This sad and moving story tells of the author’s terrible car accident, in which he and his beloved wife, Marian, and their two daughters were badly injured. The scene is set just prior to the accident, which came to Bohlmeijer in a... Read More

It sounds like the plot for a thriller by someone like Robert Ludlum. In 1931 Germany, Nazi thugs shoot and wound several men at a dance hall. The incident triggers three months of violence. When the suspects are brought to trial, a... Read More

Charles Darwin never uttered the phrase “survival of the fittest.” That was, in point of fact, Herbert Spencer, in his 1864 book, Principles of Biology. Spencer was more interested in serving personal philosophical goals than... Read More

One poem in this collection, titled “The Dreams That Cried,” begins: “Things become other things, she said. / It’s what’s inside them, I guess.” The poem’s narrator ponders the strangeness of folklore and the stories that... Read More

A reader of memoirs who isn’t familiar with Hayden Carruth’s poetry could be seriously misled by this collection of autobiographical sketches: Where Carruth’s poetry is radiant and expansive, this memoir is muddy and self-obsessed.... Read More

Abnormalities rooted in the frontal lobe of the brain can affect learning, behavior, and motor functioning for children, leading to challenges in the classroom as well as in the home. Experts have come to believe that students with one... Read More

For four days in June of 1854, twelve hundred passengers on seven steamboats chugged up the Mississippi River from Illinois, past Iowa and Wisconsin, and into the Minnesota Territory, during the “Grand Excursion of 1854.” The... Read More

“There’s only one way to get through this — to get through the second that just passed and the one we’re in right now and the one coming up.” So says Eve, the narrator of Aria, explaining how she survives the death at sea of... Read More