Amor Towles
I cannot recall a time in my reading life when I became so quickly and thoroughly enchanted with a writer. Less than 100 pages into Amor Towles’ most recent and third novel, The Lincoln Highway (2021), I hailed Mr....
BRUCE
In the early 1970s, Rock and Roll icon Bruce Springsteen recorded his first albums inspired by the lives of the blue collar working class. His 2016 autobiography, Born to Run, begins with a gritty and acutely personal reminiscence of...
Wilmington and Wildland
A history of the nineteenth century and another of the twenty-first, both inform the age in which we live. In Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy (2020), Pulitzer Prize winner David Zucchino...
The Gift of Reading
I like to read. Typically, I am engaged with several books at a time. Here are a few that I am living with now and a few more sitting over there on the shelf awaiting my attention. As many...
Three Takes on the 19th Century
Janice P. Nimura is the author of Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back Again (2015). In her latest book, The Doctors Blackwell: How Two Pioneering Sisters Brought Medicine to Women – and Women...
Spy Games II
During the past two decades, acclaimed British espionage historian Ben Macintyre has helped us see the major global conflicts of the twentieth century through a different lens. Early 1942 was a rough time for the planet. Europe and North...
Spy Games
British intelligence officer Kim Philby spent nearly his entire career as a double agent (from 1934 to 1963), in the employ of the Soviet Union. A bona-fide historical account of his enduring double life is told by journalist and...
1865
Discussions of modern political divisions in the United States often include comparisons to the most divisive moment in the country’s history, the years leading up to the American Civil War (1861-1865). The suggestion here is that we should probably...
An Album of Thoughts
I judged a book by its cover and was not disappointed. In American Histories: Stories (2018) American novelist and essayist John Edgar Wideman weaves a collection of cerebral ruminations held loosely together with the delicate thread of family, race,...
On Hume
In The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us about Being Human and Living Well, independent scholar Julian Baggini proposes the idea – upon the inspiration of eighteenth century Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) – that we might...
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