I was forty-three when I attended the National War College. Over the course of the previous twenty years, I had trained in probably twenty-five countries and had served in a dozen different assignments. Each job broadened my skill set. This is standard in our military. Every officer and noncommissioned officer goes through that same maturing […]

On November 5, 1968, Republican Richard Nixon accomplished perhaps the greatest comeback in American political history, narrowly defeating his Democratic rival, Hubert Humphrey, to become the thirty-seventh president of the United States. Only eight years earlier he had lost his first attempt at the presidency to John F. Kennedy in a devastating fashion. The election […]

Despite evidence to the contrary, we all use our brains. But most of us have never learned how to think effectively. I’m not talking about IQ or other measures of intelligence, which matter in their own way, of course. I’m talking about thinking as a learned skill. We don’t teach thinking in schools, and you […]

Imagine for a moment that you are the manager of a day-care center. You have a clearly stated policy that children are supposed to be picked up by 4 p.m. But very often parents are late. The result: at day’s end, you have some anxious children and at least one teacher who must wait around […]

My brother-in-law, Leonard Wolf, is a gentle and caring man by nature, a Chaucer scholar by training-and also an expert in the terror and horror genres in film and literature. Those interests brought him, some years ago, to consider writing a book about a real-life serial killer. The man had murdered ten people, including three […]

In the 1980s there was a proliferation of poverty collections, short stories, and novels published by women of Latin American descent in the United States. By the end of the decade, another genre of U.S. Latina writing, the autobiography, also came into prominence with the publication of three notable autobiographical collections: Loving in the War […]