Recently, I was gifted the use of a book to read on Native American wisdom by my Sylva dentist Dr. David McGuire. Thousands of years ago, the Toltec were known throughout southern Mexico as “women and men of knowledge” and who formed a society to explore and conserve the spiritual knowledge and practices of the ancient ones.

Recently, a teacher of history asked me, a former teacher of history, about ways to bring history alive for high school students. My response hasn’t varied in 40 years: “Make connections.” Students — and the rest of us as well — need to remember we live today with the consequences of events like the signing of the Declaration of Independence or the Battle of Gettysburg.

One of the best things about the East Coast is the fall. Last November, I made a trip to California and was surprised to find mild weather and a nameless time. There’s a reason it’s called the place where seasons never change, and I realized then and there, I was an East Coast girl through and through. 

Fifty years ago this year, I dropped out of graduate school and my studies in medieval history, and set off in a different direction. I’ve never forgotten the thought that came rolling along right behind my escape from academia: “Now I can finally read whatever I want.” 

“In my younger and more vulnerable years” are the words with which narrator Nick Carraway kicks off “The Great Gatsby.” Those seven words entranced me when I first read “Gatsby,” living then in my own younger and vulnerable days as a 20-something whose heroes were writers, most of them American, most of them male. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe: that was my triumvirate, with dozens of other novelists and poets sitting just below the salt at the same table. 

Whether you are an expert in folk music or if you can’t tell a banjo from a mandolin, a new biography, “Doc Watson: A Life in Music,” by Eddie Huffman, will draw you in. Along the way you’ll discover not just Doc’s story, but the rich history of our state and the impact of its traditional music. 

When you think “politician,” what picture pops into your mind? In today’s world, regardless of party, it is likely a bald or gray-haired old man, fixated on power and money, loyal only to his corporate sponsors. 

Enter Jacinda Ardern. Prime Minister of New Zealand. Elected at age 37 to lead her country. What kind of young woman could handle such a task, survive the opposition and pull her country together? 

(Editor’s note: This is the second part of Anne Bevilacqua’s review of “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order.” The first part can be found at smokymountainnews.com.)

Until 2014, no U.S. adversary, including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, had managed to achieve even 60% of American GDP. In that year, China became the first, and did so “quietly,” says Rush Doshi, political scientist and author of “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order.”

(Editor’s note: This is the first section of a two-part review. See next week’s SMN for the second part.)

Does China seek to replace the United States in its position as global leader? This is the question that political scientist Rush Doshi answers in “The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order” (Oxford University Press, 2021, 339 pp). 

Of all the chapters that I read and reviewed in my most recent review of the book “Letters From the Smokies” in Smoky Mountain Living (June-July 2025), the story of the Walker Sisters was the one story that got my attention probably more than any of the others.