Jonah Raskin

Wild Lies

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Cast Out of Eden: The Untold Story of John Muir, Indigenous Peoples, and the American Wilderness by Robert Aquinas McNally. University of Nebraska Press May 1, 2024

“Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infected’ with ‘wild animals’ and ‘savage’ people.”  — Luther Standing Bear

Recent events in Gaza have animated current discussions about “genocide” and what it has meant and still does mean. Those who want to understand it might look back at the history of the frontier in America and on the life of John Muir who is so firmly lodged in California lore and legend that he seems as impregnable as El Capitan, the huge granite monolith in Yosemite National Park which Muir helped to create in 1890 and then aimed to protect with help from our jingoist big game hunter Theodore Roosevelt. Muir’s name is written all over the state of California: John Muir Wilderness, John Muir National Monument, John Muir National Monument, John Muir College, John Muir High School, and more.

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PTSD & Seth Lorinczi’s Psychedelic memoir, “Death Trip”

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I used drugs—marijuana, LSD and ecstasy—in the Sixties but I never thought of them as therapeutic. The author, Seth Lorinczi, and his new autobiographical book, Death Trip, A Post Holocaust Psychedelic Memoir, has opened my eyes as never before to the idea that psychedelics can help heal the trauma of the Holocaust. In Lorinczi’s telling of the story, psychedelics rescued him, psychological speaking, from the legacy of Fascism, World War II and the extermination of millions of Jews.

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Stuck and Moving (“Read Mosab Abu Toha’s Poetry & Go to War-torn Gaza”)

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I have been reading and writing poetry ever since I was a boy growing up in Huntington, Long Island, not far from where Walt Whitman was born and raised, and where he founded the newspaper, The Long Islander, which published my column on high school sports. At the age of 82, I still turn to poetry more often than to newspapers for news of the world, local, national and international. Recently, I read and reread the timely and (perhaps) timeless poems about Gaza in Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, published by City Lights.

That book appeared in print at about the same time that the author and members of his family, including his wife and children—and thousands of other Gazans—were detained by Israeli soldiers. Fortunately, Toha’s wife and children were released and allowed to travel to Egypt where the poet joined them, and then wrote and published an eye-opening account of his own harrowing arrest, incarceration, and interrogation. That narrative was published in January 2024 in The New Yorker. In a short time, it has alerted readers around the world to Toha’s poetry and to his own newsworthy story.

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San Francisco: City for Flâneurs

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San Francisco is made for walking and walkers, though surely not for all times of the day and especially at night when it can be dangerous to walk on a dark and unfamiliar street. I know. I walk two or three miles a day for exercise and to reach a corner store to shop for groceries or a local restaurant like Mixto which serves Peruvian food where I devour the seafood stew.

Walking is probably the most democratic form of travel. It doesn’t cost anything to walk, stroll, or saunter and it doesn’t lift you off the ground and make you higher than anyone else.

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