Ignore the Robin-Leach-like subtitle this is not an ogling survey of mega-moneyed celebrities Robert Frank writes a weekly column and daily blog called The Wealth Report for The Wall Street Journal and he offers us an informative guided tour around an astonishing American landscape Most of its i

I beheld cried the prophet Jeremiah and lo there was no man and all the birds of the heavens had fled 4 25 KJV One part of the Bible that has gained in heft thanks to the technological horrors of modernity is the apocalyptic genre When visionaries in either testament describe a global catac

Imagine a trek across many lands--from Xian in central China through Kyrgyzstan Kazakhstan Uzbekistan Afghanistan Iran Turkey and finally Antakya Antioch on the Medite-rraneanby rattletrap buses primitive trains taxis hired cars and trucks one brief plane ride and endless hikes from score

Here are two incontrovertible truths about Gertrude Bell 1868-1926 she was a brilliant wise fascinating woman and she played a significant role in the creation of modern Iraq But 8220 Queen of the Des-ert 8221 8220 Shaper of Nations 8221 The original British edition had a quieter t

Holocaust literature that grimmest of subgenres may be said to have begun with Primo Levi 8217 s devastating and indispensable though wretchedly translated Survival in Auschwitz 1947 But Levi was little read at first not until the trial of Adolf Eichmann unforgettably reported by Hannah Ar

Back in 1978 on the way to his bar mitzvah a funny thing happened to Jeffrey Goldberg now Washington correspondent for The New Yorker he started to become a passionate Zionist His assimilated secular left-wing and soon to be divorced parents thought they could avoid the predictable alrightn

In his essay Reflections on Gandhi 1949 George Orwell declared Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent By that standard Leonard Woolf 1880-1969 needs to undergo severe scrutiny since Beatrice Webb called him a saint with very considerable intelligence a man wit

The poet-novelist-playwright Thomas Bernhard 1931-89 had much to be miserable about He was born out of wedlock to an Austrian carpenter who never acknowledged him and committed suicide in 1940 and a maidservant who promptly passed him on to her father a minor writer named Johannes Freumbichle

If you wanted to explain to a visiting Martian what the old American WASP aristocracy was all about you could find worse examples than Roger Angell First there is the pedigree one ancestor Captain John Sheple was captured as a teenager by Abenaki Indians in a raid on Groton Mass in 1694 A

Talk about heroic labors To flesh out the tale of his quirky Irish-American theologian Fr Eddie Danaher George McCauley a New York Jesuit invents major chunks of history an imaginary religious order the Christian Fathers founded in the 16th century by a swashbuckling Portuguese explorer-tur