I was heartbroken to learn recently that my fourteen-year-old daughter was assigned William Golding's novel Lord of the Flies  in her eighth-grade language arts class.  I read this novel myself in high school more than forty years ago. Many of us did. Lord of the Flies  is like Animal Farm  (which my daughter also read this year, and hated), To Kill a Mockingbird , and Catcher in the Rye —books that get threaded into the curriculum at some point and then become difficult to r

Photo taken by Matt Prosser - Creative Commons The Wikipedia article about the Battle of Biak says, correctly, that the Marines...

And when the war was over, he came home.  My grandfather was not a war hero or even a combat soldier. He was an artist, “born with a...

Photo from karam_veer, licensed on Creative Commons A friend asked me recently how I felt about turning sixty this year. “Terrible,” I...

It was difficult to know if there were more of them than usual. I would hear the sirens coming from a distance, always from the west and...