A Bureaucrat's Mistake Led to the Fall of the Berlin Wall In a country loaded with bureaucrats, it seems oddly fitting that a bureaucratic blunder would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall. To set the scene, the year was 1989, and the Soviet empire was unraveling. In...
Powerful Biography Lays Millions of Deaths at Mao's Feet The first sentence of the acclaimed biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, couldn't be more to the point: "Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population,...
Canton Actors Bring a Remarkable Couple to Life When a friend first approached Roslyn Pratt about playing Nancy Brown in the Canton film production of The Disappearing Man, her first reaction was "Oh no, you don't."Â Based on her extensive stage experience, Pratt...
Canton Group Brings The Disappearing Man to Life Furious, the overseer stepped away from Mamma and kicked up dust with his boot...Then he picked up a stick, a sturdy one, and circled Mamma like he would a dangerous dog. Henry had to act. He knew it now...The overseer...
Berlin Trip Takes Me to the Site of the First Shooting Along the Wall Talk about timing. I spent the last two weeks in Austria and Berlin, in part to do research for my new novel on the Berlin Wall, The Puzzle People (which explains why I have not done a blog for...
Phoenix Dust Storm Hearkens Back to the Worst Hard Time If you haven't seen the incredible images of the recent dust storm that swept across Phoenix, check out this YouTube video. It brought to mind a book that I read last year, The Worst Hard Time, an award-winning...
Caldecott Honor Book Joins The Disappearing Man in Canton Festivities I first came across Henry Brown's incredible story while visiting Cincinnati for the premiere of the VeggieTales movie, The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. At the time, I was a VeggieTales writer,...
It Took One of the Craziest Games of All Time With baseball's All-Star game just around the corner, I can't resist a bit of baseball history--one of the most bizarre games in the long history of the game. I am a White Sox fan, but this game involved the...
If Only Henry Brown Had a Computer Game... I couldn't resist this curious bit of news. A friend recently sent me an article about a man who is shipping himself in a box from Bald Knob, Arkansas, to Portland, Oregon, beginning July 7. That's right: A seven-day...
When Western Illinois Tried to Split From the Union Some have described it as our 51st state. But others have called it a republic, which tried to secede from the Union in 1971. Whatever it was, state or republic, people knew it as Forgottonia. Forgottonia was...