I am among the many who marvel that a smalltown fellow could have created such characters who give us so many brilliant (and sometimes frightening) insights into (our) human nature. Shakespeare's characters remain, indeed, both flattering and terrifying mirrors. If we only can take the time and have the sight to look into the mirrors... The mirrors of the bear pit or the latitude trap ...
Global Investigative Journalism Network: Editor’s Note: This is the introductory chapter of a new, five-part GIJN guide to investigating elections that will be serialized over the coming month.
“Any man who is good by heart is a great man!” “If you want to feel the life and the body of great men who are long gone, go to their tombs or monuments; if you want to understand the real life and the wisdom of great men who are long gone, go to their libraries!”
I taught myself how to do research, how to dig out the pieces... I discovered in the process that, contrary to the notion that the past is a dead thing, that in fact wherever you scratch the surface, you find life. And it was the life, the people and what happened to them, that was the pull for me.
A man, 85 years old with far more than a century of stories to tell, walked toward a small shed behind his humble, white-shingled house on Music street. With steps slow but firm, he neared the barely five-by-ten structure tucked between the former Whiting farm, the Grange Hall and the West Tisbury Congregational Church. He reached the shed and opened the door. Although cleaned out for repairs, a desk left its imprint on the shed’s sun-soaked wooden floor. Gone too, for the moment, is the Royal Standard Typewriter he uses to tell his stories, a conveyance of history nearly as old as he.
The man had another story to tell.
“I invite you to follow this link to a superb Academy of Achievement tribute to a fellow Pittsburgh native, David McCullough. The tribute includes biography, profile, interview, and photo gallery.
Why do I share this now? I do so because I’ve done something radical here: I’ve gotten rid of all books on my shelves and on my Kindle except for twelve books written by McCullough.
And I will focus all my remaining reading and blogging efforts on those twelve books. I will begin with McCullough’s biography of John Adams. It wasn’t his first published book but is first in the historical chronology of his subjects.
