anything that comes between two covers filled with the printed word
Infants slowly expiring in their cribs, surrounded by siblings and parents already dead of the disease, who could no longer care for them but whose corpses had not yet been collected by a city task force overwhelmed with the death toll; adults in rude good health, dying within hours of …
I owe Esther Williams an apology but unfortunately I’m seven years too late to deliver it (she died in her sleep at the venerable age of 91 in 2013). On the few occasions I caught her show-biz aquatic act from clips of her at-the-time blockbuster movies — Neptune’s Daughter, On …
Growing up we Boomers witnessed the advent of television while being weaned on movies that presented a simplistic, almost childlike, image of what frontier life was like in the American West. The lines were starkly drawn: there were White Hats (the good guys), Black Hats (the bad guys), a saloon …
The Eighties and Nineties saw a frenzy of prosecutions across the country of day care center operators accused of sexually abusing children in their care, the most infamous being the McMartin family of Manhattan Beach, California. In a 2003 book I just ran across in a thrift store, No Crueler …
In recent years, I’m drawn to stories of self-sacrifice and grace under pressure (as the author whose name inspired this site defined courage), most markedly when revealed in time of war. The military nurses whose story is now preserved for the ages in We Band of Angels by Elizabeth Norman …
Matthew Algeo’s entertaining and irresistible account of the Trumans’ 19-day road trip just after leaving the presidency in 1953 triggered a unique combination of reactions as soon as I put it down: tears at the elegiac ending and an almost uncontrollable urge to rent an RV and hit the road, …
I recently reconnected with a friend after 30+ years of separation. While catching up on the lost decades, he eventually revealed his current situation: homebound and dying of non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. His one pleasure left in life, though, is reading: 4-5 books a week, sometimes as many as one a day. …
“Hello, my name is….and I’m a Stones-a-holic.” Since age 11, in the month of June 1965 when I was sentenced to 2 weeks’ purgatory at summer camp, I’ve been an unabashed and unashamed Stones groupie and fan. It was while living in an army-style dormitory with, say, 20 other kids …
Col. Kurtz’s dying words “the horror, the horror” resonated with me time after time while reading this mesmerizing and (at times) emotionally overpowering work on the French Revolution (which most history books date from 1789-1799). The period that captured my imagination as a child and has always held the most …
Interior of MacLeod’s Books, Vancouver, B.C. Two weekends ago I visited a retired antiquarian book dealer at his home in North Atlanta, where he continues to sell them via the world wide web. Like a true biblio-holic, books are everywhere: in the basement, living room, kitchen, den, the front foyer, …
