My Blog
Why the DSM Uses a Name from Ovid 2000 Years Ago
For the first time I can remember, some form of mental illness has been regular front-page news. First, the brain disease of addiction that killed 80,000 Americans last year from opioid overdoses. Then the obscene charge that it’s the mentally ill, not the right-wing...
The Patriots, A Gentleman in Moscow, and Solzhenitsyn
The book cover for The Patriots by Sana Krasikov describes this novel as a “Dr. Zhivago for our times.” I would have called it, “The return of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn. Pasternak’s love story about Zhivago and Lara has moments of beauty...
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...