When is it as good as it can be?

When is it as good as it can be?

 I have finished composing novel # 5, the working title Resurrection, the last book in The Long War series. These five novels follow two men and two women, American and Russian, from their mid-teens to a denouement during the breakup of Yugoslavia.     They...
Patrice’s Uncle Kurt & The Holocaust

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...
The Impossible Presidency

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...
Perfume River – The storyteller and truth

Perfume River – The storyteller and truth

The Storyteller and Truth Robert Olen Butler and Perfume River The novel is a pack of lies hounding the truth. Carlos Fuentes Robert Olen Butler is in my estimation the finest living American author and his just released book, Perfume River, his finest novel. It is...
On Bullshit: Liars and Storytellers

On Bullshit: Liars and Storytellers

On Bullshit and On Truth I had long visualized the lexicon landscape between The Truth and The Lie as a continuum along which lay a rich and varied vocabulary––deception, denial, camouflage, working truth, baloney, etc––with full equivalents in every language on the...
On Truth: Harry Frankfurt

On Truth: Harry Frankfurt

Why am I doing this? I’ve lied and the shame burns to this day.  Someone I’ve trusted lied to me; the injury heals as slowly as a gunshot wound. I’ve watched a grand deception unfold, its objective the death of millions, and contributed my share to its discovery and...