About the Author

JOHN VERNON is the author of the novels La Salle, Lindbergh's Son, Peter Doyle, and All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar. The recipient of two NEA fellowships, he teaches at SUNY Binghamton. His work has been published in Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and The Nation.

Reviews

"Vernon's greatest virtue is his style - smart, marvelously specific, insightful both about large issues and small ones." - Jane Smiley.
Boston Globe "Odd, yet engrossing, an almost dreamlike ramble through loss." Kirkus Reviews "A novelist turns to science and history to explore, in this nonfiction excursion, the puzzle of his brother, Paul, whose distressingly pathological mind Vernon began to comprehend only after his brother's death." The New York Times "A beautiful performance lit by stark, revealing bursts of language and delivered with the gravity of liturgy." Publishers Weekly "The erudite Vernon calls on an immense fund of learning to integrate Paul's odd life into a sensible overall view of the world and its history. Thus, A BOOK OF REASONS is both a meditation on a lost sibling and a wide-ranging essay on such seemingly disparate topics as tools, the circulatory system and the history of the thermometer, among many others....Each topic in the book...fits organically into the text, being expertly woven together with the surrounding subject matter." The Washington Post "I found John Vernon's account of the clutter in his brother's life-- and the consequent ladders of thought and feeling erected from that 'foul rag-and-bone shop'-- not only poignant but deeply gratifying. Vernon lifts us high, confronting basic questions about the nature of existence itself, and the peculiar objects that sustain this transient life. As ever, Vernon writes with clarity, poise, and grace." -- Jay Parini, author of BENJAMIN'S CROSSING, THE LAST STATION, and ROBERT FROST: A Life. "John Vernon's impressive range gets wider and wider. He now offers a pensive, searching, candid book about a man going off to buy a thermometer at Wal-Mart and rediscovering the entire universe in the process. It is also, affectingly, a memoir of his dead brother and a vexed, calamitous life that ended too soon. These pages amount to an apocalyptic commonplace book bounded by three crucial months of searching and finding. Learned, articulate, and daringly concise." -- Paul West "What a pleasure to read large thoughts that make the head swim -- with irresolvable paradox, wild speculation, the human intelligence battling away at its cage...The culture badly needs more books of this kind -- with real thinking, and without the sensationalism of sordid confessions, miserable childhoods, terminal diseases, sexual disaster, all catalogued without reference to any genuine ideas....You should read this book. You will have more questions of your own." The Hungry Mind Review "While these excursions might be informative and enlightening to people who did not study the topics in college -- and even to those who did -- the best thing A BOOK OF REASONS gives us is a glimpse into the workings of a writer's mind...A BOOK OF REASONS is inspired work indeed." Salon --

"Vernon's greatest virtue is his style - smart, marvelously specific, insightful both about large issues and small ones." - Jane Smiley.
Boston Globe "Odd, yet engrossing, an almost dreamlike ramble through loss." Kirkus Reviews "A novelist turns to science and history to explore, in this nonfiction excursion, the puzzle of his brother, Paul, whose distressingly pathological mind Vernon began to comprehend only after his brother's death." The New York Times "A beautiful performance lit by stark, revealing bursts of language and delivered with the gravity of liturgy." Publishers Weekly "The erudite Vernon calls on an immense fund of learning to integrate Paul's odd life into a sensible overall view of the world and its history. Thus, A BOOK OF REASONS is both a meditation on a lost sibling and a wide-ranging essay on such seemingly disparate topics as tools, the circulatory system and the history of the thermometer, among many others....Each topic in the book...fits organically into the text, being expertly woven together with the surrounding subject matter." The Washington Post "I found John Vernon's account of the clutter in his brother's life-- and the consequent ladders of thought and feeling erected from that 'foul rag-and-bone shop'-- not only poignant but deeply gratifying. Vernon lifts us high, confronting basic questions about the nature of existence itself, and the peculiar objects that sustain this transient life. As ever, Vernon writes with clarity, poise, and grace." -- Jay Parini, author of BENJAMIN'S CROSSING, THE LAST STATION, and ROBERT FROST: A Life. "John Vernon's impressive range gets wider and wider. He now offers a pensive, searching, candid book about a man going off to buy a thermometer at Wal-Mart and rediscovering the entire universe in the process. It is also, affectingly, a memoir of his dead brother and a vexed, calamitous life that ended too soon. These pages amount to an apocalyptic commonplace book bounded by three crucial months of searching and finding. Learned, articulate, and daringly concise." -- Paul West "What a pleasure to read large thoughts that make the head swim -- with irresolvable paradox, wild speculation, the human intelligence battling away at its cage...The culture badly needs more books of this kind -- with real thinking, and without the sensationalism of sordid confessions, miserable childhoods, terminal diseases, sexual disaster, all catalogued without reference to any genuine ideas....You should read this book. You will have more questions of your own." The Hungry Mind Review "While these excursions might be informative and enlightening to people who did not study the topics in college -- and even to those who did -- the best thing A BOOK OF REASONS gives us is a glimpse into the workings of a writer's mind...A BOOK OF REASONS is inspired work indeed." Salon --

As a novelist (La Salle, etc.), Vernon brings structure and meaning to his art. As an observant man, however, he sees more than enough chaos and apparent meaninglessness in real life. In this erudite memoir of how he tried to understand the life and death of his reclusive older brother, Paul, he embarks on a highly discursive exploration of how "history in its minute particulars touches us all, and in the least expected ways." The thrust of the book lies not so much in the narrative of Paul's life as in Vernon's fascination with everyday objects and their histories. As Vernon uses a Chap Stick that he finds in Paul's car, or hammers a nail, each action triggers a meditative reaction. En route to the house left him by his brother, Vernon stops at a Roy Rogers and, chewing a rubbery sandwich, ponders Ptolemy, William Blake and Hero of Alexandria. The simple act of buying a thermometer sparks Vernon's investigation into the history of the object at hand, which, in turn, sparks an investigation into the history of God and the nature of reason, which leads, finally, right back to brother Paul. And remembering Paul's funeral calls forth a treatise on the history of embalming, decomposition, spirituality, the body, the roots of physiognomy. As Vernon's prose ricochets from Paul's possessions to his own and to the many ideas that fill his head, he gives readers both a description and an example of how a writer's mind forges a web of connections among the objects and ideas of the world. It is a beautiful performance lit by stark, revealing bursts of language and delivered with the gravity of liturgy. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.