James Eads How was the grandson of James Buchanan Eads, designer of the world-famous Eads Bridge. James Eads How lived as a hobo. His bindle (bedroll) was a black and white buffalo plaid, tied to a stick. At least, that is how it was represented in Warehouse 13, a science fiction […]
Pity Lizzie Gottlieb. Daughter of one of the finest book editors of the twentieth century, she is fascinated by his prickly but immensely fruitful relationship with Robert Caro, one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century. She wants to make a documentary about that relationship. Neither man will allow […]
“We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.”― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose A book can change your life. But a rare and mysterious book, one with secrets not yet fathomed? A book like that can own you. The Rule of Four is a New York […]
I have always loved the phrasing used in India after someone dies: “He is no more.” Stark, simple, powerful. The being has ended. Compare that to our various euphemisms. “Passing” can also suggest deception, pretending to be White or female or whatever might prove an advantage. Or traveling—“I’m just passing through”—but […]
Let us end our time travel with death, the most revealing state of all. There was no privacy between the 1860s and 1880s; one learned from the newspaper exactly what ailed one’s neighbors. An awful lot of dropsy, the swelling we now call edema, and specifically, dropsy of the heart; also […]
The Civil War was over. Reconstruction had begun. How were Blacks faring in rural Missouri? The editor of the Jefferson Democrat does not sound like a wholesale bigot, but he wrote within a societal grid of long-established prejudice, wariness, and condescension. In 1871, for example, the newspaper reported: “Two Negro Militiamen […]
From old issues of the Jefferson Democrat, painstakingly transcribed for the Jefferson County Historical Society, we can extract the gentle amusements of life in these parts a century and a half ago. If you fancied yourself “book-larned,” there were debates: “Question—Resolved that man is the architect of his own fortune.” (Six […]
Someone far more altruistic than I has transcribed old issues of the Jefferson Democrat word by word, starting a little before the 1870s and ending a little after, for the Jefferson County Historical Society. You cannot find this amalgamation of humor, tragedy, scandal, poignancy, derring-do, and sweet quirkiness in all of Netflix. And […]
The entire world is short-staffed these days, all of us fed up with working. Thoreau would grin and ask what took us so long. He swiftly figured out how to work only one day a week for his few necessities and use the rest of his time to do his own […]
Nothing nags at you like an overdue book. For half a century, I have dwelt in an unreasonable terror of that ten-cent fine. There were changes along the way, of course. Online renewing thrilled me—this was all I had to do? Click a box? But oh, when someone else wanted that […]
