Overview

Margaret Randall, the author, editor, and translator of nearly 200 books, turns her mind to the process of thinking - the purpose of which is to engage in the act of curiosity, inquiry, and examination. What results is an intimate, keen, and far-ranging collection of exploration from one of the great minds of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These thirty-one pieces range from current political events to the history of communication, from deciphering the Maya code to a childhood admiration of Elizabeth Taylor, from Alan Turing to the New York City subway maps. And each one concerns itself more with the act of thinking than reaching conclusions, engaging readers with their own ability to think.

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9781735151649

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Reviews

Discerning and deeply humane, these essays from international award-winning poet, activist, author Margaret Randall are gems of wisdom, originality, and vision, challenging us to rethink the very process of thought itself. Distilled with age and her wide-ranging art and activism over the course of eight decades, these pieces are quintessential Randall: profound, moving, unforgettable. - Minrose Gwin, author of The Accidentals In Thinking about Thinking, Margaret Randall's brilliant mind takes us on a journey of exploration of the personal: identity, vulnerability, purpose, and of the social/political (which of course is personal): revolution, food, art, technology. From the personal 'Becoming Elizabeth Taylor' to the provocative 'Preserving Racism or Preserving History?' to the expansive, research-based 'Breaking the Maya Code: Creativity across Continents and Time, ' to the exquisite love letter to her wife Barbara, 'Silliness Genes, ' the thirty-one essays will school you, challenge you, tickle you, entertain you, and give you hope. Grateful to take this journey with someone so deeply committed to speaking her truth, in the service of setting herself, and others, free. - Olga Talamante, community activist and Executive Director Emerita of the Chicana Latina Foundation Margaret Randall's Thinking about Thinking takes us into the mind of one of the most courageous and nuanced political and cultural thinkers of our era. That she is also one of the world's greatest living poets gives the language of these exquisite essays a precision and grace not found in most philosophic writing. Those of us discouraged by modern philosophy's linguistic and logical reductionism will find Randall's essays to be inspiring thought-expeditions into realms of conscience, contradiction, and meaning. They stimulate us to explore the roots of our own thought processes, take notice of the exceptions we have to our own positions, and think with greater confidence and deeper curiosity about our own ways of making sense of the world. Randall's 'mind wanderings, ' as she calls them, are directed at finding the truth and how she feels about it, the truth with all its subtle self-contradictions, its delicate shadings, and the emphatic resonance we feel when it finally reveals itself in a form we can comprehend. In Thinking about Thinking, Margaret Randall leads by example; she shows us with clarity and an anti-dogmatic openness-of-mind new ways to deal with the full spectrum of our reactions to the way life presents itself to our consciousness and ways of ordering our thoughts. Rarely is a book both beautiful and practical. Randall's is just that-a moving and revelatory exploration of some of the world's great conundrums, and a trail guide to how any one of us might move through the underbrush and into open spaces and new light. - V. B. Price, author of Innocence Regained and columnist at mercmessenger.com

Author Information

Margaret Randall is a feminist poet, essayist, oral historian, translator, teacher, and photographer with a long history of social activism in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and the United States. She is the author, translator, and editor of nearly two hundred books and cofounder of El Corno Emplumado/The Plumed Horn, a bilingual journal that published more than seven hundred writers from thirty-five countries. She fought deportation by the U.S. government, which claimed her writing subversive, and won her case. She has been recently awarded the Poet of Two Hemispheres Prize, the Haydee Santamaria medal, an honorary doctorate of letters from the University of New Mexico, the Democratic Project Paulo Freire Award, and the George Garrett Award. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her wife, the artist Barbara Byers.

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