State park trail entry point.

Journey Home

Tales from the pilgrimage.

Book Review

  • Art Cullen is the kind of writer I have to watch what I write about him in public. Chances are, unless the Good Lord takes him from us, I’ll run into him in some unforeseen context to experience consequences for writing anything too negative. Not that I would, Dear Marty, We Crapped in Our Nest:… Read more

  • Book Review: 107 Days

    It feels necessary for Kamala Harris to have written 107 Days. I’m glad she did. It was a quick read that touched the high points of her short presidential campaign. Hearing the story, in her voice, is important. It’s essential reading for anyone who follows presidential politics. I make it a point to read or… Read more

  • Book Review: Nomadland

    Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century was recommended on social media. It contains the kind of crisp, clear writing, and solid narrative I seek to create. When combined with the topic of how septuagenarians and others fit in to a modern American economy where it is difficult to earn enough to… Read more

  • Large crop fields have been worked along many of the roads I traveled to Chicago this week. Ready or not, the season turned to spring. Next on my indoor planting schedule is tomatoes, followed by cucumbers and squash. I’m waiting for conditions outdoors to improve to tear down some of last year’s garden and prep… Read more

  • My reaction to Food for Thought: Essays & Ruminations by Alton Brown is it fills gaps in my personal culinary history. Brown occupied space after the formative experience I had in South Georgia in 1997 and 1998. While working on a logistics project at a clay mine and processor, after a 14-hour shift at the… Read more

  • My credentials to write a review of Romney’s book are somewhat chary. I have never read a book by Jane Austen (Gasp!). When on vacation in Stratford, Ontario, our family attended a dramatization of Pride and Prejudice during which I promptly fell asleep. Yet here I am saying Jane Austen’s Bookshelf: A Rare Book Collector’s… Read more

  • In The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, author Chris Hayes addresses things people in my network are experiencing and to some extent freaking out about: Why can’t I stop doom scrolling TikTok and Instagram Reels? Why can’t I read a long book any more? Or more than one book in… Read more

  • Book Review: Citizen

    Each end of year holiday season I find a book by or about one of our presidents and read it as a gift to myself. Since that slugabed Barack Obama hasn’t published his second book of presidential memoirs (volume one was published in 2020), I settled for Bill Clinton’s post-presidency memoir Citizen: My Life After… Read more

  • I understand what Thom Hartmann wrote his new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class — And How to Rescue Our Future. However, the book is less likely written for a boomer like me than for millennials and younger people who did not live through the Reagan Revolution.… Read more

  • The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi is a solid read from a person at the center of American politics since first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1987. In a time when the average American adult finishes just over five books per… Read more