Winston Churchill took painting as seriously as he did public service, politics, and writing. He painted 500 canvasses, more than most professional painters.
Here’s what’s interesting to me. Churchill’s wartime friend, Dwight Eisenhower, also became a painter, Eisenhower quite by accident. In 1948, when he was president of [...]

Winston Churchill wrote because he had to. It was his way of earning a living.
Members of Britain’s Parliament served without pay until 1911. An act that year granted them a nominal salary, but not enough to live on, so many MPs had jobs or professions that paid their bills.
For Churchill, [...]

Winston Churchill was much, much more than a British politician and statesman in the last century. He was fascinated by history, was a student of history, and eventually became a writer of history – the four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
The series begins with Caesar’s invasions of Britain in [...]

Could Winston Churchill be the most prolific writer of all time? He rates high, says biographer Paul Johnson, wrote at least 8 million words, perhaps as many as 10 million. . . . You may want to read Johnson’s biography of Churchill – titled Churchill. It’s a brief 192 pages.
Tomorrow: Churchill, the historian

Joe Owens was there, in Korea, a Marine lieutenant leading Baker-One-Seven, a mortar and rifle platoon at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, a horrible fight in the deep freeze of a Korean winter.
He wrote a book about it, Colder than Hell.
And I found the book at the AAUW book sale.
I’ve read James Brady’s Korean war [...]

I like oral histories, such as Studs Terkel’s Working and The Good War.
So when I picked up Rudy Tomedi’s No Bugles, No Drums: An Oral History of the Korean War at the AAUW’s used book sale, well, I was hooked.
Tomedi, a journalist and Vietnam war vet, came along too late to know the Korean war [...]

I like those books that tell us about the prominent and perhaps little known writers in our state. Or county courthouses. Or taverns. Or former governors. Or . . . you name any kind of aggregation and some enterprising soul has probably written a book about it.
Pictures and paragraphs.
Short reads.
But hugely interesting if you care [...]

Songwriter Carrie Jacobs Bond had a big impact on the American music business a century ago. My interest in her grows out of the fact that she was born and grew up in my town of Janesville, Wisconsin, and a recent revelation – to me – that she had lived for a period of [...]

Carrie Jacobs Bond wrote “I Love You Truly”, the song that almost every wedding singer in this country sang at weddings between 1901 – the year she published the song – and the early 1950s.
Bond’s music was meant to be sung around the piano in the evening at home. It held up well in the [...]

There it is on North Fifth Street, not a dozen blocks from the house in Atchison, Kansas, in which Amelia Earhart was born – a 25-room Victorian mansion.
The Evah C. Cray Historical Home Museum.
A big name for a big house. A banker – W.W. Hetherington – built it in 1882.
The house was physically unremarkable, except [...]