Dealing with loss, grief, and the balm of love
On the first Saturday of June, my friend John and I were just leaving McKay Used Books in Manassas, Virginia, when I spotted a woman young enough to be my granddaughter seated at a table topped by a couple of piles of books.
Southern stories for summer reading
Perhaps like many people, summer is a time for me to finally read those books I’ve been wanting to get to. While this summer began with determination to dwindle the stack of my “to-read” books, that stack has ended up bigger than smaller.
Sebastian Junger on death, visits and physics
Every once in a while, I find myself engrossed in a book that suddenly delivers my ignorance to me on a silver platter.
Books, parrots, love and regrets
If Monica Wood’s “How to Read a Book” were a painting rather than a novel, it would be a triptych, one of those three-paneled works of art often hinged together so that it can be closed or displayed open.
A remedy for the spring-time blues
There are always seasons in life when you feel the need to get away from your day-to-day, and I have found myself in just such a season.
Two fine novels for spring reading
Two novels, one a classic Western set in 1885 Nevada, the other centered on Barcelona and the aftermath of the Spanish Civil war, snagged my attention this past week. I was busy, but every time I caught a break, I was on the front porch, enjoying the May weather and turning the pages.
Building a world beyond
Having just recently written a review for these pages of an anthology made up of multiple writers published in 2023 with a similar title that was edited by Ervin Laszlo, I am taking the liberty to review the much more singular and shorter primer that Laszlo wrote in 2022 prior to putting together his large anthology.
Molon Labe: A review of ‘Gates of Fire’
A little over three years ago, a stranger in a coffee shop with whom I’d struck up a conversation excused himself from the table, walked to his car and returned with a copy of Steven Pressfield’s “Gates of Fire.”
Good medicine and Mother’s Day — a book, a poem
All of us, to one extent or another, make our way through a world of unexamined phenomena.
It’s a complex world, and we generally glide through it without thinking too much of its parts and machinery. We all carry mini-computers in our pockets, but ask us to explain how we can look at the screen of our phone and read a newspaper from New Delhi, and the best most of us can do is shrug.
Two faces of war: America 1861, Spain 1812
Anyone interested in the history of our country will benefit by reading “The Dogs of War: 1861” (Oxford University Press, 2011, 128 pages).