Original anecdotes, commentary, rumination, and occasional pontification.
DECEMBER 14, 2025 – When the most recent wintry fusion of deep freeze, cold wave, cold snap, polar vortex, and Alberta Clipper descended upon this region of the world, I thought I’d supplement my other reading by strapping on a pair of snowshoes and venturing into David Halberstam’s highly acclaimed, New York Times bestseller, The …
DECEMBER 7, 2025 – For fewer and fewer Americans, this date marks a singular day in our national history. As the irresistible current of time carries us farther downstream from “[the] date which will live in infamy,” as FDR described Imperial Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the people alive then and their personal memories are …
DECEMBER 1, 2025 – Outside the Chester, Connecticut public library is a sign marking America’s upcoming Semiquincentennial. I doubt the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will be called by its Latin derivative, which is half a dozen letters longer than “Bicentennial” (and two letters longer than my good friend Dr. Ravi(shankar)’s last name, …
NOVEMBER 19, 2025 – Today I raced to the last page of, November 1942 – An Intimate History of the Turning Point of World War II by the Swedish historian and journalist, Peter Englund. As the last words reverberated inside my head, I closed the book, rose out of my chair, and peered out the …
NOVEMBER 11, 2025 – China. The armchair tour continues, but I must confess that the more familiar I become with historic names, dynasties, and big sweeping epochs, the more of a stranger I feel as I wander up and down, back and forth inside that country. The view from the window of my figurative tour …
NOVEMBER 6, 2025 – Today Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced that beginning Friday, commercial flights in the U.S. will be reduced by 5,000 a day each day until 10% of pre-reduction volume is achieved. The ultimate impetus for this action is the government shutdown. As I watched the 10-second clip of Mr. Duffy delivering his …
NOVEMBER 4, 2025 – Our day’s end stop Monday was at the Picchetti Winery in the rustic heights above Cupertino. The product of this +140-year-old establishment—now consisting of 9,000 cases of wine a year—is sold only through wine clubs across the country. Our tour guides, Russ and Kerri, have been members for decades and have …
OCTOBER 22, 2025 – I’ve always enjoyed the study of history, but inevitably my principal areas of inquiry—American, European, Russian, Mediterranean, and to some extent, Middle Eastern—have been rather narrow, not to mention shallow. Comparatively speaking, my knowledge of India, China and East Asia is rather abysmal. Several years ago I caught myself remarking to …
OCTOBER 7, 2025 – Over the years I’ve met numerous interesting people who live along my walking route to and from “Little Switzerland.”[1] With some of these folks I’ve enjoyed extensive conversations about a host of subjects. One standout is a fellow, Phillip, eight years my senior, whose house is on the “Matterhorn” overlooking the …
SEPTEMBER 22, 2025 – The film tells us little of Quisling’s ascendancy to power—as it were; he’s not depicted as a megalomaniac or Il Duce character, though as head of the Nordisk folkereisning i Norge, or “Nordic popular rising in Norway,” a political action group established in the early 1930s, Quisling was known as its fører—the …
SEPTEMBER 21, 2025 – (Cont.) The best stories are ones that tell us about ourselves, and Quisling: The Final Days, does just that. Not that we’re traitors. Few of us, in fact, would see anything of ourselves in the flawed eponymous character. Enter, however, Peder Olsen, a hospital chaplain assigned by the Right Reverend Eivind …
SEPTEMBER 20, 2025 – I can’t remember how old I was when I first heard the name, “Vidkun Quisling,” but it was my dad you said it. And you can bet that Dad used the word “traitor” to describe the Norwegian “Minister President” during the German occupation of Norway. So did everyone else who invoked …
AUGUST 24, 2025 – I was going to write about something else today, except late in the proceedings—at around 6:30 this evening—I experienced a “Voilá!” moment that inspired me to write about something different altogether. Readers all too familiar with my Pergola-on-a-Platform shouldn’t be surprised that the “Voilá!” moment occurred while I was working on …
AUGUST 20, 2025 – Today “UB” would’ve turned 102. He didn’t do too bad in the longevity column, having lived just 44 days shy of 95. I remember exactly where I was when I received the call—walking down a broad corridor of Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, awaiting a flight back to the U.S. A hospice …
AUGUST 19, 2025 – I grew up in a household that was unabashedly Republican and anti-government, which was a bit ironic, since my dad worked for . . . the government[1]. Given the amount of at-home political discussion, by osmosis I was politically aware from a very early age. By fifth grade and the 1964 …
AUGUST 16, 2025 – (Cont.) The more I read about apocryphal epochs in 20th century history, such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao, the more they seem to feature the same three aspects of the human condition. These have universal application, I think, and can be used as tools …
AUGUST 15, 2025 – (Cont.) The central thesis of Mao: The Unknown Story is that Mao Zedong was a monster. By comparison, Adolf Hitler was an elder statesman and Joseph Stalin, a venerable world leader. Chung and Halliday, the authors of Mao, portrayed him as the ultimate nihilist narcissist psychopath, who brought nothing but utter …
AUGUST 14, 2025 – If you’re feeling glum about our nation’s prospects, I invite you to take a close look at China from 1937 to the present. Why China and why during that period? For its extreme example of our resilience as a species. Many other examples exist, but none on the scale or to …
JULY 29, 2025 – Today while waiting for an appointment, I was fully engaged in my principal distraction of late[1]—reading a 600-page biography of Mao Zedong, master of China from 1949 until his not-a-day-too-soon-death in 1976. When a younger person asked what I was reading, I held up the cover, which bears Mao’s portrait—and his …
JUNE 24, 2025 – (Cont.) Before Saturday I knew three things about the Shakers: 1. Aaron Copeland had given them tribute in Appalachian Spring, arranged from the ballet music he’d composed for the Martha Graham Dance Company. (One of the signature melodies of the suite is from the Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts.”); 2. They made …
JUNE 15, 2025 – (Cont.) I’m now in the small state of Connecticut, which is a big state for boats—many of them, big boats. The state next door, Rhode Island, is an even smaller state but with a moniker writ large: The Ocean State. The rest of New England is outwardly seafaring too, except . …
MAY 31, 2025 – As I first reported several weeks ago, part of my follow-through from the spring semester course in Russian history I took at the University of Minnesota, has been my study of the Stalinist Purges of the 1930s. The textbook for this study has been The Great Terror, Robert Conquest’s aptly entitled …
MAY 18, 2025 – We’ve all been long exposed to the adage that “history repeats itself,” as more recently amended to, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Weary of this cliché, I find more useful the insights that an examination of history, similarly to close analysis of literature, reveals about the psychological make-up of …
MAY 17, 2025 – As readers might know or guess by my name, I’m of Swedish descent. Though Swedes have no monopoly on “Eric,” I’m guessing a higher percentage of Swedes and people of Swedish descent are called “Eric” than is the case in all other lands, except, perhaps, Norway and Denmark (but in those …
MAY 13, 2025 – A few days ago I finally finished reading The Crimean War by the British historian, Orlando Figes. I’d mentioned this book several months ago on this blog and remarked that prior to “going back to college” to study Russian history, I was as ignorant as the next American about the Crimean …