Points of Light

Most of the essays in this book first appeared as newspaper columns and differ from the originals only in minor, editorial ways. The real challenge for me, used as I was to academic and fiction writing, was the necessary brevity of the essays. The discipline of having to compress my ideas into a finite word count troubled me at first. Later, however, I was grateful for the experience because it forced me to get to the point and stay strictly on task. Instead of grumbling, I came to relish t...