Agatha Christie wrote her famous detective novel based on an even more famous kidnapping In Agatha Christie’s crime novel Murder on the Orient Express, the well-mustachioed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot solves the grisly stabbing of an American tycoon traveling … Continued
Though the practice is now more associated with Halloween, spooking out your family is well within the Christmas spirit For the last hundred years, Americans have kept ghosts in their place, letting them out only in October, in … Continued
The American naturalist spent the last years of his life cataloguing America’s four-legged creatures he spring of 1843 came late. In March the Ohio and Mississippi rivers were still choked with ice. But by April 25, the weather … Continued
The dime novels and story papers entertained boys and launched a popular culture we still consume today In the early evening dark of March 30, 1889, a thick crowd of eager children – estimates say as many as … Continued
Storybooks feature a fair amount of factual errors—and those errors can be revealing In Joyce Wan’s 2015 picture book, The Whale in My Swimming Pool, a large and very round blue whale sits on top of a boy’s tiny … Continued
Nearly three centuries before heroines like Katniss and Meg Murray, Sarah Fielding published a book on the values of female education Consider with me, what is the true use of reading,” begins Sarah Fielding in the preface to … Continued
The writer’s dystopia, populated by ‘automaton figures,’ was surprisingly modern If you’re a fan of the TV series, “Westworld,” you’re probably aware that it’s based on Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name. What you may not know … Continued
Published eight decades after it was written, the new book offers a first-hand account of a Middle Passage journey Sitting on his porch in 1928, under the Alabama sun, snacking on peaches, Cudjo Lewis (born Oluale Kossola) recounted … Continued
Seventy-five years after the publishing of ‘The Fountainhead’, a look back at the public intellectuals who disseminated her Objectivist philosophy For 19-year-old Nathan Blumenthal, reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead for the first time was nothing short of an epiphany. Published … Continued
Mildred Wirt Benson helped invent the fictional teen sleuth who became a generational role model Nancy Drew struggled this way and that. She twisted and squirmed. She kicked and clawed. But she was powerless in the grip of the … Continued