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 tagged as “essays”
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…
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…
It was all about the Queen until it wasn’t. And it was precisely at that point that Charles didn’t sing along. When it came time for “God Save the King” at the end of his…
Driving through Anderson Valley recently, I realized most of the sheep pastures, mill sites and apple orchards of my youth had turned into vineyards. Those many vineyards have begat an equally dizzying number of winery…