Writing
November 19: Can we handle the truth?
Next Thursday at lunchtime, I try something entirely new: a joint public appearance with my wife, Nancy Floreen, member at-large of the Montgomery County Council! We’ll be at the Literary Luncheon series of the Friends of the Library of Montgomery County, at Strathmore Hall Mansion in North Bethesda, MD. The fun starts at 11:30 a.m.…
Read MoreC-SPAN Posts National Archives Talk on Impeached
On September 23, I spoke about Impeached to a terrific audience at the National Archives, which C-SPAN taped and then broadcast last weekend on C-SPAN 3. The video is now posted on the web, for your viewing pleasure.
Read MoreOn the Road Again . . .
Summer’s over when it’s time to go out and hustle books. So this Thursday (Constitution Day!) I’ll be at St. Mary’s College in southern Maryland at 4:30, speaking on The Summer of 1787. Then it’s back to Impeached, which will be my topic next Wednesday, September 23, at the National Archives in DC, at noon. …
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 MoreReconstruction, Andrew Johnson and the South
In the last several weeks, I have talked about my book, Impeached, before several groups in the South: Altanta, Lexington (KY), Nashville, Memphis. I was somewhat anxious about these appearances. After all, The book (and my talks) are highly critical of Southern policies towards the freed slaves.immediately after the Civil War. I also take a…
Read MoreThe French Revolution
No, not the decade-long upheaval in Europe that veered between liberty and riot. The novel set in San Francisco by Matt Stewart, which is being released on Twitter RIGHT NOW, as part of a great new experiment in social media. The media has had a field day with this story, including the Wall Street Journal…
Read MoreBook TV, Saturday, July 11
On Saturday, July 11, at 1 p.m., C-SPAN’s Book TV will air a panel discussion on the Civil War that I participated in last month at the Printers Row Book Festival in Chicago. I was talkiing, naturally enough, about Impeached. The other panelists were Tom Campbell, who has done an interesting book about abolitionists in…
Read MoreStranger than Fiction
I caught a remarkable movie last night on Turner Classic Movies: “The Baron of Arizona.” It tells the tale of James Addison Reavis, a swindler in the class of Bernie Madoff. In the late nineteenth century, Reavis claimed much of the state of Arizona under a bogus Spanish land grant. Several points in the story…
Read MoreRiding Two Horses at Once
It’s fairly sweet to have my book mentioned in a review of someone else’s book — even if I’m not entirely sure what to think of the description of The Summer of 1787 as a “novelistic narrative. ” It happened in this morning’s NYT Book Review, and even in the second paragraph of the review,…
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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