A Baby in Every Bottle: Lydia Pinkham, Purveyor of Patent Medicine and Sex Education

Robert Burns and the Clarinda Letters

Robert Burns is a favorite poet of mine. I don’t know which came first, my fascination with Scotland or with Burns, but one feeds the other and I am besotted.

Through his poems, Burns takes me to Scotland — “Yon wild mossy mountains sae…

Frederick Douglass: Explaining What It Means to Be Human

The Bridge of San Luis Rey: Collapse and Connection

Lessons from The Samurai’s Garden

The Samurai’s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama is a quietly compelling novel. It tells of the passage of a boy out of childhood: the year is 1937 and Stephen is a Chinese boy sent to recuperate in his family’s Japanese beach house following a withering bout of tuberculosis…

Charles Lamb: Essays of Elia

The 19th century was a great century for writers. If I could only bring one century of writing with me to a desert island, I would choose the nineteenth without hesitation. Not only for the literature but for the essays: the essayists of the 19th century were wide-ranging in…

How I Wrote American Rebels

First, the why?

365 Books: A Year of Mourning and of Joy

Fourteen years ago, my oldest sister died of cancer. Three years later, I began a year of…

How to Read All Day

Always have a book with you.

Read while waiting.
Read while eating.
Read while exercising.
Read before bed.
Read before getting out of bed.