One of the types of books I most enjoy collecting are the thin, hard-bound, Time-Life kind of volumes, written for the average reader. They always seem to contain insights I had never known before and photographs that give life to our ideas of ancient peoples. I have an enormous volume […]
One of our great new GoNOMAD writers, Moumita Deb, wrote about how often Chinese people told her how lucky she was to have a girl and a boy. I think, really, they were saying how lucky she was to have more than one child. If the one-couple / one-child rule […]
When I bought my car (for about half the blue book value) the things I liked were things people generally didn’t like: standard shift, crank windows and manual door locks. I hate having to turn on the car to close the windows or unlock the doors. Also it has an […]
Who is this person? I’m not at liberty to say. Did she accompany her singing dog at the Really Big Show? I couldn’t possibly comment. Did she kill a guy and kiss a girl on stage? I am not the person to ask. I do have one thing to say, […]
Got a chance to take some top-notch spot news photographs when a barn across the street burned down. Can’t you just feel the heat of the inferno and the skill and courage of the firefighters? I think I’ve got a great new career here. Is it my fault the moon […]
My housemate Kelly was a computer whiz and he set up a monitor on our front porch where we watched all kinds of movies and television shows. It was interesting to see what we both wanted to watch. Kelly, who lived here for ten years on and off, was like […]
I posted this entry before, but I’m posting it again, with a postscript. The founding principle of this blog has always been that it’s not about me, but about the books. That’s a good principle, but as my great friend Archie Goodwin has said, “There are times when a principle […]
I’ve been wrapped up in the biography of Augustus Caesar by Anthony Everitt that I got from a friend. I’ve read every history of Rome I can get my hands on, I’ve even tackled Livy and Polubius and Tacitus and Suetonius and all those guys, but even so I’ve learned […]
I found the ultimate trivia question in an article in Smithsonian Magazine, which my excellent brother Shady sends me when he’s done with them. Actually, the ultimate trivia question is June Cleaver’s maiden name. But this one is a close second. Here’s the question: What year did Hank Williams die? […]
In March of 44 BC a young guy named Octavian was waiting for his great uncle in a place called Appollonia on the Adriatic Coast of Greece. He had become a trusted agent of his uncle, who was assembling Roman legions in Greece in preparation for a campaign against the […]