Tag Archives: travel

A Journey into the Wasteland (of Downtown Seattle)

Downtown Seattle isn’t what it used to be. In my youth it was a wonderland, a special place to go for shopping and entertainment. It was safe enough that my parents felt comfortable dropping a group of us kids off … Continue reading

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Another Look:  America Redux: Impressions of the United States After Thirty-Five Years Abroad by John Walters

Update February 25th, 2023: The U.S. political and social landscape continues to quake, and this book retains its relevance. Update February 15th, 2020: For some reason I had a strong urge to repost this description of the memoir I wrote … Continue reading

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Book Review: A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith by Timothy Egan

I decided to read this book not because of its religious content but because I enjoy good travel memoirs. Egan has sound secular credentials: he writes for The New York Times, has won a Pulitzer Prize, and has published several … Continue reading

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The World Is Changing

The world is changing… If you are familiar with The Lord of the Rings you have come across this quote. In the first film, The Fellowship of the Rings, the elven ring bearer Galadriel says it in the very beginning. … Continue reading

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Book Review:  A Long Strange Trip: The Inside History of the Grateful Dead by Dennis McNally – Part Two: Locale

Although the Grateful Dead eventually toured all over the United States and around the world, their origin story is inexorably linked with the San Francisco Bay Area. The late sixties, when the Dead came to prominence, was a heady time … Continue reading

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Another Look:  After the Rosy-Fingered Dawn: A Memoir of Greece

Greece has always been regarded as the birthplace of western civilization and a Mediterranean paradise.  In The Iliad and The Odyssey Homer uses the magical epithet rosy-fingered dawn to describe the sunrise over a land of myth, fascination, and mystery.  … Continue reading

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Book Review:  I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins

I got it into my head that I have been reading a lot of nonfiction lately and I needed to get into a novel. I conducted an online search to see what my local library had on hand, and if … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward by Daniel H. Pink

This book starts out strong. The author points out the fallacy of the expression “no regrets” because, well, everyone has regrets. To find out what these regrets are, Pink undertook a massive international survey and also delved deeply into past … Continue reading

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Another Look: World Without Pain: The Story of a Search

In the 1970s, after the Altamont Rock Festival, the Manson Family cult murders, and the fiasco of the Vietnam War many young people, disillusioned by the hippy movement, began to leave their homelands and travel to the far places of … Continue reading

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Book Review:  The Sun Is a Compass: A 4,000-Mile Journey into the Alaskan Wilds by Caroline Van Hemert

The Sun Is a Compass is a wonderful book. I enjoyed it through and through. In it, a young couple travel by rowboat from Bellingham, Washington up the Inside Passage to a town called Haines, hike and canoe through the … Continue reading

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