Book Review: ‘Norman Rockwell’s Models: In and Out of the Studio’
During the middle of the 20th century, Norman Rockwell became America’s artist. He captured the best of what America represented: freedom, friendship, and family, these typically encapsulated with a sense ...
05-31-2023
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Poetry: A.E. Housman’s ‘To an Athlete Dying Young’
To the young and healthy, death can often seem a courteous entity, one that will patiently await the completion of life's narrative before interrupting with its final word. ...
06-1-2023
Which to Choose: Mark Twain’s Short Story, ‘The Five Boons of Life’
Throughout our lives, we desire many different gifts but rarely desire death. We come to fear our end and so seek what we think are better gifts, rather ...
05-29-2023
Book Recommendation: ‘Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable’
Wordsmiths and bibliophiles unite as Mark Dunn’s “Ella Minnow Pea” celebrates its 20th anniversary by releasing an illustrated edition to mark this milestone. ‘A Novel in Letters’ Ella ...
05-28-2023
Friendships That Endure: Aesop’s Fable, ‘Two Travelers and a Bear’
True friendship is characterized most by loyalty, for loyalty is the virtue that sustains friendships through any hardship. Loyalty gives us the courage to remain with friends, even ...
05-26-2023
Epoch Booklist: Recommended Reading for May 26–June 1
This week, we feature a witty guide to domestic and cultural sanity and an incisive look at the gifts Greek classics have bestowed on our culture. Nonfiction ‘Domestic ...
05-26-2023
Book Recommendation: ‘Gila Lost and Found: Search and Rescue in New Mexico’
I have a special fondness for New Mexico and its intrinsic natural beauty. Many of my cousins (on my mother’s side) reside there, predominantly around Albuquerque and Socorro. ...
05-23-2023
Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’: The Wife of Bath: A Character With Surprising Views
One of the most recognized characters of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales," the Wife of Bath, is known for her novel ideas on marriage and love. Chaucer created a ...
05-21-2023
Book Review: ‘Bloody Blood Groups!’: Blood Types and Groups From A to Z
Blood is the essence of life. It also forms an important part of our culture: If it bleeds, it leads; blood is thicker than water; blood will have ...
05-20-2023
Epoch Booklist: Recommended Reading for May 19–25
This week, we feature a children’s classic that stirs the love of nature and a lucid essay collection exploring early 20th-century naval history. Naval History ‘Fighting in the ...
05-19-2023
Book Review: ‘Battle of Ink and Ice: A Sensational Story of New Barons, North Pole Explorers, and the Making of Modern Media’
Before reality television, people satisfied the urge to see new places and do new things by reading about the exploits of risk takers, including explorers. Before the internet ...
05-18-2023
Book Recommendation: ‘Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World’
As I pen this recommendation, I’m looking out my home office window to a world of green from the trees that stand tall to greet the day. Perhaps ...
05-18-2023
Book Recommender: Behind Abraham Lincoln’s Journey From Log Cabin to White House
So much has been written about Abraham Lincoln that it seems impossible to reveal more. Yet John Cribb’s work of historical fiction, “The Rail Splitter,” gives us the ...
05-17-2023
Lost in Excess: Mark Twain’s Short Story, ‘Hunting the Deceitful Turkey’
Temperance is a very undervalued and much ignored virtue. Though we usually associate temperance with food and drink, we should apply it to everything else in our lives ...
05-16-2023
The Enemy Within: Jean Raspail’s ‘The Camp of the Saints’ 50 Years Later
From the terrace of his home on the crest of a hill, an old professor peers through a spyglass at the scene unfolding below on the sand and ...
05-16-2023
Book Review: ‘Crushed: Big Tech’s War on Free Speech’
Monopolies are nothing new in our capitalist economy, but as Colorado Congressman Ken Buck aptly illustrates in his book “Crushed: Big Tech’s War on Free Speech” (“Crushed”), Silicon ...
05-13-2023
Yeats’s ‘Adam’s Curse’: The Dignity of Work
For the whole of human history, man has simultaneously shirked from work, sought respite from it, delighted in it, and found it a necessity. Even while seeking to ...
05-13-2023
The Glass-Half-Full Poet: Edgar Guest and the American Spirit
Like millions of other immigrants to America, Edgar Albert Guest (1881–1959) worked hard, overcame adversity, made good, and loved the land that gave birth to his dreams and ...
05-13-2023
Book Recommender: A Refreshing Bestseller Saluting the True and Proud History of America
The weighty, 944-page “A Patriot’s History of the United States,” originally published in 2004, has been lauded by mainstream press as “refreshing” in its absence of a political ...
05-13-2023
Epoch Booklist: Recommended Reading for May 12–18
This week, we feature an urban planner’s engaging guide to building on Mars and a suspenseful novel about eight strangers who meet one fateful day. Fiction ‘The Time ...
05-12-2023
Book Review: ‘The Lost Diary of George Washington: The Revolutionary War Years’
George Washington kept a diary throughout his life except for a break during the bulk of the war years. When he resumed his diary in May of 1781, ...
05-11-2023
Book Review: ‘Afghanistan 1979–88: Soviet Air Power Against the Mujahideen’
The aftermath of America’s disastrous and tragic withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 can never be forgotten. It is too cataclysmic to forget. But it should ...
05-11-2023
Book Review: Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion
Westward expansion is a most fascinating era of American history. It was a time of hope and chaos, promise and betrayal, hardship and serenity, and that hardly covers ...
05-10-2023