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“Journey from a known place to a destination always surprising…”
Almost Killed by a Train of Thought: Collected Essays
By David Benjamin
In more than 40 years writing his “weekly screeds,” David Benjamin’s bylines range from Tokyo to Paris to Brooklyn. He has shared with readers real-life portraits of a theatrical mouse in Munich, a blind acupuncturist in Japan, and Henry Herx, the Voice of the Legion of Decency.
For something completely different, Benjamin has matched wits with a wise-cracking “smart home,” interviewed the Antichrist, discovered the Fourth King in Bethlehem, and bantered weirdly with America’s foremost “idea man,” the formidable, inimitable Dr. Wilhelm Bienfang.
Throughout the literary sketches, social commentaries and madcap satires in Almost Killed by a Train of Thought, David Benjamin embodies a dictum that irreverent essayists — from Voltaire and Twain to Dave Barry and Gail Collins — have faithfully embraced: Nothing is sacred.
In one high-tech spoof, Benjamin evokes H.L. Mencken’s bath tub, breaking news about a mobile-phone contraceptive called “Nippit 3000.” Visiting his Wisconsin hometown, he writes, “If he had stuck with us, Andy Warhol probably would have warned us that, by about 1996, everyone would get to be a child molester for 15 minutes.”
About Benjamin, journalist Brian Santo wrote, “His anchors are kindness and a gentle humor that only sharpen his commentary… [He] can write about nearly anything, including technology, something that touches all our lives every day and which few other writers can even conceive how to tackle.”
AWARDS: Independent Press Awards, Best Essay Collection, 2019.
Almost Killed by a Train of Thought: Collected Essays
By David Benjamin
Price: $15
What they're saying
“In David Benjamin’s essays, the reader is as likely to encounter characters from J. D. Salinger or Emile Zola or Fyodor Dostoevsky as scenes from Edward Hoagland or Philip Lopate. An essay by Benjamin begins as a journey from a known place — a small town in the Upper Midwest, say, or Paris or Tokyo or Brooklyn — to a destination that is always surprising. At the same time Benjamin’s personal journey starts with a working-class childhood in Wisconsin and – no matter how far the author roams — seems always to circle back to that beginning, to view the world from that platform. In touching cameos – two of the best pieces in this marvelous collection — we meet the writer’s father and grandfather, the former a bartending ironist whose life of pathos bewilders his son until, as an adult, ‘I was old enough to feel it myself,’ and the latter an eloquent ‘natural-born historian,’ whose story unfolds to the young listener like a book of ‘huge crinkled pages illuminated by innocents.’ No matter the subject — memoir, politics, culture — David Benjamin observes it all with the keen eye of an H. L. Mencken musing on the life around him.
— Stephen Bluestone, author, The Painted Clock
“His anchors are kindness and a gentle humor that only sharpen his commentary… [He] can write about nearly anything, including technology, something that touches all our lives every day and which few other writers can even conceive how to tackle.”
— Brian Santo, EE Times