Bøker av Dan O'Brien

A collection of prose poems that chronicles the family life of two cancer survivors. Dan O'Brien's powerful companion to Our Cancers catalogs the recovery of a cancer survivor, whose wife has recently survived her own cancer, as he returns to his daily life while raising a young daughter. This prose-poem sequence is a true survivor's notebook, using photos and the tools of memoir to evoke how disaster can constellate our past, present, and future. In his poems, plays, and nonfiction, Dan O'Brien has explored, as he says in a 2023 interview, "how trauma shatters identity, and in its aftermath we reconfigure and rewrite, as it were, the story of who we were and are and maybe will be." In highly personal poems reminiscent of dramatic monologues, as well as shorter lyric fragments, the protagonist reconsiders the people and places he knew before his illness, including his estranged family and others with cancer. While looking back he moves forward again, resuming his career as a writer and teacher, revisiting Ireland, and making a kind of pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There is a confiding and at times comical tone in these poems as O'Brien awakens to the delights, absurdities, and wonders of existence, and as he and his wife work through the aftershocks of their trauma toward a deeper love. With text and image, Survivor's Notebook shows how we go on, with resilience, gratitude, and joy, when "the emergency's elsewhere" now.

"From Scarsdale is an evocative and lyrical memoir of a haunted childhood in Scarsdale, New York. With a cancer diagnosis in his early forties, the author is compelled to revisit and resolve the mystery of his family's sadness. The fourth of six children in an Irish-American household distinctly out-of-place in this affluent suburb of New York City, O'Brien grows up in a claustrophobic milieu of secrecy, lies, and mental illness. The turning point in his maturation is an older brother's attempted suicide - an event he witnesses firsthand. From Scarsdale traces with sensitivity the complex histories and dynamics that lead to this trauma, as O'Brien investigates the psychologies of his parents, themselves the survivors of painful childhoods in Scarsdale. Then, simultaneously disturbed and catalyzed by his brother's depression, and his own developing obsessive-compulsive disorder, the adolescent O'Brien discovers literature and the theatre as an escape, though it will take years for an actual liberation to occur. In many ways this memoir is that liberation, as his ambition here has been to tell "the story of who I am and where I'm from, with honesty, insight, and something like forgiveness. To try to leave the old place behind."--

"True Story: A Trilogy gathers together three documentary plays by acclaimed playwright and poet Dan O'Brien concerning trauma, both political and personal. The Body of an American speaks to a moment in history when a single, stark photograph--of a US Army Ranger dragged from the wreckage of a Blackhawk helicopter through the streets of Mogadishu--altered the course of global events. In a story that ranges from Rwanda to Afghanistan to the Canadian Arctic, O'Brien dramatizes the ethical and psychological haunting of journalist Paul Watson. In The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage the playwright applies journalistic principles to an investigation of his childhood unhappiness, as he searches for the reason why his parents and siblings cut him off years ago. The more he learns about his family, the more mysterious the circumstances surrounding their estrangement become, until his sense of self is shaken by rumors regarding his true parentage. The trilogy concludes with New Life, a tragicomedy that finds Paul Watson in Syria and the playwright in treatment for cancer, while together they endeavor to sell a TV series about journalists in war zones. New Life explores the paradox of war as entertainment, and dares to dream of healing after catastrophe. These three gritty yet poetic plays stand as a testament to the value of witnessing, honoring, and perhaps transcending the struggles of living."--

This book is the first devoted to Hume's conception of testimony. O'Brien looks wider than the miracles essay, turning to what Hume says about testimony in the Treatise, the moral Enquiry, the History of England and his Essays.

David Hume (1711-1776), philosopher, historian, and essayist, is widely considered to be Britain's greatest philosopher. One of the leading intellectual figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, his major works and central ideas, especially his radical empiricism and his critique of the pretensions of philosophical rationalism, remain hugely influential on contemporary philosophers. This comprehensive and accessible guide to Hume's life and work includes 21 specially commissioned essays, written by a team of leading experts, covering every aspect of Hume's thought. The Companion presents details of Hume's life, historical and philosophical context, providing students with a comprehensive overview of all the key themes and topics apparent in his work, including his accounts of causal reasoning, scepticism, the soul and the self, action, reason, free will, miracles, natural religion, politics, human nature, women, economics and history, and an account of his reception and enduring influence. This textbook is indispensable to anyone studying in the areas of Hume Studies, British, and eighteenth-century philosophy.

Poet and playwright Dan O'Brien chronicles the year and a half during which both he and his wife were treated for cancer.

Drawing deeply on O'Brien's experience of cancer and of childhood abuse, and of collaboration with a war reporter, the four essays in A Story that Happens offer hard-won insights into what stories are for and the reasons why, 'afraid and hopeful', we begin to tell them.

On a rainy afternoon in Key West, Florida, Brigid ducks into Niall O'Neill's cluttered pub, in search of her keys. Soon, it becomes clear that what Brigid is really seeking is much deeper-and more mysterious. Stories and secrets intertwine as Niall and Brigid balance the fine line between past and present, reality and shadow. "Reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's bumbling philosophers in WAITING FOR GODOT...the torrent that is KEY WEST hits the audience with a barrage of philosophical questions: Is God in every one of us? How is the thin line between ecstasy and insanity drawn? Is there life after death? What is the value of truth, and will we be haunted by our lies? And the story O'Brien weaves is entertaining. His plot drags the audience through the entire spectrum of human emotion before releasing them back into reality... [with] a shocking twist worthy of a good M Night Shyamalan reveal."Erin Morrison-Fortunato, Rochester City Newspaper

A collection of monologues from award-winning American playwright and poet Dan O'Brien.

In Scarsdale Dan OBrien applies to his own early life the same honesty and insight that were evident in his prize-winning War Reporter. Growing up in a family scarred by past trauma, he makes a bid for freedom in love with myself and this young strays life only to be pulled back into the orbit of the place he had sought to escape. ...

Since the publication of their first controversial novels in the 1950s and 1960s, Philip Roth and Edna O'Brien have always argued against the isolation of mind from body, autobiography from fiction, life from art, and self from nation. In this book Dan O'Brien investigates these shared concerns of the two authors.

Once a great falconer and environmentalist, Malone has entered middle age a broken man, devoid of the passion and promise of his youth. And now the developers are threatening to build condominiums on his beloved Brendan prairie.

Traces the history and ecology of this American symbol from the origins of the great herds that once dominated the prairie to its near extinction in the late nineteenth century and the subsequent efforts to restore the bison population. Great Plains Bison is a tribute to the bison's essential place at the heart of the North American prairie.

Second poetry collection by Dan O'Brien based on the experience of the war reporter Paul Watson, taking in the aftermath of the Arab Spring in Syria, Libya and Egypt

Dan O'Brien's earlier award-winning novel The Contract Surgeon introduced readers to Valentine McGillycuddy, a friend of the great war chief Crazy Horse. The Indian Agent is the riveting sequel to The Contract Surgeon.

Winner of the Western Heritage Award, this beautifully crafted historical novel from one of the West's most popular writers tells the true story of the friendship between Valentine McGillycuddy, a young doctor plucked from his prestigious medical career and newly married wife to serve in the army during the Great Sioux War, and the fearsome chief Crazy Horse.

Memoir of the summer and fall writer Dan O'Brien spent honing his falconry skills on his ranch in South Dakota

The story of the residents of a small western plains town and the turmoil that results from the colliding interests of its "native" inhabitants and newcomers