My grandfather got me my well-worn edition of Our Oriental Heritage back in April 1999, from a used bookstore in Nyack, New York. Our Oriental Heritage was the first volume in what historian Will Durant thought would be a 5-volume survey of civilization called THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION. It was published in 1935. I first…
If one were to peruse the list of books I have read since 1996, the first item of note might be the book that started it all, #1 on the list: From Earth to Heaven by Isaac Asimov. Why this book? Why the list? Why now? In other words, how did it all start? In…
April 6 marks a special anniversary for me. On April 6, 1996, I began to keep the diary which I still maintain today. Four years earlier, on April 6, 1992, Isaac Asimov died. The two events are most definitely related, as we shall see. Sometime in the early spring of 1994, while wandering through a…
What is the first book you remember? Pressed to answer this question, eyes traversing the tall silhouettes, pillars of the shelves in my office, thoughts spelunking into the increasingly shadowy regions of my early memory, I’d have to say that the first book I remember is Dr. Seuss’s Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You…
Where were you when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon? When John F. Kennedy was assassinated? When the first plane hit the World Trade Center? We have a knack for recalling our circumstances during world-shaking events. For me, I remember what I was reading. Perhaps it is simply a weird trick…
Some books are a call to action. Such was Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon. This book set me off on two paths of discovery: one on the U.S. space program before the space shuttle era; the other was one to see if I could be part of that program. It started with the HBO miniseries From…
Some books are like the pebbles that start an avalanche. John Adams by David McCullough was one such pebble for me. In the late spring of 2001, one could not walk into the Book Star near the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura Boulevards without seeing row after row of hardcover editions of John Adams arrayed at the front…
“Books are a uniquely portable magic,” Stephen King wrote. When I was just a youngster, my mom would tell me that books can take you anywhere. Isaac Asimov talked about books being a form of telepathy, a kind of direct communication between the mind of the writer and the mind of the reader. Books can…
(As I recently announced, this is the first in a new blog series I am trying out called “Shelf-Life.” Each episode centers on a book on my shelf. See the original post for more details. And enjoy!) Several years ago, needing to free up shelf space, I went through a very rare (for me) purge…