Andy Unedited
Exploring Books, Life, and Writing
With the upcoming broadcast on PBS of the final episode of Les Misérables, I offer an excerpt from A Deeper Look at James by my wife, Phyllis, and me. We compare the musical with Victor Hugo’s book, but the same is true for this new six-part Masterpiece Theatre production. While I posted this six years …
This fall I’m releasing my new book, Write Better. To help celebrate that, we’re giving Andy Unedited a big facelift. What’s the new book about then? Writing is hard work. So in Write Better I want to make the job easier, especially for nonfiction writers, and help them do it better. I’ve loved words, reading, …
This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Kitty Genovese on March 13, 1964. So here I rerun my post from two years ago on this landmark episode in American culture.
I’m always amazed when very intelligent people say very stupid things. But it’s happened again. This time it’s in The Grand Design, the latest book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for thirty years, a chair held by no less than Sir Isaac Newton, himself no …
I was with a group of friends recently when another common myth of western civilization was trotted out as if it were gospel. “We all know religion has caused more violence and death than anything else.” “Well, actually, that’s not true,” I ventured. Heads turned. Mouths gaped. The planet itself seemed to wobble on its …
Everybody does it. Besides that, it’s not wrong. In fact, sometimes it can be a beautiful thing. No, I’m not talking about that! I’m talking about ending sentences with a preposition.
Years ago Steve Stuckey, a colleague in InterVarsity, told me a story about Campus by the Sea on Catalina Island, off the coast of Southern California. Rattlesnakes have been on the island for time out of mind. In the mid-1930s, some enterprising folk brought in wild pigs to keep the snake population under control. The …
Some 230-plus years ago, thirteen colonies were unhappy with the mother country. So the leaders of these New World governments gathered in Philadelphia to debate, discuss and bargain. Finally, they cobbled together a unanimous vote (with one abstention–New York!). As all school children know, the momentous day in 1776 on which the colonies declared independence …
When I first entered publishing, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, the folks at InterVarsity Press had a slogan for a reading program they were promoting: “Fifteen Minutes a Day Is Fifteen Books a Year.” The idea was that if you could give on average fifteen minutes a day to reading, over the course of …
I can’t remember the last time I read a book a second time–except perhaps for Goodnight Moon. But when our neighborhood book club decided to discuss The Sparrow, I was delighted to read it again.