Teacher and Author
I get mildly annoyed when my wife scrolls through her iPhone in bed at night. There is nothing mild about it when she deigns to play audio, almost always a song-and-dance number from some local theater production. On this particular … Continued
Twilight of the Gods is a thrilling conclusion to Ian Toll’s thirteen-years-in-the-making “Pacific War Trilogy.” The longest and, Toll admits, hardest of the three to write, the final volume is nevertheless a taut narrative of the war’s complex final year. … Continued
To Rescue the Republic: Ulysses S. Grant, the Fragile Union, and the Crisis of 1876 is Bret Baier’s fourth biographical book. Even so, I couldn’t escape the feeling that he is playing at being a historian (especially since I can … Continued
Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads was a gift. Listening to it in my car during the Holiday season was like an audio advent calendar. Each new commute-long section brought surprises, like daily presents wrapped up just for me. As it happened, I … Continued
N wasn’t at the grocery store on Sunday morning. I went in all smiles, ready to talk Bengals, especially about that interception last week when Ja’Marr Chase had his defender beat, but he looked to the end zone before the … Continued
“Kids these days….” The phrase doesn’t need to be completed and usually isn’t. But the meaning is clear. Children have disappointed their parents. Or, if not their own, other parents’ kids have, with their ignorance, rudeness, and general misbehavior. The … Continued
Thomas Sowell published A Conflict of Visions thirty-five years ago, the first volume in a trilogy on the nature of political struggle. It was received with a yawn, by the establishment, at least. Sowell seemed to speak for no one … Continued
“He was buried in Hyde Park, his impact largely forgotten in the city and region that he loved enough to want to change.” [352] Thus ends Kerry Greenidge’s 2020 biography of the–yes–much neglected William Monroe Trotter. He was born in … Continued
We attend to data that support (confirm) our existing beliefs (biases). The phenomenon is so common it has a name: confirmation bias. I was aware of this process as I read Kerri Greenidge’s important new biography, Black Radical: The … Continued
I finished Ron Chernow’s definitive biography of Alexander Hamilton this month. It is easy to see how Lin-Manuel Miranda was inspired to write a musical about this overlooked “founding father without a father.” His life is truly operatic. I could … Continued