. There is no denying that many, many people, myself included, have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of reading William Faulkner. But if you ask us whether we recommend his work, we might hesitate. The enjoyment we’ve gotten out of Faulkner we’ve worked hard for. He doesn’t make it […]

Jim Mullen is a very funny guy, as you might expect from the author of “Baby’s First Tattoo,” and “It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life.” He has a funny column in the Vernon (British Columbia) Morning Star about CEOs who make as much as a billion dollars […]

I searched our site the other day to find a story called “The Art of Wandering in Paris,” one of those stories that make an editor’s day. But when I searched for stories about France, it didn’t come up. Why? The word France was never used in the story. It’s […]

I have been reading about the Battle of Waterloo in the Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes and in Howard Keegan’s brilliant book The Face of Battle. Both works quote original sources, but the former quotes them at length and the latter quotes them sparingly while giving the reader an overview […]

At one point during the US campaign in Italy during WWII, Don Whitehead of the Associated Press dropped in on Ernie Pyle of Scripps-Howard. He knew Ernie had been feeling depressed. “Ernie was all man, but there was something that made you want to take care of him, to lend […]

James O’Reilly, cofounder of Travelers’ Tales feels the same way I do about books. Here’s an excerpt from his website: “To James O’Reilly, books are as important as water, air, and food. He writes: ‘I would be a sad fellow indeed without them, and this has been true for as […]

After the terrible losses they suffered at Waterloo, it must have brought great joy to the British soldiers to restore to the French people just what they had always wanted: a fat king named Louis. In The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes, edited by Max Hastings, we hear the uplifting […]

To celebrate his victory over the Russians and the Prussians, resulting in the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon ordered a lovely hunting party in the country and had his chief of staff, Alexandre Berthier, arrange everything. Berthier, a paragon of efficiency, had the coaches arrive at the Tuilleries on […]

There are a lot of ups and downs to blogging, and a lot of learning experiences. Here, for example, is a response to my “Short Disquisition on the London Derriere“: I wrote that “Danny Boy” is a woman’s song and men have no business singing it. “It’s a song about […]

. In my next to last entry I mentioned the all-too-brief enlightened reign of Senate President Vesta Roy. It was an historic window of opportunity that occurs only once or twice in a generation. A sincere call to set aside partisan politics and improve the law of the land. Child […]