.There is no point to the study of history if each event, each action, each decision is seen in some mechanistic manner — as if what happened had to happen. [...]
People get obsessed. They get obsessed with growing orchids. With the fortunes of the Los Angeles Lakers or the Cincinnati Reds or the Cleveland Browns. With the stock market. With [...]
Patricia Hampl laughs and says, “I have a list.” We’re talking over the phone about that bane of modern life, the to-do list, she in the kitchen of her St. [...]
It is a bit perplexing that the ancient story of David --- the giant-killer, king, adulterer, father, sinner and old man --- doesn’t have its own book in the Hebrew Bible. Instead, [...]
The endless white around the corner I know it comes, not when. I am running to it, racing, straining, through the brittle leaves, the boggy mulch, deeply breathing [...]
Let me make clear I’m no cook or baker. I have, I’ll admit, followed the directions to produce a Betty Crocker cake (with canned frosting) with relatively edible results. And, [...]
Christopher Moore, the author of 15 wacky novels, explains in an afterword that he had planned for his latest book Noir to be about a “poor working mug” who got [...]
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, published in 2016, is a pleasant book, so playful and light that I fully expected to find, once I’d finished reading the novel, [...]
It’s not often that the National Catholic Reporter gets quoted in an art book. Nonetheless, the Catholic newspaper’s headline over a 1995 story by Demetria Martinez commenting on popular notions [...]
At the end of The March of Folly, on its last page, historian Barbara W. Tuchman writes that the best way to avoid folly by government — the folly fueled [...]
