History, Real Life and Faith
I’ve connected insomnia and prayer for years. But I’m getting tired of it. Long ago, I heard some sage person comment, “if you can’t sleep at night, pray. The devil doesn’t like it and he’ll stop harassing you so you can fall asleep.” I tried it. Often. I haven’t found the saying to be true. After seemingly days of not sleeping…
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It’s a sobering moment when you realize Henry Huggins, in some camps, is considered historical fiction. How can a book I read and loved as a child be considered . . . . historical? Beverly Cleary‘s first published the book in 1950. Nearly 70 years ago. In publishing circles, historical fiction is defined as “prior to the Vietnam war.” The…
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My mother was an Italian immigrant. That’s her in the passport photo. Mom’s the baby. My grandmother, Fortunata, is the heroine. Or the crazy woman, depending on your perspective. If Fortunata looks a little stressed, keep in mind her baby was only two months old. Her other children were nine years and thirteen months months old. They was leaving in two…
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Did you know the bagpipes played an important role for the British army during World War I? 2500 bagpipe players were in the trenches with their men. The pipers played the clarion call to arms to the men of the British Expeditionary Forces and thus were usually the first ones “over the top.” They stood in full view of the…
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Some of us are good at restoring old photos using Photoshop, and some of us only can admire their work. I’m in the admiring category. That’s been particularly true when I wrote a novel set during World War I and first caught glimpses of colorizations of very old photos from the war. Like many, I was intrigued. How was it done?…
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Many people have seen this famous photo of St. Paul’s Cathedral wreathed in smoke following the London Blitz of December, 1940. What you may not know is that all that smoke is not the cathedral, but the burning of London’s book warehouses. Among those buildings destroyed were warehouses containing all the unsold copies of the Oswald Chambers canon then in…
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