Chris Wohlwend Chris Wohlwend is a magazine writer and editor and author of the memoir Ridge Running: A Memoir of Appalachia. The article below is about one of his experiences pursuing the worldwide field of auto racing. +++ I was awakened by loud laughter followed by a quieter “shhhh”. The language was French, the voices • Read More »
Chris Wohlwend Chris Wohlwend is a magazine writer and editor and author of the memoir Ridge Running: A Memoir of Appalachia. The article below is about one of his experiences pursuing the worldwide field of auto racing. +++ The glass of champagne wasn’t something I had planned, or even cared much about. But I was • Read More »
If you are someone who rides horses or who thinks of horses as among the most graceful and beautiful animals on earth, Janet Jones has things to say that you will want to hear. Jones is a neuroscientist who studies perception, language, memory, and thought. She also trains horses and has become a keen observer • Read More »
To know anything about publishing is to know that best-seller lists are not always what they appear to be. Some of those lists do in fact reflect sales of books. But many, especially the ones you might see inside bookstores, reflect something quite different. Recently there surfaced a story from Great Britain that WH Smith, • Read More »
America does itself no credit for accumulating one of the largest imprisioned populations per capita in the world. For generations now, the politically popular thing to be is “tough on crime,” and that has meant bringing more actions into the definition of criminal behavior and putting more and more people into our bulging prisons. The • Read More »
By 1963, Norman Rockwell had been associated with the Saturday Evening Post for nearly five decades, had created icons for the American public, and had himself become something of an icon. As an illustrator, the title he gave himself, he had reflected in his art how many Americans envisioned themselves. The problem was that it • Read More »
When Mickey Ganitch woke up on the morning of December 7, 1941, he wasn’t thinking about the possibility of war with Japan. Instead, he was thinking about football. Specifically, his thoughts focused on the game in which he would be playing that day. Ganitch was a signalman on the USS Pennsylvania, which is sitting in • Read More »
How many times in your childhood (or adulthood, for that matter) have you been “shushed” in a library? Probably more than you can remember, right? Everybody knows that you’re supposed to be quiet in a library. It’s just a natural thing. Except it isn’t. The idea of being quiet in a library comes from Thomas • Read More »
Have you ever had the feeling when you were reading about George Washington that you might not of been getting the full story? Is this guy really is good and perfect as American mythology makes him out to be? George Washington was certainly essential to the founding of the United States. He gets a lot • Read More »
The owners of major-league baseball teams in 1941 had a radical plan to change the game. It was not a rule change. Baseball rules have been in place for more than four decades, and they seem to be working well. This was a change of venue. For all of its existence major league baseball head • Read More »
With the publication of the stories of the murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe is deservedly labeled as the “father of modern detective fiction.” Unfortunately, he died too soon to develop that genre. That became the task of others. One of those authors, now long forgotten, was Anna Katharine Green. She is credited • Read More »
Some years ago, the BBC produced a 90-minute documentary on the parallel lives and careers of Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone titled Gladstone and Disraeli: Clash of the Titans. (You can watch it on YouTube, irritatingly divided into six 15-minute segments with the first here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4CHsWMV3Es) When it comes to 19th-century British politics, the title is • Read More »
As the baby of the family, Anne Brontë never got beyond the shadows of her more famous sisters, Charlotte and Emily. Everyone in the family doted on her, and when she died early, at the age of only 29, in 1849, her reputation and her place in English literature faded even further. Anne deserved a • Read More »
How’s this for a plot? A number of people (eight or ten) with dark secrets are lured to a place where they can’t escape (a locked room or a deserted island). They are greeted by a host they cannot see and told that in a short time, they will all be dead. Then, they start • Read More »
Chances are, you have given a copy of Goodnight Moon to expectant parents to make sure it was in their child’s library when the time came for them to understand it. Or maybe somebody gave you a copy when you were young. If so, it would have been one of the more than 50 million • Read More »
“I notice that when all a man’s information is confined to the field in which he is working, the work is never as good as it ought to be. A man has to get a perspective, and he can get it from books or from people — preferably from both. This thing of sleeping and • Read More »
For more than five decades, Mort Drucker was one of the most subversive people in America. Drucker was not some member of an anti-government cell plotting the violent overthrow of the rule of law. Rather he was an artist who could draw people like no other artist, revealing their pomposities and absurdities but in a • Read More »
Arthur Ashe we remember as a tennis star whose quickness and grace on the court masked a concentration and preparation that few athletes have matched. Ashe’s tennis career was cut short by health problems and his life ended tragically early by a medical accident. Ashe was many things besides a tennis champion. Among them, he • Read More »
Rarely, if ever, has an art, music, and theater critic held such sway over American public opinion as did James Gibbons Huneker at the beginning of the 20th century. Huneker accomplished this feat using a depth of knowledge about his subjects and a writing style that would-be scribblers such as H.L. Mencken sought to emulate. • Read More »
When Thomas Edison famously made his first sound recording in 1877 on a machine that he had just invented, the phonograph, his first words had to be something that everyone was familiar with. So, he said, “Mary had a little lamb, . . .” The nursery rhyme he was quoting wasn’t one that was composed • Read More »