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 »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,237) on Friday, December 31, 2021. Happy New Year. Janus is the two-headed god who looks both backward and forward. For a couple of weeks, we will be looking back through the weekly newsletter and picking some of my favorite item because of their stories • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, December 24, 2021. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone. This era of Covid has discombobulated (I love that word) everyone, and I have no easy answers or sage advice. I still wear a mask whenever I go into a public but • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, December 17, 2021. The recent flutter of publicity about the fact that trial defendant Ghislaine Maxwell sketched the artist who was sketching her in court (see this New York Magazine article if you want to know more about that) reminded me about • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, December 10, 2021. Nearly one quarter of adults in the United States (23 percent) are on Twitter, according to a recent in-depth survey and analysis by the Pew Research Center. I was surprised by that figure because it is higher than I • 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 »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, November 26, 2021. Thanksgiving Day, I think, is the best of all holidays. It can be religious or secular or a lot of both. It comes close to the end of the year but not so close that we are making “best • Read More »
Two playwrights dominated the London theater scene at the beginning of the 18th century. Both were women. One was the — Aphra Behn (the subject of a previous post in this newsletter). The other was Susanna Centlivre. As with Aphra Behn, relatively few details are available to us about Susanna Centlivre’s origins and early life. • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, November 12, 2021. Growing up in Nashville in the 1950s and 1960s, we were certainly aware of country music and the Grand Ole Opry, but our focus as teenagers was on rock ’n roll. None of the people I knew realized just • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,272) on Friday, October 8, 2021. Audiobooks—are they really “books”? If you listen to an audiobook, does that count as reading one? Those questions came to mind as I read an email this week from a good friend and newsletter reader. She was responding to • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,290) on Friday, September 10, 2021. The bandsaw box is something known to most woodworkers. You take a block of wood usually about the size of your hand with the fingers spread out (give or take) and a few inches deep. Then, through a series • Read More »
When the heavy hand of the British crown grew more onerous on the American colonists in the 1760s and early 1770s, a satirical play appeared in the Massachusetts Spy lampooning Thomas Hutchinson, the crown-appointed governor of Massachusetts. The title of the play was The Adulateur, and one of the main characters was Rapatio, who was • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,313) on Friday, August 6, 2021. Writers are often asked where they get their ideas on what to write about. Fiction writers probably field this question more than non-fiction writers, but the question seems to be universally on the minds of readers. Many writers like • Read More »
This newsletter was sent to everyone on Jim’s email list (2,332) on Friday, July 2, 2021. Americans celebrate themselves this weekend, as they should. America has no shortage of problems, faults, and flaws. It also has no shortage of critics, many of whom are Americans themselves. So it should be. But one thing that Americans prove • Read More »
William Whewell had a problem. In 1834, he was reviewing a newly-published book titled On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. It was an extraordinary work, something that he had never encountered before. It was a book that took on incomplete and fragmented knowledge of the fields of astronomy, mathematics, physics, geology, and chemistry and brought • Read More »