Watch This: Changeling, with Angelina Jolie

Changeling is the incredible story, based upon actual events, of Christine Collins’ quest to find her young son Walter, missing without a trace. It is also the story of appalling corruption in the government and police department of 1920’s-’30’s Los Angeles, which apparently has been a significant problem of long-standing. A third subplot involves a [...]

Watch This: Julie and Julia

Delightfully delicious
In 1949, Julia and Paul Child moved to Paris. For a while, newly unemployed, Julia flounders about for something to do, and finally hits upon cooking. It’s France, after all. In 2004, Julie and Eric Powell moved to Queens, NY. Julie thought she’d become a writer, but has become stalled in a [...]

Archaeology News: King Herod’s Tomb

Herodium, also called Herodion, was first positively identified in 1838 by the American scholar Edward Robinson, who had a knack for locating biblical landmarks. After scaling the mountain and comparing his observations with those of the first century Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, Robinson concluded that “all these particulars…leave scarcely a doubt, that this was Herodium, [...]

American Myths: The Real Betsy Ross

Betsy Ross made the very first American flag at her home in Philadelphia, at the request of none other than George Washington. Or did she? Here’s the real story

Watch This: Gore Vidal’s Lincoln

Author Gore Vidal’s work of “factual fiction”, Lincoln, is a monumental novel focusing upon the five years of the most dramatic of presidencies. Distilling nearly 700 pages of biographical detail into a three hour miniseries must have been daunting, but writer Ernest Kinoy was up to the task. It’s hard to judge direction in a [...]

Archaeology News: How they finally found Washington’s boyhood home

George Washington famously owned and lived at the plantation called Mount Vernon, which is located on the banks of the Potomac River, about 16 miles south of the eponymous US capitol. But he resided in many other locations before inheriting that estate from his brother’s widow. Washington was born in 1732, on his father’s tobacco [...]

Nonfiction: What Would Barbra Do, by Emma Brockes

WWBD?

Emma Brockes was raised in England by a mum who would break into show tunes at the drop of a hat. Growing up in the age of DVDs, Emma and her girlfriends were free to to watch their favorite musicals ad infinitum , and boy, did they ever (imagine seeing Mary Poppins, voluntarily, [...]

Classic Lit: The Warden, by Anthony Trollope

Not for Profit

Septimus Hardy is that rarity – an honest, “disinterested”, Church of England cleric. For 10 years, he has held the living as warden at a charitable “hospital”, founded centuries ago for impoverished but worthy tradesmen. When in the interest of reform, John Bold, Warden Hardy’s daughter’s suitor, brings a suit against the church [...]

Historical Fiction: The Burning Bride, by Margaret Lawrence

Another of the midwife’s tales
Part historical fiction, part murder mystery, The Burning Bride is the third in Margaret Lawrence’s series about midwife/amateur sleuth Hannah Trevor, inspired by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s nonfiction work “A Midwife’s Tale”. This installment is based upon Shays’ Rebellion, an uprising that occurred in Massachusetts in the aftermath of the [...]

Watch This: The Advocate, with Colin Firth

Hidden gem
Set in medieval times, The Advocate opens with the journey of idealistic new lawyer Richard Courtois from Paris to the southern French village of Abbeville, where he hopes to make a difference in the lives of the downtrodden peasants. In no time at all, he’s overwhelmed by a backlog of cases the [...]