Hero of the Empire

I don’t always get to books when they first come out.* And that’s not a bad thing. Speaking as a writer, I want people to continue to find and read my books long after their publication date.** Speaking as a reader, I love digging into the backlist of authors who have newly crossed my path.…

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On Juneteenth

I recently did a major sort-and-purge of the unread non-fiction in my study. Once again, I had accumulated piles of books on the floor in front of the bookshelves where the un-read non-fiction lives.  In order to put books on the shelves, I had to get rid of books that I had no intention of…

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City of the Century

Many moons ago I bought Donald Miller’s City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America as background material for a book proposal I was working on. I stopped the proposal halfway through, when I got the commission to write Mankind: the History of All of Us for the History Channel…

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