“I wrote this book in the thirties, against the background of depression at home and mounting tension abroad. The preoccupations of that unhappy time cast their shadows over its pages.” I first took up The Thirty Years War by C.V. Wedgwood ten years ago, and while I was caught up […]
First American president to visit Finland? Author of the Monroe Doctrine? Creator of the Library of Congress and the National Weather Service? Only president to meet Empress Catherine the Great of Russia? Close friend of Tsar Alexander II? Still stumped? I don’t blame you. Friend of Sally Hemings. Restorer of […]
I’m reading a brilliant, prodigious work, Paradise Postponed by John Mortimer, the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey. The Rumpole stories, though highly formulaic, are always delightful because Mortimer has a seemingly inexhaustible source of crazy characters that reflect English society. They bring us a mishmosh of classes and generations, […]
I’ve been poring over Rachel Maddow’s second book, ‘Blowout,’ with great satisfaction and amazement. I’ve been watching the news for the last twenty years, and this book is like a concordance that explains it all and puts it into context. This book connects the lack of tornado shelters for Oklahoma […]
The demons in Hell are happily heating up the red-hot pokers and sharpening their tridents to welcome their latest soul in torment, Father Richard Lavigne, who passed away far too late last Friday at a nursing home in Greenfield. Lavigne pleaded guilty to molesting two boys in 1992, and received […]
Last year I had a severe bout of pneumonia, combined with a staph infection which caused my heart to go into an irregular rhythm called A-fib. I wrote about it in an email to my friend VJ: There was an incident during my two weeks of intensive care that I […]
I remember, back in 1993, when Lorena Bobbitt famously cut off her husband’s penis, that there was one (1) other instance of a female assaulting a male partner, and news anchors across the country, based on these two (2) cases, wondered if this was a dangerous new trend of women […]
There’s an expression in politics — I think it was Marshal Cobleigh who told me about it — where you “walk around the corner and meet yourself.” He and I were working for the president of the New Hampshire Senate at the time, and he was referring to a situation […]
I’ve just finished a book called Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson and found it positively riveting. I don’t often say this, but I think every American should read this book, especially those concerned with the criminal justice system. As a writer, Stevenson is in a class with Ernie Pyle, Alexander […]
Every morning when I fill my bird feeder, I put a row of sunflower seeds on the porch rail and stand there for a while to see who is the bravest birdie. Who do you think wins every time? We have bluejays, cardinals, chickadees, doves, flycatchers, goldfinches, house finches, […]