Late summer through early December of 1969 was frightening to those of us up in Bel Air, the gated Los Angeles community for the financially fabulous. It was the dark season of the Manson Family homicides and paranoia ran high; the “Acid Is Groovy” murderers were still on the loose and appeared to be attracted to upper income neighborhoods.I would often drive, all alone in the middle of the night, on upper Bellagio, Somera, Mulholland, Sarbonne, Roscomare, Stradella, Linda Flora or any of the other narrow, serpentine roads I routinely traversed, through gothic fog so thick I crawled rather than...
Solzhenitsyn Now Required Reading In Russian Schools
Excerpts from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's 1973 epic The Gulag Archipelago, once banned by Soviet censors, have now been added to the curriculum for high-school students in Russia.The decision by he Education Ministry, announced today, was taken due to "the vital historical and cultural heritage on the course of 20th-century domestic history" contained in Mr. Solzhenitsyn's work, the ministry said.It is believed that over a million Russians perished in the Gulag, created by Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin and expanded by Josef Stalin as a clandestine network of prison and labor camps.The Gulag Archipelago, published in the West in 1973, has secretly circulated...
Hot Off The Press Delivery, Version 2.0
This morning when I checked my email, I had a message from Dustin, the CEO of a company called Paperspine. He was kind enough to take the time to write and inform me that I was remiss in not including his company amongst the online book delivery services I mentioned in yesterday's post.Well, Dustin, consider this a valentine to Paperspine. A verbal bouquet to thank you for giving me another piece of information to share here. Dustin informs me that Paperspine offers the largest number of titles (200,000) available from any book rental service, and also offers 500,000 titles for...
New Online Dictionary For Word Mavens
In the beginning there was the Word.But without a dictionary no one knew how to spell it, pronounce it, how to use it in a sentence, if there was another word that was its opposite or meant the same thing, or where the word came from. In short, the whole story of the word was unavailable to the speaker. For the writer, fugetaboutit; tough enough to carve out those cuneiforms, you had to wing it on spelling and all the rest.Thence wrote Samuel Johnson his dictionary. Then Noah Webster. The Oxford English Dictionary followed. (Yes, I know I’m leaving out...
Ernest Hemingway: Down For The Count
In 1922, Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey was the toast of Paris. He was feted and fawned over, the women obliging, the men in awe.Champion for three years, he was used to celebrities wanting to put the gloves on and spend a fantasy few minutes sparring with him. A fighter who took all that occurred within the ring with extreme seriousness – it is not a playground1 - he nonetheless indulged many: he allowed silent film star Douglas Fairbanks to throw jabs and rights at him, knowing that Fairbanks’ smaller frame and lesser weight would not put much power behind his...