Ellen F. Harris

      With a big grin spread across his cherubic, bearded face, Paul Schoomer looked like a Jewish Santa Claus. Instead of carrying a sack of toys, he would fill a shopping bag with books you did not know you needed. Serious books. Sure, Paul’s Books offered best-sellers, coffee-table tomes, and children’s books, but […]

Clint Smith asks if we have the will to reckon with our past, for “the story of slavery is the history of America. It is etched into every corner of this country and beyond.”

Readers snapped up John Lutz’s police procedurals because they could tell he knew the details of police work. As a switchboard operator for St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department, he had listened to beat cops phoning in from call boxes. “That gave me insight into how they think,” he told me. “Police think they are aware of a depth of the dark side of human nature that other people can’t begin to imagine.”

Madame Fourcades’s Secret War: The Daring Young Woman Who Led France’s Largest Spy Network Against Hitler reads like a well-written thriller about the most interesting French woman since Eleanor of Aquitaine. It stars an unlikely heroine who fought autocrats throughout her life.

“Charles as a judge was never oppressive nor demeaning to lawyers,” says former Assistant U.S. Attorney David Rosen, now an adjunct law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “He erred on the side of being human.”

In her twenties, Florence Gould danced in the Folies Bergere. In her thirties, she dazzled her guests in sequined pajamas designed for her by Coco Chanel. In her forties, during WWII, she served as a collaboration grande horizontale for high-ranking Nazis in Paris. In her fifties, as the war ended, she schemed with them to […]

Alone atop the Hill affords a unique look into the life and times of Alice Dunnigan, an African American pioneer of journalism in an age spanning Jim Crow to the beginnings of the civil rights movement.

Watch Everything explores the career and times of U.S. District Judge Charles A. Shaw as one of three brothers growing up in racially-charged St. Louis, when personal tenacity and collective caution where a way of life.