Between Panic and Desire

Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, "A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem," this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own. Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author's early lifethe Kennedy assassination, Nixon's resignation, watchingFather Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a fewshaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today's world for all who spent their formative years in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire,Between Panic and Desireunfolds in kaleidoscopic formsa coroner's report, a TV movie script, a Zen koanaptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America.

Dinty W. Moore is a professor and the director of the creative writing program at Ohio University. He is the author of several books, including The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction and The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still.