Auberon Alexander Waugh (1939-2001) was an English journalist, and eldest son of the famed Evelyn Waugh. He wrote five excellent novels, but gave up writing fiction because he didn’t like being compared to his famous father. Instead he made his living by writing and...
There is a story told about President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Apparently, sometime after being president for a very long time, he got tired of smiling that trade-mark Roosevelt smile and saying the trade-mark Roosevelt things at all those White House receptions. So,...
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr A dazzling book, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, published by Scribner in 2014, concerns a subject that would not necessarily bring the word “dazzling” to mind — war. World War II and the...
A preacher delivering a sermon on the text “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” argued that people can lose their souls by being TOO charitable. When some gasped at his statement, he continued: “Many people attend church, hear...
In the past few weeks, two musical groups have crossed my path. From different sides of the world, in two different languages, I have not been able to get them out of my mind. On the surface, they could not be more different: Samoan traditional folk songs and American...