News item: “Forty-million American have trouble getting to sleep at night.” Seeing that, I thought about my experience after leaving the hospital following a back operation this summer. On the first night home, without the various comfort devices of a…
On September 3 the board of supervisors of California’s rural Siskiyou County, right next to the Oregon border, voted to secede. The reason: inattention of the state government to their problems, such as roads. Secession talk bubbles up from time to…
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991a cluster of newly independent states was created. Some, such as Belarus, stayed very close to Russia; others such as Ukraine, made strong assertions of their independence. With Russia on its north and east,…
California Governor Jerry Brown made no secret of his wish that a high-speed rail line from northern to southern California would be his legacy. He’s now 75 and is expected to run for and win reelection next year. That would…
The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad By Lesley Hazleton (Riverhead Books, 320 pages, $27.95) Egypt’s violence should be seen as the latest chapter in a titanic struggle between Muslims who want to live in the 21st century and a much smaller…
For about a generation now fierce Chechen warriors have been trying to wrest from Russia their land in the Caucasus Mountains. The fighting was so deadly at one point that their capital, Grozny, was leveled. In recent years a tense…
No, that’s not a typo in the title. It’s about the hero of a Western novel who so resembles him that you’d think he was an earlier incarnation of the famous president. Railhead is the novel, by California writer Guy…
Harry O’Connor died last week. He was a hero of the Reagan movement, largely unsung, but a hero nonetheless. It began on a March Monday in 1974, Ronald Reagan’s last year as Governor of California. He had just arrived in…
Calvin Coolidge, who became the 30th President, was born on the Fourth of July, as if Divine Providence had decided he was to be the embodiment of basic American values. As it turned out, he was. He was born in…