This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,495) on Friday, November 20, 2020. Thanksgiving is approaching, and I have always particularly enjoyed our national season of gratitude. It is important that we acknowledge what we have been given, even during a year when all of us have seen our lives […]
About Jim Stovall
Jim Stovall, (JPROF.com) a retired journalism prof, is now a novelist, self-publisher, watercolorist, gardener, woodworker, and beekeeper -- among other things. Subscribe to his weekly newsletter at http://www.jprof.com .
Vietnam Voices – Incursion into Cambodia
This is the second episode in our podcast series, Vietnam Voices. Episode Summary Billy Minser talks about his Army unit’s incursion into Cambodia and their making contact with the North Vietnamese. Episode Notes Billy Minser spent six months of his year-long tour in Vietnam as a forward observer for an Army combat unit. In […]
Vietnam Voices podcast – A medic goes on patrol
This is the first episode of our new podcast series, Vietnam Voices: Air Force medic Aubrey Moncrief is assigned to a Green Beret unit in 1968 in Vietnam during the Tet offensive. He describes a patrol he was on when two helicopters were shot down and a pilot is wounded. Aubrey Moncrief joined the Air […]
More on William Seward, another walk through the Golden Age, and writing like a rifle: newsletter, November 13, 2020
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,5xx) on Friday, November 13, 2020. Some people cook and bake. Some people collect. Some make things. Some draw and paint, some listen (to music, etc.), some watch (birds, airplanes, insects, old movies, etc.), some read. The list could go on and on, of course. […]
William Seward: ‘Just enough virtue’ (part 1)
William Seward’s modern biographer, Walter Stahr, subtitled his excellent book, “Lincoln’s Indispensable Man.” That sobriquet is hard to argue with when you examine how the Lincoln Administration navigated through the shoals of secession and the fierce opposition of the unionist Democrats. There was no guarantee that Lincoln, Seward, and the Republicans would prevail. But Seward […]
William Seward, voting, Vietnam Voices, and a podcast recommendation: newsletter, November 6, 2020
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,5xx) on Friday, November 6, 2020. There are those of us who are wondering if the fevered political season will ever end. An interesting novel is sometimes a good antidote. I’m reading a couple now: Ian Rankin’s In a House of Lies and Ian McGuire’s The Abstainer. […]
Candice Millard, through her own struggle, finds her real story
When Candace Millard was researching and writing her best-selling River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, she had to navigate her own river of doubt, which eventually helped her better understand what her real story was Millard was pregnant with her second child in 2005, she got a phone call from her doctor saying something […]
The unknown Jacques Futrelle, Drew Pearson (part 2), and a podcast recommendation: newsletter, October 30, 2020
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,5xx) on Friday, October 30, 2020. Back to the (Zoom) Future. In the last few days, I attended a poetry reading of a friend’s new book on Facebook; I helped another friend launch a book on Zoom; and I attended a memorial service on YouTube for a friend […]
Drew Pearson, Washington journalist and power-broker
The cloakroom of the fashionable Sulgrave Club in Washington, D.C., on the night of December 13, 1950, showed no evidence that it was the season of good cheer. Instead, a burly ex-boxer, the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy, was pounding, kicking, and choking a smaller man 20 years his senior, the equally infamous — in the […]
Political debates and a few thoughts about the election, Harold Bloom on reading, and a century of Christie: newsletter, October 23, 2020
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,5xx) on Friday, October 23, 2020. Political debates in this country have never been especially uplifting affairs. Even the iconic Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 (see below) are remembered because they introduced Abraham Lincoln to the nation rather than for their soaring rhetoric and sweeping […]
Lee Child, Jack Reacher and their biographer
Several years ago I found myself in the mystery/thriller section of a local bookstore, standing next to a man who was looking intently at a shelf of Lee Child’s books. “I’m trying to see if they have the latest Jack Reacher novel,” he said, unnecessarily explaining himself. “If you haven’t read any of them, you […]
Washington’s biggest Big Foot, the origins of Jack Reacher, more Bach and more baseball Hall of Fame deaths: newsletter, October 16, 2020
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,510) on Friday, October 16, 2020. “Zoom,” unlike “google,” has been in use for a long while as a legitimate verb with a specific, well-established meaning. At the beginning of this year, we all knew what it meant, especially if there were children around who had […]
Why Pearl Harbor was bombed (part 2), Ian Rankin, reporting on the infirm who hold power: newsletter, October 9, 2020
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,515) on Friday, October 9, 2020. This week’s point of gratitude came early in the week when we opened our beehives for the first time in three months and found lots of bees abiding there. The major challenge for a beekeeper these days is keeping […]
The birth of the selfie, why Japan bombed Pearl Harbor (part 1), and reader reactions: newsletter, October 2, 2020
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,519) on Friday, October 2, 2020. Johann Sebastian Bach is on my list of “things to be thankful for” this week. In fact, he’s not far from the top. Bach lived from 1685 to 1750 and was a composer of baroque-era music. He was also deeply spiritual, […]
The writing of Hans Brinker, Gayle Lynd’s long journey, and a Walter Mosley short story: newsletter, September 25, 2020
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,521) on Friday, September 25, 2020. The year continues to bring its oddities. Major League Baseball is finishing its shortened season this week and will begin playoffs next week. The configuration is like no other, and I won’t try to explain it. I’m not […]
Gordon Parks and “The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957”
Gordon Parks bought his first camera in 1938 when he was 25 years old and living in Seattle, Washington. Up to that time, Parks did not have much of a life. Born in Kansas in 1912, Parks was one of 15 children and experienced the cruelties of racism when some white kids pitched him into […]
Mosley wins distinguished contribution medal from the National Book Foundation
Noted: this from the Washington Post: Walter Mosley has been named winner of the 2020 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. He is the first Black man to win the foundation’s $10,000 lifetime achievement award, which was first awarded in 1988. The author of more than 60 books, Mosley […]
Josephine Tey and her masterpiece of paranoia in postwar England
Those Americans of us who watch a lot of British-produced television — from Upstairs, Downstairs to Downton Abbey to Belgravia and many more besides — are often impressed, if not horrified, by the number of servants required to help the British upper-classes get through the day. Butlers, cooks, scullery maids, chambermaids — the list of […]
Mary Mapes Dodge and her extraordinary editorship of St. Nicholas magazine (part 2)
The publishers of The Century Magazine, in 1872, had given Mary Mapes Dodge a golden opportunity — a “blank check,” as we would say today. She was determined to make the most of it. They wanted her to create a magazine for children, and they were convinced that Dodge was the right person for the […]
Mary Mapes Dodge, the Silver Skates, and St. Nicholas magazine (part 1)
Mary Mapes Dodge, suffering from the disappearance and then death of her husband in 1857 and facing the need to support herself and her two sons, wrote one of the most beloved children’s novels of all time — Hans Brinkler or The Silver Skates. For that, she will always be remembered. But what she did beyond the […]
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