When author P.D. James began writing her first novel in the mid-1950s, she wrote later, “it never occurred to me to make a start with anything other than a detective story.” James had been reading mystery novels for many years, and she believed that she could write one that would be good enough to find • Read More »
When Helen Kirkpatrick finally got a job as the London correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in 1939, she gave herself a seemingly impossible first assignment. She suggested to her editors that she try to get an interview with the duke of Windsor, the former king Edward. The assignment seemed impossible because it was well • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 491) on Friday, August 5, 2022. The item concerning independently-owned bookstores that appeared in last week’s newsletter needs a follow-up. If you enjoy ordering books online and receiving them without having to travel, and if you also want to support your local independent bookstore, • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2, 480) on Friday, July 15, 2022. The United States is one of the few nations left on earth that allows capital punishment—the death penalty. And that punishment, according to Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at The Marshall Project and the author of Let the • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, July 8, 2022. The headline in the New York Times read “Columbia won’t participate in the next U.S. News ranking.” My heart leapt up, as the poet has said. It’s time we did away with all of these bogus numbers that essentially • Read More »
“I exist and I suffer; but the law denies my existence.” Caroline Norton, who wrote this dynamite sentence, knew the power of the pen. Indeed, she lived in a time when it was her only weapon, and she used it well. Doing so brought her a measure of personal satisfaction, but it also changed the • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,470) on Friday, June 17, 2022. Now that America is in the midst of its first major heat wave of the season, it’s probably a good idea to consider heat itself and its effect on human beings. In terms of actual deaths of humans, • Read More »
When she was 19 years old in 1912, Edna St. Vincent Millay had few prospects. She had just graduated from high school in Maine, but her family did not have enough money to send her to college. Her sister, Norma, worked as a waitress at a local inn that summer, and Edna stayed with her • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,234) on Friday, April 1, 2022. You newsletter readers are carrying much of the load for this week’s newsletter. I have received several substantial and interesting comments on articles I have included during the past couple of weeks, and I want to share them with • Read More »
History remembers the name of Catherine Parr as the sixth wife of Henry VIII’s six wives, the one who survived. In truth, however, she should be remembered for much more than that. Her accomplishments were many and widespread. Catherine Parr was the first female to have a book published in English with her name as • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,199) on Friday, March 4, 2022. Spring, the calendar tells us, is still a few weeks away, but in my part of the world, it has begun early—and not a moment too soon. The grass and trees are turning a bit greener, and the early • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, February 18, 2022. Few books touch us like the ones that we are able to read to the children in our lives: sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, cousins, grandchildren, children of friends, etc. No experience I know of can match that of reading • 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 »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, January 21, 2022. To simply know how something happens, or that it will happen, is not to understand it. That’s the case whenever I walk into the very generous garden that I have been blessed with. Come spring, something will happen, and • Read More »
Rarely does a historical novel, written for children, generate such controversy between archaeologists and historians, but that is what The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff, did when it was published in 1954. It continues to be the source of controversy today. The novel concerns the Ninth Roman legion, a legion which was mysteriously • 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 »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, January 14, 2022. Trees, we are told by a recent New York Times article, are superheroes when it comes to fighting climate change, especially in urban areas. They can lower the temperature as much as 10 degrees, reducing the demand for air • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,232) on Friday, January 7, 2022. Happy New Year. With regard to Covid, it seems that as we turn the calendar to this new year, we are little better off than a year ago. Covid cases are surging, and our faith in the vaccines to • Read More »