Books

From Chapter 6: Medea and Jason

When she met Jason, Medea was a very young woman, known to be a magician, yes, but only locally. I like to think of her as seventeen, but she might have been younger. She was a beauty and a follower of Hecate, a powerful goddess of the underworld. She was also the niece of the powerful witch Circe, who becomes...

Why do Americans go to the grocery store to buy wine from California, Italy, or New Zealand, when many of us can find an independent winery thirty minutes down the road? Why are locally grown and produced wines so often disdained when locally grown food is upheld as the gold standard? The U.S. wine industry has lagged behind Europe’s for far too...

Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist exposed a brutal but commonplace system of child exploitation to Victorian readers. Conditions in workhouses, factories, and child criminal gangs posed lethal and daily hazards to children born to poverty. Several much-needed reforms took place in the aftermath of Oliver Twist’s publication. But what were the...

Has there ever been someone who accomplished so much and at the same time thought less of herself? Before she had even turned forty, Florence Nightingale was the darling of the British public, the heroine of the Crimea. She could have sailed home to England and comfortably dined out on her fame for the remainder of her long days.

Instead, she...

It has become a cliche to say that one person can make a difference, but the life of Mahatma Gandhi confronts us with the enduring truth of that statement.

It is impossible to say exactly what moved people to revere and follow him and be imprisoned and beaten on his behalf in the thousands. No doubt, his ever gentle demeanor had a hand in that....