Basho’s wife one day found herself with a serious travel bug. Soon Cesca convinced her husband to quit his day job to take an excursion to the East, partly inspired by his fascination with Eastern philosophies. The travelogue begins in Australia, but the nitty gritty starts in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The people they meet…
Life in small-town Pennsylvania in 1965 is starting to reflect concerns reverberating across the country: The shadows of World War II remain, with the specter of Nazis who escaped justice lingering; the effects of the more recent Korean war are still felt; and on the home front, second-wave feminism is changing the dynamics of the…
Even before the reader meets upstanding Mark Greenley, former star college athlete and current dedicated paramedic and Little League coach, a murky opening chapter titled The Librarian introduces two blind men in a vaguely described room full of files that are labeled in braille, whose contents aren’t in braille—so the men can retrieve the files,…
“This book is a transmission,” the author declares, not a memoir, though his life serves as the “evidence and the vehicle” for that transmission. Drawing on experiences spanning military service, practicing tax law, and impressive strength training, he urges readers to choose “the harder right over the easier option.” As a teenager, Timothy emigrated with…
In this novel’s version of planet Earth’s distant future, much like our contemporary world, some have rejected artificial intelligence and technology, while others seek to hasten humanity’s transformation. But in Vaughn’s accelerated dystopian society, humanity remains threatened by the Geometry, a mysterious superintelligence capable of erasing entire populations. After an amnesiac woman bursts from a…
The book opens in 1995 with Yacoobi on a bus bound for Afghanistan; she was returning to the country for the first time in more than two decades. She knew that her mission to set up clandestine schools for girls would almost certainly lead to her being “arrested, tortured, or killed on the spot” if…
“Throughout history, rulers of humankind narrowly defined the world’s center to be their own corner of the world,” writes Stoffer. From the Babylonians and Romans to the Zhou dynasty and the Aztecs, imperial civilizations have made dramatic claims about their importance and exceptionalism. In this work, Stoffer argues that our history is more accurately defined…
As the music industry has undergone a profound paradigm shift in the 21st century, it has left a lot of history behind: small labels that released seminal music, studios where those classics were recorded, sessions so significant that they established one Southern town as “the Birthplace of Country Music.” If a culture commemorates battlefields and…
Midterm elections latest: Rift grows between Democrats Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens in Michigan CNN El-Sayed’s Campaign Doesn’t Want Haley Stevens at His Events The New York Times US Senate candidate El-Sayed wants Democratic rival to stay away, source says Reuters Michigan feud threatens Democratic unity in key Senate race Financial Times Haley Stevens advised to stay away from…
“Saturday Night Live” paid tribute to the Milwaukee Brewers’ historic World Series win during a Weekend Update segment that featured the return of Bobby Moynihan’s Drunk Uncle commentator character. Moynihan spent nine seasons on “SNL,” from 2009 to 2017. His recurring Drunk Uncle character was a classic Archie Bunker-esque East Coast guy with blunt observations…