John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” tells of complementary yet contentious partners George and Lennie and their quest to acquire a place of their own so they can “live off the fatta the lan’.” Here are five of my favorite excerpts from the novella. Because of Steinbeck’s prioritization on storytelling, [...]

The world is filled with a seemingly endless amount of good books and authors, past and present. Here are some of my favorites, with links to well-crafted, thought-provoking excerpts from the works. “Slaughterhouse Five” By Kurt Vonnegut “On Writing” By Stephen King “The Old Man and the Sea” By Ernest Hemingway [...]

“Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead” is Phil Lesh’s 2005 autobiographical exploration of himself and his decades of playing bass with what is arguably the 20th century’s hardest-working rock band. He especially digs into the Dead’s formative years — the drugs (the band attended Ken Kesey’s [...]

Toward the end of World War II, Navy plane mechanic Bob Ernst was stationed at Kaneohe Bay near Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, helping assemble Lockheed PV-1 Venturas that had been shipped in parts from the U.S. mainland for use in the Pacific. Before arriving there, Ernst already had about three [...]

William “Bill” Wilcox doesn’t dump his storied history on you all at once (to get it, you have to coax pieces out one at a time), nor does he ever stray from meek when telling it. His voice keeping soft, his hearing working against him, Wilcox eventually steers into his [...]

Nafeh Kurdi remembers the images of splattered red after the bombs fell. “It was very hard for me to see the blood on the floor,” the 20-year-old from Syria said. Amid the gruesome fighting in Syria, the strike had hit Kurdi’s university in Damascus, the country’s capital. It, plus his [...]