Insomniac since my twenties, I have tried every herbal, narcotic, meditative, ocean-waved, breath-counting trick there is. The best, hands down, was the time I spent at a friend’s apartment in downtown Chicago. Snow fell lightly, outlining the gracious old hotels and turning the streetlights numinous, and every night the heavy clop-clop of the […]
As it rounded a corner in a parking lot at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the Dymaxion Car made a nostalgic sound, throaty and hardworking. Its engine, a 1933 Ford Flathead V-8, has been described as one of the 10 best engines of the last century and was used for both cars and trucks, […]
Eunice Verdell Rivers was born on November 12, 1899, in Jakin, Georgia. She was best known as “Nurse Rivers” during her time as a public health nurse with the Macon County Health Department in Alabama. Her name became entangled with the infamous “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” the colloquial name for the […]
The last two times I taught African Americans and Children’s Literature I went out of my way to teach a book by Shirley Graham Du Bois (born November 11, 1896). There were three reasons for this: First, I wanted students to understand that children’s literature was more than fiction and poetry, that non-fiction […]
All kids are tuned to difference, since it means survival. But when you grow up poor you become acutely aware that some people have the means to change things, even in small ways, but do not. Discouraged by the enormity of the problem, they laugh too much or develop blank or busy looks. […]
“She lived as if the gospel were true.” —Daniel Berrigan¹ Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness², was placed in my hands fifty years ago by Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit poet and prophet of nonviolence. Fresh from federal prison for burning draft files as a protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam, he […]
In November 1989, the world watched with disbelief as the Berlin Wall fell. In America, we followed one breathless report after another about the end of communism, and we speculated about the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe and perhaps even the Soviet Union. Fortified by an attitude of triumphalism and optimism, the […]
Norman Rockwell died forty-three years ago today. As a visual storyteller he had few peers, and his timing was good, too. His lifespan (1894-1978) tracked the rise and fall of illustrated magazines with striking precision. The fusty family house magazines like Harper’s Monthly, Century, and Scribner’s Magazine began to give way to cheaper, […]
What do I get for predicting that James Bond would still be looking over his shoulder in retirement, and despite his heroic adventures would feel only fatigue and purposelessness? None of that was hard, but what about my prediction that he would be “bombing-around in a vintage Land Rover, then cleaning it to […]
On November 2, 1963, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated, the victim of a military coup. Twenty days later U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in what was apparently another coup, although it remains unclear who wanted it and why. This is clearly what Malcolm X was referring […]
