A collection of essays on the art and obsession of cooking well for one’s friends. On his kitchen beginnings: …as with sex, politics, and religion, so with cooking; by the time I began finding out about it for myself, it was too late to ask my parents. They had failed to instruct me, and I…
Read more …as with sex, politics, and religion, so with cooking…
The second Eye of Isis novel publishes on January 15, 2022. Barbara Peters of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore calls it “On the Waterfront, Cleopatra style.” Well, yes. The construction industry always was a deadly business. An excerpt: “We were in Rome, with Auletes and the queen, begging Pompey for money.” “Before my time.” “Just barely,…
The map in question is the one made by Dr. John Snow to plot the deaths caused by the 1854 cholera epidemic in London, which proved for the first time that cholera was a water-borne disease and not, as was generally acknowledged at that time, air borne. There is a ton of riveting (and sometimes…
Read more The smell of a cesspool was probably a lot easier to take with a skinful of gin.
I am always acutely aware that we grow writers from the ground up. I wouldn’t be a writer today if my mother had not hauled me at age eight up the ladder from the Celtic to the dock and marched me down the boardwalk to the Seldovia Public Library, where she introduced me to my…
Brisk, well written, continent by continent (excluding Australia) survey of how geography is destiny, beginning with Putin going down on his knees every night to ask God why He didn’t put mountains in Ukraine. I really liked the way Marshall organized it, too. The first chapter is Russia and how so much of their actions…
Read more …why the entire continent of Africa is becoming a Chinese colony…
So now is the time when I start chumming the waters for the new book. It’s the second novel in my Eye of Isis series, which is set in Alexandria and Egypt in the time of Cleopatra. The first book, Death of an Eye, opened in May 47 BC. Caesar and Cleopatra have returned from…
I remember when I got to the end of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma thinking, “Well, what the hell CAN I eat, then?” Although the image of that potato farmer covered in fertilizer did stick, I was pretty much done with Pollan lecturing me on how everything I buy in a supermarket contributes to the destruction of…
[for the Poisoned Pen Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, July 13, 2012] Sometimes research is easy. When I lived in Anchorage my house was right under the traffic pattern to the seaplane base of Lake Hood. One day my father was helping me with something in my back yard and a Cessna 206…
Hobo Jim died today. Back in the day (2002, I think) I had the privilege of writing about him in Alaska magazine, and this is how I’m going to remember him. THUNDERFOOT by Dana Stabenow There are lots of reasons to go to the Alaska State Fair in Palmer every year. Turkey legs and crab…
This Friday at 6pm Alaska Time, author Jesse Wegman will join the Homer Public Library to discuss his book about the Electoral College. Click here to join the Zoom conversation.The book is available from the Homer Bookstore. [My February 2020 review] Never mind the elections of 2000 and 2016, I’ve disliked the whole notion of…
