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Seward and Auburn
This is roughly what I said on September 18 about Seward and Auburn. I do not feel the need, with this audience, to answer the question I often have to answer: who was William Henry Seward? Instead I propose to talk about Seward and Auburn: about why he came to live here, why he spent…
Read MoreSeward Reviews
The first publication reviews of Seward have appeared. They are favorable; indeed the review in the Dallas Morning News could be described as glowing. It ends with the following: “Writing like that makes history come alive: a researcher digging into the mines of the past and quarrying new insight on an old story. Seward:…
Read MoreVA to CA, day six
At around ten this morning the phone rang, and our realtor asked if we were in California. “No,” said Lydia, looking at the desert all around us, “not yet.” “But we are in California,” I insisted, “we crossed an hour ago.” The reason Lydia did not think we were in California was that the first…
Read MoreVA to CA, day three
We now have a rough structure for our days. I get up too early, go out running for a little while, return to find Lydia stirring. We get dressed, eat breakfast, pack up the room, depart. This morning we were on the road about 7:30, about as early as I have ever been on the…
Read MoreVA to CA, day two
Today was our first real day of travel, a full day on the road. The dog and I started the day with a short run in Lexington, Virginia. It is always hard to take a good run from a highway motel: you are a long way from the nice roads; you are in the midst…
Read MoreVA to CA, day one
As I mentioned in an earlier post, we are selling our house in Virginia, buying one in southern California. Today was our last day in the Virginia house: a sad day, because selling a house is not quite like selling or giving away a bit of furniture. A house is in a sense just a…
Read MoreTop 10
Publishers Weekly has designated my Seward book as one of its “top ten” history and military history books for the fall season. In the short review on June 25, PW says that the book is a “fresh contribution to the Civil War-era bookshelf” which “brings out from Lincoln’s shadow the formidable William Seward, an antislavery…
Read MoreImpeachment of Lincoln
I have another book review up today on the Washington Independent Review of Books: this time of Stephen Carter’s novel about the impeachment of Abraham Lincoln. Wait, you say, Abraham Lincoln was never impeached, was he? No, he was not, but Carter imagines that Lincoln survived the assassin’s bullet, that Andrew Johnson was felled instead,…
Read MoreThird Pass
My friend Nick Trefethen, in his book Trefethen’s Index Cards, says that “before computers articles and books went through one or two or three drafts before publication. Authors had to be skilled at envisioning how copy would look in print that was splattered with corrections and reorderings and insertions. Nowadays, if the author is finicky,…
Read MoreABQ memories
On a happier note, let me try to post a photo of mock trial nationals in Albequerque. A week has passed since we were there, but I am still thinking about what we did well and what we could do better next year. This photo shows half a dozen of the Exeter team at dinner…
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