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…
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…
i. A few days ago, I finished reading The Age of Napoleon by Will Durant and Ariel Durant, the final entry in their 11-volume Story of Civilization series. It took me just shy of a quarter century to get through the books. Combined, they are the best history books I have ever read. It was…
Whispering in the dark Information overload manifests itself like a demon in the dark. On lazy days that I spend reading for most of the day, I fall asleep at night to the whispers of passages that I read earlier in the day. These whispers are vague and formless and closely resemble a fever dream.…
One subset of travel books that I enjoy are those that mix travel with some theme of discovery. John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley is the model from which many of these books have taken their example, and Nathaniel Philbrick is quick to admit that Steinbeck served as a model for his entry in this sub-genre,…
Across the street from our house in Warwick, Rhode Island, beyond the backyard of our neighbors, an old cemetery was perched atop a small hill. The cemetery was surrounded by a low stone wall. A rusty iron gate opened into the cemetery on one side of the wall, but I never remember using the gate.…
Yesterday, I walked across the Beringia with a branch of Ancestral Native Americans, ancestors to the First Peoples. Later, I boated with them down the western coast of North American, several thousand years earlier. In both cases, I took note of what I saw around me, even though none of that was described in the…
For the last 19 years, the first thing I think about on July 4 is not the birth of the country, it is death. In one of the most remarkable coincidences in the history of the country, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, which happened to be July 4, 1826–the…
ince it is May 28 and I happened to remember on the day, for a change, I thought it worth mentioning to both history and astronomy buffs, that at May 28, 585 B.C., the Battle of Halys took place. This battle is significant for two reasons. First, the battle stopped abruptly when solar eclipse darkened…
Today is my ninth leap day (1972 was a leap year, but I was born after February 29 so I don’t count that one. Leap day always makes me think of the history of leap day, which in turn gets me thinking about the intricacies of calendars and of keeping time in general. Man, the…
I often wonder why I find history and science so fascinating. With science, it’s what Richard Feynman called “the pleasure of finding things out”. We learn how the universe around us evolved and how it all works. With history, I suppose, it’s similar, except instead of learning how the universe works, we learn how people…
I left China behind this morning at around 5:30 AM and at once started on the last part of Our Oriental Heritage, Japan. Keeping in mind that this particular book was published in 1935 (and therefore written some years before), I found this passage particularly interesting: The third act is modern Japan, opened up in…