Despite being a school dropout, a lifelong deadbeat and drug addict, Thomas De Quincey was also an influential writer and critic ahead of his time.  He was a personal friend of several of the English Romantic poets and author Frances Wilson displays a deft understanding and descriptive style in recounting his virtues, his failings, and his [...]

“There’s a fire and a fury raging in that little woman and scorching her heart,” author William Makepeace Thackeray observed of Charlotte Brontë. “She has a story and a great grief that has gone badly with her.” Bronte did have a sad life, albeit one of magnificent creativity. Losing her mother in childhood and all of [...]

When I grew up in the 1980s, I didn’t like dance/pop music like Prince and Madonna I liked music like Motley Crue and Van Halen.  Every guy I knew wanted to play guitar like Eddie Van Halen.  Unfortunately, they also wanted to do a lot of other things and as Greg Renoff’s new book Van Halen [...]

Rosemary Kennedy (1918-2005) eldest daughter of Joseph P. & Rose, spent her life paying for the mistakes of others, starting with a birth botched by an attendant that resulted in intellectual disability, and later a fateful decision by her father to use experimental surgery to “correct” his eldest daughter’s unpredictable mood swings and behavior.  The Kennedy [...]