Blogroll

Book Review: The Show That Never Ends by David Weigel

All right, I owned or own six Emerson Lake and Palmer LPs, six Yes LPs, King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King, three (yes, three!!) Rick Wakeman solo albums and a handful of other progressive rock albums. There’s probably a half dozen or more such albums on my iPod right now. Caught up […]

The telephone number transformation

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to what sticks in our minds from childhood. As I look back, I can’t figure out why the announcement of telephone number changes in the early ’60s stays with me.

Anyone who’s watched a 1950s or early 1960s movie knows telephone numbers then wasn’t just a series […]

Ban my book… please

“Banned book” brings to mind censorship, repression. But a different facet intrigued Helen Gurley Brown 43 years ago when she wrote her publicist about her forthcoming book, Sex and The Single Girl — publicity.

Sex and The Single Girl was on the cutting edge of the cultural revolution in the 1960s and feminism. Some 40-plus […]

Book Review: If Kennedy Lived by Jeff Greenfield

Some estimate books about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy number in the thousands. And with the 50th anniversary of the assassination coming next month, there’s been a growing stream of them this year about the assassination and Kennedy’s presidency and its legacy. Amidst the avalanche, political commentator Jeff Greenfield contemplates where we would […]

Book Review: Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident by Bill Ayers

Although likely becoming prosaic, the phrases “walk the walk” and “talk the talk” remain effective shorthand. Their meaning is seen in the story of Bill Ayers. A founder of the radical Weathermen, Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn spent 10 years underground as a result of their actions against the Viet Nam War. After their […]