Life at the Top of the Bottom is a collection of Fifty mini-essays which are pleasant to read cunningly composed to tease larger meaning out of small events they are also lucidly written and can help the reader to perfect the idiom. These essays were written during the Reagan years when Americans were assured by their leaders that competition and consumption were the crucial virtues of the citizen, that a sense of cooperation and mutual dependency was a sign of foolish nostalgia for a discredited liberalism. Twichell, the main character in the book , focuses his attention less on the entrepreneurs who try to dress their greed with the ribbons of patriotism than on those who try to escape the problems of the moment through dreams of an idealized future or an unfallen Edenic past. The would-be traveler can look to this slim volume as a useful guide and map to the cultural complexities of the aging New World. Although America is not destined, in my view, to be the leading country in the years to come, it will still play, nonetheless, an important role; and, more than Japan, it will offer a model, in many areas, for emerging countries, such as China and India, where huge potentials for individual energy — guided by the individual imagination — wait to be released.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Howard Wolf
Dr. Howard Wolf, (b.1936) Professor of American and English Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo, U.S.A., is the co-author (with Roger Porter) of the Voice within: Reading and Writing Autobiography (1973); and the author of Forgive The Father : A Memoir of Changing Generations (1978); Upper Manhattan : A Family Album -- poems (1990); A Version of Home : Letters from the Worlds (1992) and This is India : Recording Reality Itself (1992). Wolf has published more than 175 literary and cultural essays, short stories, poems and social commentaries. He is a distinguished member of the PEN International (American Centre) and has been a fellow of both, the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Centre for the Arts. In 1998, Professor Wolf visited India for the first time where he participated in the American Civilization Course at American Studies Research Centre (ASRC), Hyderabad. He returned in 1990 as an ' American Participant ' under the auspices of the USIS and gave lectures in eight Indian Cities : Chennai, Calicut, Trivandrum, Berhampur, Bhubaneshwar, Calcutta, Hyderabad and Delhi. All of Professor Wolf's books deal, in one way or another , with what he calls " the autobiographical impulses in American Life. " He is interested in the value and use of personal writing and believes that this idiom and genre, which has deep roots in the consonant with democratic ideals of a world-wide nature. Another forthcoming book of Howard Wolf is : Essays on Crisis of Humanism in Contemporary Culture.
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