William Styron’s 1979 novel “Sophie’s Choice” stands as an iconic description of a moral dilemma pushed to the furthest extreme of human cruelty and torment. A Nazi physician stands at a train station fronting massed and miserable Jews in 1943, directing some left, some right. Word has spread that one group is bound straight for the crematorium, while the other will be spared for the moment by going on to Auschwitz.

Sophie is a Polish Catholic who has landed here for smuggling a ham for her ailing mother in violation of wartime rules reserving all meat for the military. As she approaches the doctor with her young daughter and son in tow, the following conversation ensues:

Doctor: You’re so beautiful. I’d like to get you into bed with me. I know you’re a Polack, but are you also another one of these filthy communists?
Sophie: I’m not Jewish!. Or my children—they’re not Jewish either!...

Dementia hovers over America’s 54 million seniors (most recent 2019 figures) like a slightly noxious cloud that either already affects some 7 million of them or has the remaining 47 million (and their families) making nervous jokes about constantly misplacing their keys. While dementia comes in various forms and severities (some 70% from Alzheimer’s disease), its common core is heartbreak.

These emotional impacts are borne not only by those who fall to it, but in many ways, even more heavily by family members and other intimates who must watch their beloved not merely decline and die, but in the often long dying, turn into someone almost unknowable, alien to who they had been.

Canadian writer and Nobel Literature Prize winner Alice Munro, now 90 herself, explored some of this heartbreak and the adaptations caregiving spouses try to make in coping with it in her widely hailed short story, “The Bear Came Ove...

For the average person born and brewed in everyday contemporary English, reading Shakespeare is no walk in the park. Despite his essentially one-name status reflecting a worldwide reputation as a playwright and poet barely this side of a god, Shakespeare goes either under- or unread by the vast majority of people largely because of his arcane, at-first-glance impenetrable prose, which can be a challenge for even the most learned readers.

The Irish critic Fintan O’Toole captured this truth with his usual panache in his slim-but-packed 2002 volume, “Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearean Tragedy.”

Recapitulating his “Shakespeare Is Hard…” title in the text, O’Toole goes on to add “So long as you can see that there is a lot of life in Shakespeare, then the effort begins to make sense.”

Castle hallways are long, empty, and mournfully shadowed, every inch lifeless gray mortar, th...

Roger Craig was an avuncular figure in the sometimes rough-and-tumble, sometimes over-sentimentalized world of major league baseball. He was a better-than-his-record starting pitcher mid-20th century, enjoying a 12-year career and four World Series appearances before staying in the game first as a scout and coach and then through a successful decade-long run as a manager.

It was during his eight-season run (1985-92) managing the San Francisco Giants in that cosmopolitan city that the slightly drawling Durham, North Carolina native became known and celebrated for a down-home phrase to keep his players’ spirits up, especially when they were leaving the clubhouse after a tough loss, or worse, several losses in a row.

“Don’t let your daubers down,” he would tell them, employing that delightful, if somewhat mysterious-origin word “daubers” to here mean their spirits, confidence and passion for the game.

One ne...

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1. It was the only time in American history a president refused the peaceful transfer of power.

2.  It was the only time in American history a president refused the peaceful transfer of power.

3. It was the only time in American history a president refused the peaceful transfer of power.

4. It was the only time in American history a president refused the peaceful transfer of power.

5. It was the only time in American history a president refused the peaceful transfer of power.

6. It was the only time in American history a president refused the peaceful transfer of power.

7. It was the only time in American history a president refused the peaceful transfer of power.

8. It was the only time in American history a president refused the peaceful transfer of power.

9. It was the only time in American history a president refused the peaceful transfer of power.

10...