I have mentioned my great admiration for Grace Metalious as a woman who sat down at her kitchen table, like Harriet Beecher Stowe and J.K. Rowlings, and created not just a popular book, but one that entered the American lexicon and changed the way that Americans, especially small-town Americans felt […]

I’ve posted several excerpts from Ernie Pyle’s dispatches describing the realities of army life during World War II. Another book that gives a vivid, accurate picture of the life of the infantryman is Bill Mauldin’s “Up Front,” which Mauldin wrote to accompany a selection of his famous cartoons featuring two […]

Here’s another example of Ernie Pyle making a story out of not getting a story: “A friend of mine in Winnemucca, Nevada, once said that the next time I came to Hollywood he wanted me to find out if Myrna Loy is really as sweet in person as she is […]

Before he became famous as a war correspondent, Ernie Pyle was kind of famous as a columnist. In 1934, when he was managing editor of the Washington News, he had a severe case of flu and took time off to recuperate. His doctor had suggested a warm climate so he […]

I’ve heard endless arguments, all of them circular, about why we had to drop the atomic bomb on Japan to save American lives. If I, Stephen Hartshorne, were to state that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, there’s no reason anyone ought to pay any attention to my opinion. But […]

When I started writing entries on the theme of “Ike’s Advice Unheeded” many moons ago, I suggested that millions of people died needlessly because Ike’s advice was not taken by those in power. The advice I cited, if it had been followed, would have averted the French war in Indochina, […]

Back in 1956, Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt and leader of a pan-Arab movement in the Middle East, proclaimed that he was nationalizing (taking over) the Suez Canal. US President Dwight Eisenhower received a message from the British that they intended to “break Nasser” and to initiate hostilities. Britain, […]

Here’s another descriptive passage from “The Shirley Letters” by Louisa Amelia Knapp Smith Clapp, a.k.a. Dame Shirley, describing life in the mining camps of California in 1851: “You must know that today is the anniversary of the Independence of Chile. The procession got up in honor of it consisted, perhaps, […]

On her way to the mining camps to join her husband, Dame Shirley, author of “The Shirley Letters,” witnessed a practice as old as humanity and described it in a letter to her sister Mary Jane: “We passed one place where a number of Indian women were gathering flower seeds, […]

I was delighted to find that other readers enjoy Dame Shirley as much as I do. We even had a comment from our friend Mridula in India! I thought I would include a passage from “The Shirley Letters” which dispels one stereotype of the ’49er and the ’50ers and the […]