Tuesday, January 11 2011
Life During Wartime: Carl Sandburg’s Poetry of the Macabre
For every moment of brief tedium in Sandburg’s masterpiece, the master suddenly hits the reader with a scene or a moment that is breathtaking in its prose and cold, dispassionate observation of life during wartime.
Thursday, July 1 2010
The Seven-Layered Arsenic Cake of Madame LaFarge and Other Crime Classics
Crime Classics, a 1953 CBS ‘true crime’ radio series, seems to be something of a slap in the face to audiences’ sense of identification and notions of self-importance, presenting a vision of a callous and petty world where the individual matters little, and their thoughts and feelings matter less.
Friday, February 26 2010
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln by John Stauffer
In John Stauffer's capable hands, the tug-of-war between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass is a study in the evolution of both a friendship and a political world view.
Monday, February 9 2009
American Experience: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln tracks the converging paths of the president and his killer, then tracks and draws connections between their last journeys, in the forms of Lincoln's funeral train route and Booth's desperate efforts to escape.
Tuesday, November 18 2008
Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, by John Stauffer
Stauffer demonstrates in amusing and enlightening fashion the pivotal role fisticuffs and fighting had in helping Lincoln and Douglass define themselves and take control of their fates.
