Garret Keizer: 6 books

In a book the San Francisco Chronicle called "unclassifiably wise" and a "masterpiece," noted Harper's essayist Garret Keizer explores the paradox that we are human only by helping others– and all too human when we try to help. It is the primal cry, the first word in a...

American essayist and Harper's contributing editor Garret Keizer offers a brilliant, literate look at our strip-searched, over-shared, viral-videoed existence. Body scans at the airport, candid pics on Facebook, a Twitter account for your stray thoughts, and a surveillance camera on every street...

In this powerful, eloquent story of his return to the classroom, a former teacher offers a rousing defense of his beleaguered vocation Perhaps no profession is so constantly discussed, regulated, and maligned by non-practitioners as teaching. The voices of the teachers themselves are conspicuously...

Noise is usually defined as unwanted sound: loud music from a neighbor, the honk of a taxicab, the roar of a supersonic jet. But as Garret Keizer illustrates in this probing examination, noise is as much about what we want as about what we seek to avoid. It has been a byproduct of human striving since...

Weaving anecdotal narrative with trenchant reflections on his profession, Garret Keizer offers one teacher's answer to the hue and cry over the crisis in education. An English teacher in rural Vermont, he writes of the opposing realities he faces every day: the promise and energy of the young and...

In the remote mill town of Salmon Falls, Vermont, the dead of winter can feel like death itself. Jobs are scarce, kids are bored, and it sometimes seems there’s nothing better to do than drink. But when eighteen-year-old Kyle Nelson and a motley group of friends decide to challenge both the legal...