“Della Raye’s only possession was the ragged, filthy dress she wore—made from a discarded feed sack. Hunger had stalked every day of her short life. She had never tasted ice cream, never petted a puppy, never played with a doll.”... Read More

Elston Howard had much better timing on the baseball diamond than off it. The first black New York Yankee—a solid catcher with a lifetime fielding average of .993 who was voted the American League’s Most Valuable Player in... Read More

Few English writers offer as much mystery and magic as Daniel Defoe, and very few can match his output, which ranges from Robinson Crusoe—the very stuff of escapism and adventure—to pamphlets on the political, religious, and economic... Read More

“I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous,” declared Sterne, and in bursting onto the London literary scene in 1760, with the publication of the first two volumes of Tristram Shandy (“an Anglican vicar’s bawdy novel”), he won a... Read More

People nowadays take the simple act of turning on the television for granted. Some young people can’t even fathom life before cable, VCRs, or remote controls. (Heaven forbid some slothful viewer should have to get up to change the... Read More

In an early journal, John Muir listed his address as “Earth-planet, Universe.” His interests, beyond the American wilderness he defended so staunchly, included the Amazon, the planned destination of his youthful 1,000-mile walk... Read More

Jon Vickers played the most demanding of operatic hero roles brilliantly. In a career spanning over thirty-five years, he was Aeneas, Otello, Parsifal, Tristan and Peter Grimes injecting into each role an emotional, intellectual and... Read More

In an era which renders obsolete the latest and greatest media technology almost as soon as it is unpacked from the box, Levinson seeks to understand the role of media in human affairs by re-examining the ideas of a man who died in 1980,... Read More