How could anyone write a blog about great reads for a quarter without mentioning The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini? Okay, you could spend a dollar, or ten, on some fancy edition, but then you’d get a fancy-pants translation which fails to give a true sense of the original. Stick to […]
There are some books you should always buy for a quarter, even if you already have them, so you can give them to friends. One of them is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. It was a pretty popular book, so I find it quite often, and many […]
Since I work as an editor, people occasionally ask me how they can improve their writing. I tell them to read Lincoln. Just about everything he ever said or wrote, it seems, is thoughtful, concise and beautifully expressed — at times uproariously funny, at others deeply moving. Some other writers […]
When you hear about the Gross National Product going up, that’s good, right? Well, not exactly. If everyone in the United States had a safe and sane Fourth of July and did not smash into anyone else on the highway, the Gross National Product would go down. Sad to say, […]
So who was the US President who witnessed the Battle of Bunker Hill, visited Finland, met Catherine the Great of Russia and owned a pet alligator? More important than that, when the crew of the liberated slave ship Amistad sailed to the State of Connecticut, in what was supposed to […]
Sergeant Boston Corbett, the guy who shot John Wilkes Booth. Said to be a little daffy.
One funny old book that I found for a quarter is Great Epochs in American History Described by Famous Writers from Columbus to Roosevelt, edited, with introductions and explanatory notes by Francis W. Halsey, volume IX, The Reconstruction Period. There’s a great account of Charles Dickens second visit to America […]
Some anti-communist political figures like Joe McCarthy claimed that Franklin Roosevelt “gave away the store” to our Russian allies at the Yalta Conference at the end of World War II. George F. Kennan doesn’t think so, and he ought to know. He’s the guy who wrote the longest telegram in […]
If someone discovered the Gulf Stream, that would be a pretty good claim to fame, wouldn’t it? Not a great one, but still a modest claim to fame. How about if someone, back in colonial times, invented a heating device that more than tripled the energy output of a wood […]
