Look at the Trees!

Look at the Trees!

A memory that came back to me as David and I rode from southern Virginia to Northern Georgia on this book tour.  I am eight-years old .It is June,1966. We are in a blue station wagon, filled with plants and cats and little brothers. The infant is in a basket in the...
“I DON’T READ.”

“I DON’T READ.”

Peddling my book, I keep hearing this confession:  I don’t read. I can’t read.  I am not a reader. At a table on Lake Street in Minneapolis a man said, “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I haven’t told anyone.” He intimated the problem was his eyes. He wanted to...

Calling up the Nineteenth Century to Understand our Own Times.  Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth, Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered and Tony Horowitz’s Spying on the South

Annette Gordon-Reed, and Barbara Kingsolver are writers grounded in history, science, and Tony Horowitz was a writer steeped in evidence, yet reading On Juneteenth, Unsheltered, and Spying on the South together, felt like a mystical retreat with three mediums,...