I’m having tremendous fun with Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, edited by William Butler Yeats. As I mentioned, these stories about “the good people” or “the gentry,” as they are known, are very unlike the popular notion of a fairy tale. Take “The Legend of Knockgrafton” by T. Crofton […]

In 1904, Herschel Goldhirsch, then two years old, arrived in Winnipeg, Manitoba, from a shetl in what is now Ukraine and was then Austria. The next year his family moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and you can read all about his childhood in his delightful, educational books […]

Talk about your great reads for a quarter. I found a copy of Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland, edited by William Butler Yeats. A big fat book full of great stories. And one of the great things about it is that these are not anything like most people’s idea […]

Have you heard all the disastrous news? First of all, Detroit is cancelling orders for low-mileage vehicles like trucks and SUVs. People are crowding into underground and above-ground moving modules which the socialistic Europeans call public transportation. The value of energy innovations like solar panels or wind turbines is always […]

This blog is chiefly about great reads for a quarter, but it seems reasonable to include great reads for a dollar, too. And one of the greatest reads for a dollar, for anyone who loves Scotland, especially, but for everyone else too, is Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. You can […]

This blog is not usually about me, but since I, a confirmed heretic and occasional blasphemer, am offering a prayer to heaven, I thought I would make an exception. And besides, it’s actually not about me, it’s about my friend Daoud and his grandfather’s farm. My prayer is to the […]

I was reading the New York Times Book Review, which, as you probably know, is not for blockheads (a little inside joke for my friend Philip Kunhardt) and I found a review of Girls Like Us by Sheila Weller about Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon and Carole King. I probably won’t […]

Here is a poem by the inestimable literary titan, Robert B. Hay. He recited it to me more than twenty years ago, yet I still know it by heart. There’s a reference to bussing (court-ordered integration of schools) which might be puzzling to younger readers. As far as I can […]

“I more than suspect already that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong — that he feels the blood of this war, like the blood of Abel, is crying to Heaven against him. “That originally having some strong motive — what, I will not stop now to give […]

Like everyone else, I read about transcendentalism in history class, but never elected to read the works of any transcendentalists. Too boring. A bunch of flakes. Is there anyone who reads Ralph Waldo Emerson by choice? Turns out I was wrong — not about Emerson; he was a flake — […]