Joe D. Goldstrich, MD, is 82 and sharp as a tack. In 1963, as a fourth-year medical student on the neurosurgical service at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, he was one of the doctors in the…
Posts published in “Essays”
On the evening of May 28, 1915, 25-year-old Clarence Tracy set out on horseback from his mother's home in the Cummings-Spy Rock district, northern Mendocino County. He was headed to his own cabin less than…
The most compelling argument against the existence of a vast conspiracy orchestrating the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy is that the brothers were never threats to ruling power. The Kennedys were card-carrying members of…
A year or so ago I received a call from a couple of young friends of mine all excited that they were announcing their engagement to get married. This was not a great surprise to…
It wasn’t until I was around the age of twenty that my impressions of the cops really began to take form, with some of my earliest encounters with the men in blue being a couple…
Last time we explored the details of the May 1856 beating of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. The attacker was South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks who used a walking cane to repeatedly strike Sumner. Brooks was…
Terence Hallinan was always a bit mystified by Willie Brown’s animosity. Reading a headline in the Chronicle like “Brown excoriates Hallinan, other big-mouth critics,” he would shake his head in sad disbelief. When he said…
In 1835 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow hailed music as “the universal language of mankind.” Few would disbelieve him and deny themselves the comfort of the cliché that music has the power to transcend cultural, political, and…
Many of the articles about cannabis that appear in the AVA are so chock full of bad news that they would depress even Julie Andrews, who plays Maria von Trapp, an eternal optimist, in the…