clifton, and then seamlessly turns to memories of his student years in Europe on the G.I. Bill, or early family life in Pittsburgh, or his political and social action. Stern meditates on the lamb in Christianity and Judaism. He elegizes the dragonfly that kept disappearing and reappearing inside his car. He examines the comedy of the Marx Brothers and the idea of adultery in Noel Coward.<BR><BR>Interwoven with his formidable recollections (Stern, it would seem, forgets nothing) are the author's passionate discussions of his lifelong obsessions: his strong but conflicted identity as a Jew who is secular and opposed to Israel's Palestinian policy; the idea of neighbors in various forms?from the women of Gee's Bend who together made beautiful quilts to the Polish inhabitants of the small town of Jedwabne, who on a single day in 1941 slaughtered three hundred Jews; and issues of justice in its myriad forms. <br><BR>Stern accomplishes a magnificent outpouring?a last testament like Villon's (whom he evokes often) with the pacing of Tony Judt's last book, The Memory Chalet. Revealing a writer engaged with justice, imagination, memory, and witness, and written in Stern's signature, associative style, this work is a significant literary achievement by one of our most celebrated and beloved poets.<BR></DIV>