What author Patrick Ryan began as an encomium to his not-too-distant relative, the Archbishop Patrick John Ryan, developed not only into a well researched and readable history of the Archbishop but also a short history of Ireland, from... Read More

A polio epidemic in 1916 accounted for 9,000 cases of the disease in New York City alone; in 1952 the United States recorded 58,000 cases of polio; by 1964, after the introduction of the Salk vaccine, 121 cases of polio occurred... Read More

Unintelligent Humans: Questions to Stimulate Your Soul, by Richard Singer, Jr., a psychotherapist, is a small book containing barely fifty-six pages, the first twenty-one of which collect short questions and drawings designed to... Read More

It is rare that a book is palatable like a well-sauced scaloppini that demands to be enjoyed slowly, bite by bite. "Early Pleasures" by Frederick Kohner is such a book. Kohner was born in Bohemia in 1905 in a family and place that,... Read More

George Washington is quoted in "Cultivating Conscience" as saying, “Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.” This duality in human nature, and the connection between conscience and public policy, is masterfully examined... Read More

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line…,” was an especially memorable line written in 1903 by W.E.B. Du Bois in the The Souls of Black Folk, just one year before George Edwin Taylor became the first... Read More

Christopher Cartmill, successful New York playwright, director, and actor, disregarded Thomas Wolfe’s famous advice that “You can’t go home again,” and returned to his home in Nebraska to research and write a play. His subject... Read More

Like it or not, people are fascinated by other people’s troubles. All one has to do is observe how drivers slow to examine an automobile accident they come upon to recognize this aspect of human nature. It is precisely this fascination... Read More