My Blog
Encountering the Spaceship: Remembering Roger Chaffee
Late July/early August 1969. The 10 feet 7 inch Command Module pictured here has just left the moon—the burn marks still visible, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, and is now isolated in top security waiting to be shipped to the USA. As it turns out, Astronauts...
C.S. Lewis, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, and the RAF: 1940-41
August 1940. The Blitzkrieg—lightning war—has stormed across Europe since September 1939 raising the Nazi flag over every country from Poland through Europe, and, finally, France. Now Hitler turns his attention to the last holdout, the island of Great Britain. The...
Joy and Jack Lewis: Fact or Fiction
How’s this for an implausible love story. A 31-year New York woman writer is married to the love of her life, a WW II veteran trying to drown his war trauma with liquor. While he’s out on a binge one night, she’s home with their two young sons in terror that this time...
June 28, 1914: WW I Starts. June 28, 1919: Starts WW II, Here Dead We Lie
While this year June 28 news will be all about the two previous days of Presidential debates, one hundred years ago on June 28, 1919, a document was finished that would lead to the deaths of millions. And the signing date was deliberately chosen because of two murders...
Timothy McVeigh. The Unabomber. Educated: A Memoir
The title of Tara Westover’s bestselling autobiography is, well, boring. Then you read it and realize why Educatedhas to be the title. And putting the Oklahoma bomber McVeigh and the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski next to Tara Westover’s title begins to explain her father’s...
The Untold Story of D-Day Small Town USA and the #1 Glider
In the grim early days of World War II when their big brothers and dads and uncles were off fighting, the children of Greenville, Michigan, wanted to help. When their town’s Gibson Refrigerator Company got an unexpected government contract, the kids knew what to do....