San Antonio College Library

In this, his first new book of poems in seven years, Merrill is at the top of his form. His unrivalled poetic use of the private life is brilliantly evident. The stuff of autobiography is transfigured becoming a medium for the profoundest truth, couched in a language that draws on both rueful wit and elegant slang. From "Nine Lives," an Athenian fable, through "Volcanic Holiday," with its euphoric helicopter ride, to "Family Week at Oracle Ranch,"...

A More Perfect Union is the first book to offer a concise moral case for gay people's equal citizenship. Appealing to widely held American beliefs, Mohr grounds his argument for gay justice firmly in our most valued traditions of equality and freedom. Mohr explores gay rights from the most private to the most public: Should sex be protected by the right to privacy? What does marriage mean in today's society - and is there a case for legalizing marriage...

An account of the case when a senior editor of Time magazine named Wittaker Chambers shocked the country by alleging before the House Un-American Activities Committee that Alger Hiss, president of the venerated Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and previously a high State Department official, had served with him in the Communist underground.