A new poll released Thursday shows that three-fourths of Americans believe American society and culture are in a state of rapid decay. Is anybody surprised by this? I certainly am not. Just look at what is happening since Joe Biden took office. Crime is not only up everywhere, it is …
At the end of 2020, I posted a commentary in which I said: “In all my years on this planet, I never experienced a year as horrible as 2020. I am sure there are others with six or seven decades under their belts who feel the same.” Guess what, 2021 …
Today, I am turning my blog over to Steven Baldwin, a former California State legislator and executive director of the Council for National Policy in Washington. Steve, who happens to be my cousin, makes some significant and indispensable points about race and America’s unrelenting myth of “white privilege.” I hope …
It was 1967 and I had recently enrolled at the University of Kansas in Lawrence on the G.I. Bill after serving almost four years in the U.S. Army Security Agency. At the time I was working at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in the composing room. My job was to “kill” …
Three days ago the U.S. remembered the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. I was going through my files a couple of days later and ran across this story that I wrote in 1989 when I was the Chicago Tribune’s Tokyo Bureau Chief and Chief Asia Correspondent. …
The link below will take you to a podcast/radio interview I did a while back with C. P. Lesley of the New Books Network about writing historical fiction. Ms. Lesley is herself the author of six historical fiction novels set in 16th Century Russia during the reign of Ivan the …
Today is the 80th anniversary of Imperial Japan’s attack on America’s 7th Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. I lived in Japan and covered that nation for 10 years as the Chicago Tribune’s Chief Far Eastern Correspondent and Tokyo Bureau Chief. Naturally, Pearl Harbor was never far from the cusp of …
In my continuing examination of the way people of the past predicted the future, here is yet another look at some interesting forecasts from long ago. My previous post on predictions from the past was posted earlier this week. Why am I blogging about this? Because, as an author of …
Predicting the future can be a daunting, if not a sometimes embarrassing occupation. I have already posted on this topic a few times because as a writer of historical fiction I think it adds something when characters look ahead and wonder what the world will be like in one hundred …
There is an anonymous quote about books and reading them that I recall from my English Literature class at the University of Kansas several centuries ago. It goes like this: “Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.” The meaning …