Part 1: Eating the Fresh Catch Part 2: Fighting Back Sometimes a writer doesn’t go looking for his next project. It comes looking for him. This is what happened to Rod Dreher, a writer at The American Conservative. He received an anonymous phone call from a doctor whose news-watching parents, immigrants from Romania, followed the story of a pizza parlor in Indiana facing [...]
I do believe that ages 12 until 30 are the most write-able years of one’s life. Coming-of-age adventures never get old for readers. Exhibit A for my little theory is How Did You Get This Number?, a collection of essays by Sloane Crosley. Crosley is a child of the New York suburbs; also a child of the sexual revolution, living out the long adolescence [...]
We all know his faults. If you can’t figure them out on your own, late-night comics, the hosts on The View or your Facebook friends will enumerate them for you, punctuating it all with a good many exclamation points and some virtual flying spittle. Mormons who like Jeff Flake will question your decency if you support him. They must not have had a dad [...]
Come with me and we’ll escape into a world that is no more, but must have been lovely while it lasted. We’ll see it through the eyes of Carol Buckley who, in At the Still Point, remembers life as the youngest of ten children in a family of notables and achievers. Daddy Buckley had a golden thumb. With his money, he housed his large [...]
So, who remembers their high school history textbook? Chances are, if you attended between 1980 and today, you studied Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Writers of Zinn’s era approached history in a new way, concentrating less on kings, presidents, and tycoons and more on the guy on the assembly line, the waitress, the cancer patient, all the people affected by [...]
It was the biggest Boy Scout trip ever. At the same time, it was the equivalent of shooting a manned rocket to the moon. It was the Lewis and Clark Expedition and, in Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage, Meriwether Lewis occupies center stage as the captain and, along with Thomas Jefferson, dreamer and planner of the voyage. Jefferson bought the continent-stretching piece of land then [...]
Hey folks, I just lost the draft of my post on Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. So let's just go with a few quotes: This book is about morality, about right and wrong. To me, the question of what to do about fossil fuels and any other moral issue comes down to: What will promote human life? What will promote human [...]
Adam Grant missed a huge opportunity. Four college students proposed a business idea to him, and Grant took a pass. His subsequent self-flagellating turned into a Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. I picked it up with more than a little reluctance. I don’t know how much originality I can tolerate. Say, some young lady wears combat boots with her prom gown. That’s original, [...]
I used to read Mormon blogs. It was my favorite way to avoid work every day. Mind you, I’m not talking about the mommy blogs, where they offered recipes and kids’ activities. I read the brainy-people-complain blogs, where they admitted that motherhood is hard and aggressive missionary tactics are embarrassing and 35 minutes of Sunday School feels like 135. Vigorous, bracing discussion it was. [...]
They Say in Harlan County by Alessandro Portelli is not, understandably, every reader’s cup of tea (or jar of moonshine, given the subject). It’s an oral history gathered in perhaps the most quintessential Appalachian county there ever was. Since I’ve got a soft spot for Appalachia — nope, I’m not ashamed of my Kentucky grandfather — I read this kind of stuff. What is [...]
