Posts Tagged ‘Writing’
The Wisdom of Napolitano
I have always had a vaguely positive fealing about Janet Napolitano, former governor of Arizona and current holder of one of the Official Thankless Jobs of modern America, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Now I know why! A profile of Napolitano in a recent issue of The New Republic includes the following passage: As…
Read MoreSunday Morning on C-SPAN2's Book TV
At 10:15 a.m. on this Sunday, March 28, C-SPAN2’s Book TV is scheduled to run an interview I did with them at the Virginia Festival of the Book last weekend in Charlottesville. The subject is Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy.
Read MoreLeadership and the Constitutional Convention
Business guru Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence) has a new book out titled The Little Big Things, 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence. For me, what’s interesting about this book is that he reports that his inspiration to write it was my book, The Summer of 1787, The Men Who Invented the Constitution. What he writes is…
Read MoreVirginia Festival of the Book
At noon on Saturday, I’ll be in at the university book store Charlottesville for the Virginia Festival of the Book, on a panel titled “American History: Our Government at Work.” I’ll be talking about the first presidential impeachment, based on my book Impeached. My co-panelists will be: Brian Balogh, of UVA, author of Government Out of Sight, The…
Read MoreThe Benefits of Fellowship
I am halfway through a remarkable opportunity, the Hodson Trust/John Carter Brown Library Fellowship. The grant supported me for two months of research at the library in Providence (where there was a lot less snow than in Maryland!), about Aaron Burr’s conspiracy of 1805-07. The grant also will cover two more months of writing at Washington…
Read MorePulitzer Biography Crashes Through
The Washington Post today carries a terrific review of the new biography of Joseph Pulitzer by my friend, James McGrath Morris, a/k/a Jamie. That it’s a great book should be clear from my own review of it, posted on Amazon: “Joseph Pulitzer’s story is a classic American rags-to-riches-to-sellout saga. A Jewish immigrant from Hungary, Pulitzer…
Read MoreOn to Providence!
Beginning in early January, I will take up two months of residence (most weekdays) in Providence, Rhode Island, thanks to the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellowship. The fellowship is granted for those working on a book of American history before 1830 — my current project on the Aaron Burr Conspiracy, which is under contract to…
Read MoreThe Wages of Mendacity
Fed up with bestselling authors who plagiarizes and just make up facts? Me, too. I let it rip on Huffington Post today. After a day spent struggling with the microfilm readers at the Library of Congress, trying to nail down the facts for my new project, I was stunned to read how Ben Mezrich wrote the book…
Read MoreSpeed Kills
Nope, not talking about meth, but about writing — specifically, writing in the twenty-first century. Like everything else in life, writing is accelerating. We don’t have to sharpen the goose quills and warm the ink to get started. We pound out blog posts and e-mails with abandon. Lots of people (not me) thumb their way…
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