Patrice’s Uncle Kurt & The Holocaust
On 16-17 October, The United States Holocaust Museum sponsored Patrice’s 89-year-old Uncle Kurt Maier, Emeritus Librarian, Library of Congress (German collection), lectures at Chicago’s Harold Washington Library. Kurt, a Holocaust survivor with a wicked...
Honor Flight 2 September 2019
Honor Flight September 1, 2019 -- Northern Wisconsin On Labor Day week-end, 2019 I joined 200+ veterans and guardians on the local Honor Flight To Washington, D.C. I went grudgingly… Marcia, my daughter, had long ago signed me up. Patrice, my wife, more or less...
Semur-en-Auxios, France
Observation tower and portion of medieval Semur-en-Auxios defensive wall. Patrice and I are moving this November (2019) to Semur-en-Auxios., near Dijon, in Burgundy, France. Why? Because we can. We are retired, squared away, and I speak French. And, as opposed to...
The Impossible Presidency
Professor and historian Jeremi Suri’s The Impossible Presidency shines. Neither ornate nor prosaic, his words are well-chosen, his metaphors apt, the construction of the argument convincing (to me, at least). A previous work, Kissinger, rests on my desks...
Louts, Predators and Daughters
I am a hard case for the homilists of Holy Wisdom, the Benedictine Monastery, Madison, Wisconsin, where I attend mass. I tend to zone out. However, the first reading during last week’s mass, Numbers 27:1-11. caught my attention. Here, before Moses, the daughters...Featured Books
The Executioner’s Son
In the spring, 1953, Danton Larionov, son of NKVD officer, Captain Volk Larionov, spies Ekaterina Soroka, the Ukrainian, herding sheep in the shadow of the Suzdal's medieval fortress. He intends to rape her, but she pauses him with a fairy tale beginning his time of troubles. Suzdal is now a GULAG. As Stalin's death convulses the Soviet Union, she holds him a bay with Russian tales. In the fall, she disappears, as if Koschei, the Deathless, has taken her. He vows to find her, and begins his journey through distant and strange lands to battle an implacable and cunning enemy armed with the most improbable and powerful weapons, the American soldier, Richard Belisle, hero of the first and second novels of The Long War Series.
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