By Christopher Corbett Polly Bemis became a nationwide news sensation when she arrived in the town of Grangeville, Idaho, in 1923, coming out of the mountains for the first time in fifty years. The 70-year-old Chinese woman, who had never heard of trains or automobiles or electricity, wanted dental work and eyeglasses. About emigrating from […]
By Oscar Andrew Hammerstein The Hammersteins: A Musical Theatre Family, by Oscar Andrew Hammerstein, commemorates the author’s grandfather and great-great grandfather, the first two Oscar Hammersteins. Oscar I turned the future Times Square into the theater capital of the world. Oscar II gave us some of our best-known musicals, from Showboat to Oklahoma! to The […]
By Eileen Sisk “This biography paints an unprecedented portrait of not only country’s biggest star of the ’60s, but perhaps its biggest son of a bitch.” So says the jacket cover of Buck Owens: The Biography. Following 19 number one songs on Billboard’s charts, Buck Owens spent 17 years as co-host of syndicated television show […]
By Mark Mills By the spring of 1942, the tiny island of Malta, located south of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea, is the most bombed patch of ground in the world. Pounded incessantly by German and Italian warplanes, the Maltese are losing confidence in the power of Great Britain to protect its colony. Loyalists who […]
By Rosanne Cash Rosanne Cash is the eldest of four daughters of Johnny Cash and his first wife, Vivian Liberto. She was born to the impoverished young couple in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1955, one month before the release of her father’s first single, “Cry, Cry, Cry.” They moved to Los Angeles several years later, after […]
By Dara Horn It is Passover 1862 and Jacob Rappaport is in New Orleans to murder his uncle. Once unable to rebel against his father’s orders, he is now helpless to refuse the orders of his Army superiors. A 19-year-old who escaped from an arranged marriage and joined the Union Army, Jacob has been sent […]
By Jane Borodale When seventeen-year-old Agnes Trussel discovers she’s pregnant, she steals a neighbor’s gold coins and runs away to London. Her impoverished rural Sussex family can’t support another child, and she would be forced to marry the neighbor who raped her. With her possessions tied inside a piece of oilcloth, she sneaks away before […]
By James Guilford Kendry detests her prestigious high school and its bullies, her middle-class neighborhood in which her mother hides a drug addiction, and her “toilet bowl of a social life.” The 15-year-old white girl wants to live adventurously, like the black girls she admires from a distance when she rides the train to her […]
By Jeffrey Buckner Ford River of No Return: Tennessee Ernie Ford and the Woman He Loved is the story of a husband and wife who loved each other deeply, whose alcohol addictions swept them helplessly down a river, and whose emotional instabilities made it a river of no return. The cover photo beautifully illustrates this […]
Author: Kingsley Browne “Much of men’s motivation to fight comes from their appreciation of the link between warfare and masculinity,” Kingsley Browne states in Co-Ed Combat, “and disruption of that link is likely to diminish their motivation.” Allowing women to be combat soldiers would decouple being a soldier from being a man, and failure in […]