Review of “Homicide in Hardcover” by Kate Carlisle

Homicide in Hardcover is an adorable mystery about Brooklyn Wainwright, a San Francisco book restoration expert who gets caught up in a criminal investigation. Her former beloved mentor, Abraham Karastovsky, has been murdered while working on a supposedly cursed book, The Faust. Brooklyn takes over the project, and tries to solve the crime herself with [...]

A Guide to Presidential Cookbooks

As this month of great presidents comes to an end, you might want to contemplate celebrating their leadership throughout the coming months as well with recipes used at the White House over the years. The Library of Congress, that endlessly bountiful cornucopia of great information, provides a Selected Resource Guide to White House recipes and [...]

Great Image Search Engine

Have you tried “Search Me“? The images are beautiful. You might try as an example (searching under the image tab): Lincoln. You get everything from the K-Mart in Lincoln, Nebraska to wonderful reproductions from Abraham Lincoln’s life that aren’t so readily retrieved in Google’s image section. And, as a very useful feature, the provenance of [...]

February 27, 1860 – Lincoln Delivers a Speech at Cooper Union, in New York City

Many historians consider Lincoln’s Cooper Union speech to have been a seminal step on his road to the presidency. Lincoln had not yet declared himself a candidate for the presidency; rather, he was speaking as a “Republican Party Statesman.” The goal of his speech (aside from gaining national exposure) was to prove, in contrast to [...]

PC World Compares Kindle 1 Vs. Kindle 2

Apparently Kindle 2 is slimmer, has more contrast, features a lot of design changes, but the navigational joystick needs work. Read all the details here.

Pet Trust Law in the United States

As of this month, there are forty states in the U.S. that have enacted laws permitting animal or pet trusts. If you are interested in which states these are, and where to locate the statutes pursuant to pet trusts, check this site. You can also check out the quintessential book on dog law by Nolo [...]

Review of “The Dog Days of Charlotte Hayes” by Marlane Kennedy (For Ages 8-12)

Charlotte Hayes is an almost-twelve-year-old girl in Greater Oaks, West Virginia. She lives in a reasonably happy family with an older sister, a baby brother, and a big slobbery St. Bernard. Her father got the dog as a puppy, named him Killer, and then lost interest in him. Her dad has a good heart, but [...]

February 24, 1803 – The Supreme Court Decided Marbury v. Madison

No incoming president has ever been too pleased with the frenetic lame duck appointments of an outgoing administration, and Republican President-Elect Jefferson in 1800 was no exception. On President John Adams’s last day of office, he sat at his desk until 9 p.m. signing commissions for what would become known as “midnight judges.” As the [...]

Review of “Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages” by Ammon Shea

The author set out to read the entire Oxford English Dictionary in one year. The OED, Shea explains, is not just a dictionary; with its etymologies and usage examples from great literature, it also recapitulates the entire history of the modern English language. And it is fairly thorough: in its 21,730 pages it features the [...]

February 23, 1868 – Birthday of W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced doo-BOYSS) was an American civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, sociologist, historian, author, and editor. He was born three years after the end of the Civil War in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. His family had lived there for generations and his ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. Du Bois attended Fisk [...]