back from vacation

Spent last week in Florida enjoying some really good weather and pool time with the kids. Ate too much, didn’t get any fishing in and only went running once. But man did I do some reading. A few of the high points:

• “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (American History)” (David S. Reynolds) I took this out from the library. If you’ve got the time and inclination, it’s a great read. I’ll definitely be picking up Reynolds’ bio of Walk Whitman.
  
• “Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia” (Robert Greenfield) Courtesy of Cousin Bryan. I read this when I had brief windows of reading time. Great book about my favorite guitarist.
  
• Some links to longer articles that I read online:
• Late Bloomers - Why do we equate genius with precocity? By Malcom Gladwell at The New Yorker.
• What is Art For? A piece in Sunday’s NYTimes Magazine about Lewis Hyde, author of the amazing book The Gift. (Brush-with-fame: I sat across the table from Lewis last year at a symposium at Harvard, I wish I had known he was working on annotating Thoreau’s essays at the time.)
• The Child Trap - The Rise of Overparenting - A good meta-review of books that have come out recently on overparenting (or, spoiling kids). Worth a read.