In juvenile and children’s books, the image of the swashbuckling, adventurous pirate is rarely tempered by the more sobering history of piracy. William Gilkerson’s newest book, "A Thousand Years of Pirates", manages to preserve the... Read More

Huck Finn in Hawaii bread wagons “Rice Paddy Navy” cage girls high seas drama the KGB political moles cultural nuances: these comprise some of the more intriguing elements that the author has woven into his life’s story. One can... Read More

Contingency Plans: Like 9/11, Katrina, anthrax, and oil shortage; there’s nothing as certain as death and change. Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins,... Read More

Sandwiched between The Confessions of Saint Augustine (AD 398 and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah (AD 2007) are thousands of memoirs. Both intimate and intriguing, these personal stories represent a form of... Read More

Lawyers are a profoundly miserable lot. They are overworked, depressed, and unfulfilled, and most say that, in retrospect, they wish they had chosen another profession. The downward spiral begins in law school, where the “Socratic... Read More

For serious readers of poetry, this author is its epicenter of literary criticism. Throughout her tenure at Harvard University as Professor of English, from thoughtful reviews to her several studies on Yeats, Stevens, Seamus Heaney, to... Read More

In England (where the author enjoys higher name recognition as Oxford University’s Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature, author of biographies of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather among others, and a Commander of the British Empire... Read More

A tranquil and protected life in the ivory tower is rarely enjoyed by faculty and never experienced by university presidents. Wachman, in his engaging memoir, mentions that being president of Temple University, Philadelphia’s large... Read More