Many years ago, I hired a young man, Kevin, to help out part-time during the summer in my bookshop on Waynesville, North Carolina’s Main Street. Kevin was about six feet tall, a bulky kid who was a rising senior in high school and an outstanding student with a great sense of humor. One afternoon, I…
The First Queen of Mystery: Mary Roberts Rinehart
Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) almost wound up dead just like one of her own characters. On the morning of June 21, 1947, a disgruntled cook named Blas Reyes pointed a loaded gun at Rinehart and pulled the trigger. The only thing that saved the famous mystery writer was the age of the bullets; the filthy…
What Good Is Poetry? ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. There is nothing like a paradox to entice the mind to discover a suggested secret….
An Equality Worth Defending
In our Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote of self-evident truths “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and condemned government that was destructive of those ends. Given how important that document was, with…
Sages, Saints, and Surprises: Some Writing That Shaped America
Since the 18th century, the printed word has influenced the course of American history. From the founding of the United States, its literacy rates were higher than the countries of Europe. In his article “The Spread of Education Before Compulsion,” Edwin West of the Foundation for Economic Education writes that by 1800, literacy among white American…
Book Review: ‘Unbelievable: The Unmasking of Dr. Harrison Miller Moseley’
Tom Brokaw’s inspiring book “The Greatest Generation,” about those who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II, revealed an American generation who gave so much and asked for so little. They lived in extraordinary, challenging times but managed to build a better world with the shared values of duty, honor, courage,…
Pointing Us in the Right Direction: Good Books About Great Books
Whenever I write for The Epoch Times or other outlets about books, which is frequently, a reader or two will email me asking if I might send them a list of authors and titles worth their while. Most of them are looking for suggestions for their children and grandchildren, seeking to supplement their education with…
‘The Field Bazaar’ at 125 Years—Sherlock Holmes and the Importance of Trifles
In 1886, a struggling 27-year-old physician named Arthur Conan Doyle made a fateful decision that was intended simply to pay the bills, but that would end up enriching the world. He published a novella featuring an eccentric consulting detective by the name of Sherlock Holmes. With “A Study in Scarlet” appearing in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887,…
Book Review: ‘Too Long Ago’ by David Pietrusza
On the cover of “Too Long Ago,” there is a black-and-white photo of the happiest 4-year old boy you can imagine, holding his great-uncle’s hand at the latter’s bar in Amsterdam, New York. That boy is now the deservedly heralded presidential author and biographer, David Pietrusza. Today, Pietrusza’s default facial expression is “business somber” (he…
Book Review: ‘What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO’
With the hubbub about Mike Lindell as yet another victim of cancel culture, I decided to read his autobiography, “What Are the Odds? From Crack Addict to CEO,” released in 2019. Not the typical business memoir on leadership and management, the book follows the outer journey of a man living on the edge and the…
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