I’ve been thinking a lot about loss today, about sorrow, and grief, and the things that can tear our lives apart. My Uncle Rick died last night, at the age of 52, of complications from a pulmonary embolism. Not only was it very unexpected, but he is the first of my aunts and uncles to [...]
So spoke the southern historian U. B. Phillips at the start of his book Life and Labor in the Old South, which was published in 1929, and in which he argued the environment as having a very existent role in cultural development. Several generations of historians later, and the field of environmental history has expanded [...]
Part of my job involves reading travel guides. You know, the big fat Lonely Planet ones, and the TimeOut guides that have the colorful pictures. And more than that, the ten-or-so books on my desk are about Cuba: a place I never thought I’d visit. In my regular life, I would have no time to [...]
There was a time, several years ago, when I rarely left the travel essay section of a bookstore. I suspect it began around the time I starting subscribing to National Geographic, and I discovered the art of writing about travel. Reporting on what you ate every day or which monuments you visited is not of [...]
Stuffed animals, out-grown shoes, hand-me-down mugs; aged television sets, dog-eared romance novels, and garish gold picture frames… Secondhand stores can be a treasure trove or a purgatory between home and landfill, and quite often, it is both simultaneously. My mother is renowned for her ability to walk into a Goodwill and find the two designer [...]