reviews

Soaring (and litigating) into history... Author:  Lawrence Goldstone In the vast pantheon of great American heroes, there are only two men – brothers, actually – who can claim space on not just one, but two state license plates.  (Ohio and North Carolina have been fighting over the legacy of Wilbur and Orville Wright for decades and as every fifth grader knows, the former bike mechanics invented the airplane, or more accurately, they achieved the first powered, controlled and sustained heavier-than-air flight by a human being.) But there’s much more to the story than the Wright Flyer I successfully flying forty [...]

100 Years Later... Author:  Adam Hochschild Human history may have never witnessed a more rapid and horrific conflagration than what would come to be called World War I.  In just a matter of weeks in the dark summer of 1914, formerly quiet and peacefully coexisting European countries were at each other’s throats for reasons that to this day remain difficult to comprehend.  For four long and bloody years, purportedly rational young men traveled from all over the world to kill each other on three continents.  In the end, more than 16 million people would die and the world would never [...]

Mother Nature's Mean Side... Author:  Sebastian Junger One of the problems with non-fiction writing is that the events one writes about are supposed to have actually happened.  What if you don’t know what happened?  What if it’s practically unknowable?  How do you piece together a story when your subject matter is somewhere on the bottom of the ocean?  Undeterred, journalist Sebastian Junger decided to write The Perfect Storm, overcoming this formidable obstacle surefootedly. In October 1991, a commercial swordfishing boat – the Andrea Gail, out of Gloucester, Massachusetts – ran into one of the nastiest patches of bad weather the [...]