We celebrated President’s Day in February, so it seemed like a good time to look beneath the blizzard of conventional admiration for George Washington, the nation’s founding realtor. America’s founders were eloquent in their speeches…
Posts published in “Essays”
A half century ago Duke University graduate Paulette Arnold arrived in Ukiah, one of the ‘back to landers’ who would transform the cultural landscape of Mendocino County. For the newcomers, the 1970s were liberating: a…
It is not only a “case,” but a man and a book. Salman Rushdie has suffered unconscionably as a human being. In hiding for four years, he has lost his personal life and all personal…
“My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” — Joseph Conrad Mendocino…
A journey of 3000 miles begins with a flight delay as someone probably once said, along with the Death of Her Majesty, as Agatha Christie probably once wrote. There are worse place to be marooned…
Ruth Gottstein died in late August at the age of 100. She was the founder of Volcano Press, a small publisher in the Sierra foothills that brought out Dell Martin’s “Battered Wives” and more than…
Back in the late seventies I went down to Hopland with a couple guys to load up a truck with fallen fruit to make pear brandy. Don Fi knew the orchard manager and made the…