An excellent, well-written piece of history by one of my favorite nonfiction writers, who I was able to meet and listen to while he was actually finishing up this volume. Concise and straightforward, he avoids over dramatization in the telling, while ably detailing the times and passions involved...
This was exactly the palate-cleansing travel memoir that I needed to recover from the barren gloom of Theater of Fish. One For the Road is the second travel memoir I've read about Australia, and the second one I've loved. I'm starting to think I'd love anything Tony Horwitz writes (write faster!...
An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.—AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil’s Dictionary I’m late for Western Civ. A blue exam notebook lies on my desk. Everyone else is already taking the test. I open the blue boo...
My arrival is as indirect as the pub crawl that’s carried me there. Bill bypasses town and drives to a rocky slope facing west into the MacDonnell Ranges. No verdant Blue Mountains here, just eroded ridges of red rock, winding into the desert. But it isn’t the scenery Bill’s after. Unable to be a...
“O Patriot true! O Christian meek and brave!” Bronson Alcott wrote in a sonnet to mark the occasion. His daughter, Louisa May, also felt moved to poetry: “Living, he made life beautiful, /—Dying, made death divine.” Unaware of Brown’s blood-soaked prophecy, the Alcotts and others continued to cel...