The Correspondence

"Can civilization save us from ourselves? That is the question J.D. Daniels asks in his first book, a series of six letters written during dark nights of the soul. Working from his own highly varied experience--as a janitor, a night watchman, an adjunct professor, a drunk, an exterminator, a dutiful son--he considers how far books and learning and psychoanalysis can get us, and how much we're stuck in the mud. In prose wound as tight as a copper spring, Daniels takes us from the highways of his native Kentucky to the Balearic Islands and from the Pampas of Brazil to the rarefied precincts of Cambridge, Massachusetts"--