My new novel, The Vanishing Woman, has just come off the press--although I haven't received my copies just yet. The Vanishing Woman is based on the incredible true story of Ellen Craft, a light-skinned slave who escaped in 1848 by posing as a white man. She couldn't...
First, the East Germans tried to kill the Church of Reconciliation by surrounding it with walls, barbed wire, and booby traps. Then they blew it up. But the church lives on today with the newly constructed Chapel of Reconciliation. When the Berlin Wall went up in...
Okay, so the Berlin Wall in my living room doesn't quite match the real Wall's dimensions. But it comes close. The last generation of the Wall before it came down on November 9, 1989, stood about 12 feet tall, which is a bit too much for my living room. My replica of...
What in the world does the University of Illinois have to do with REO Speedwagon, Dan Fogelberg, Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," Billboard magazine's most powerful person in music, and the most prolific Grammy-winner living today? You can find out in a cover...
BBC Radio 4 ran a compelling show last Friday about The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle--the shredded documents that form the core of my novel, The Puzzle People. As the Berlin Wall was coming down so dramatically in 1989, East German secret police, the Stasi, began shredding...
Ted Johnson, a wonderful actor I got to visit with at this year's Gideon Media Arts Conference, plays a small but very important role in the upcoming Stephen Spielberg movie, Lincoln. He has pointed out an excellent Entertainment Weekly article that goes through the...
Few people probably remember the sinking of the iron-hulled Union ship, USS Hatteras, off the coast of Galveston, Texas, during the Civil War. But the ship played a key role in the struggle over the port of Galveston. The USS Hatteras was sunk by the Confederate ship,...
One of the highlights of 2011 was the One Book, One Community program in Canton, Ohio, which adopted The Disappearing Man as its featured book. The Canton Repository newspaper continues its support with a nice article about my Berlin mystery, The Puzzle People. Check...
The fence you see in these photos has to be the wickedest looking fence I have ever laid eyes upon. It is perhaps the most dangerous non-electrified fence in the country. My wife and I encountered this fence last spring during our walking tour in Charleston, South...
Chicago politics was alive and well in May of 1860 when the Republican party nominated Abraham Lincoln as its presidential candidate at the convention in the Windy City. Check out this fascinating article, which shows how trickery got Lincoln nominated on the third...