Here is a passage from The Worldly Philosophers by Robert L. Heilbroner describing the French utopian Charles Fourier: “Fourier, to be polite, was an eccentric; to be accurate, he was probably mildly insane. His world was a fantasy; the earth, he believed, had been given a life of eighty thousand […]
Don’t you hate people who are always dropping names and talking about the famous people they hang out with? Me too. But I can’t help it; I have to post this photo; and yes, that is the one and only Sony Stark, aka Pilotgirl. She happened to drop into the […]
You would think, wouldn’t you, that if someone discovered a sequel to a great American classic like Huckleberry Finn, that that would be big news? Turns out there is one. In fact there are two, Tom Sawyer Detective and Tom Sawyer in Europe. I have them both, but I bought […]
In 1885 a country doctor in Pennsylvania heard a 16-year-old pneumonia patient say, “Doctor, if you don’t give me something to breathe, I’m going to stop.” The doctor, George E. Holtzapple, who was also a chemist, as a hobby, decided that what the patient needed was oxygen, so he went […]
Back in 1948 my grandparents bought a house in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard. When she passed away in 1992, my grandmother left the house to her ten grandchildren, which we enjoyed for many years and finally sold this year. We all went down to close up the house and take […]
While Napoleon was standing at the gates of Moscow waiting for the deputation that never came, guess who was in St. Petersburg at the court of Czar Alexander? The ubiquitous JQA — the same guy who witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, rescued the Smithsonian Institution after its funds were […]
Nineteen fifty-eight was a tough year for Harry Golden. He was the editor of the Carolina Israelite in Charlotte, North Carolina, an eccentric, blog-like, one-man newspaper he had started in 1942 with 600 subscribers, which by 1958 had grown to a circulation of 45,000. His home, office, and library burned […]
After Napoleon had won a tactical victory against the Russian army at Borodino, one of the bloodiest and most pointless battles in the history of the world, he stood waiting at the gates of Moscow to meet with a deputation of the city fathers. He had been through this ceremony […]
Here’s an excerpt from For Two Cents Plain by Harry Golden about Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the early years of the 20th century: “The Socialists, of course, were important then. Morris Hillquit was a brilliant speaker, and so were Louis Waldeman and Congressman Meyer London; but my own favorites […]
. My uncle Robert Bruce Dickson passed away recently. He flew a carrier-based fighter plane in World War II. He recommended Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance to me. It was a gripping read and it explained a lot that I didn’t know. I didn’t really come to know and love […]