Note: As we come up on the 50th Anniversary of the Pentagon Papers, and with the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers, we felt it was timely to look back at the conflict in Vietnam. Over the next few months, I am doing an examination of several Vietnam-era historical works that examine both sides of…
Author: Rich Collins
Note: As we come up on the 50th Anniversary of the Pentagon Papers, and with the recent release of the Afghanistan Papers, we felt it was timely to look back at the conflict in Vietnam. Over the next month, I am doing an examination of several Vietnam-era historical works that examine both sides of the…
What do Cold War Bunkers in South Dakota, real estate transactions in New Zealand, Elon Musk at a conference in LA, the Chernobyl wasteland, and a wilderness retreat in Scotland all have in common? For Mark O’Connell in Notes From an Apocalypse, all these places are at the center of how humans are handling anxieties…
Progress is a funny little word. As we have trudged forth with our comprehension of “other” United States history – that is a sort of bottom-up, from the margins view of those that have been discriminated and oppressed, we have uncovered uncomfortable truths and perspectives. These views have widened our focus on the American story…
In timely fashion, authors Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith investigate baseball, war culture, and the pandemic of 1918 in Boston during the late stages of World War I. This book uses three characters as the driving force of time in their work: an ascendant Babe Ruth, at the time on the Boston Red Sox, Karl…
What was it Stalin once said? A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic? Dates too, in the sea of history, can shed their essence and become empty numbers in the expanse of time. I thought a lot about this as I read Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, an…
One of the attributes I always revere when reading novels is an author’s ability to create characters that demonstrate both the ideals and fears of an age and the dreams and realities of individuals. In Jenny Offill’s Weather, we meet Lizzie, a mother and wife who is balancing a multitude of personal issues that are…
Colson Whitehead is one of the best authors on race in America. He has particular skill in taking the racial history of this country and weaving his literary characters around them – characters that are reactive to the bigotry of the period and who leave a legacy of resistance in the face of hate and…
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a transformative and inspiring book. The author, Ocean Vuong, was born in Saigon, was not literate in English until age 11, and yet has wrote some of the most eloquent poetry and fiction in the language over the past five years. On Earth is Vuong’s first piece of long-form…
Our most popular book through the Christmas season and to begin the new year is local author Wendy O’Leary’s Breathing Makes It Better. I conducted the following interview with Wendy to shed some insight into her motivation for writing the children’s book. R&P: What is your academic background and how has your education led you…