SELECTED WRITINGS
RECENT
“Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither are books”
Saporta Report
March 11, 2024
pdf
“What the ancients knew about the pleasures of armchair travel”
Boston Globe
July 2, 2023
pdf
ESSAY ON WRITING
Past Imperfect: Lives in the Biographer’s Mirror
New York Times
February 18, 2015
link
PROFILES
Keeping the Faith
Profile of Pete Seeger
Horizon Magazine
October 1981
pdf
Conversations from a Room
Profile of Leonard Cohen
Canadian Forum
August-September, 1983
link
A Conversation with Eugene P. Odum, Whole-Earth Mentor
Natural History
Oct. 1998,
pdf
ARTICLES AND ESSAYS
How the West Was Lost
A Road Trip in Search of the Oregon Trail
(Harper’s Magazine)
May 31, 2000
pdf
Life on the Line
Following the San Andreas Fault
(San Francisco Examiner Sunday Magazine)
Nov. 10, 1985
pdf
Fantastic Voyage
A Memoir
Oxford American
2007
pdf
The Interstates Turn 50
Time Magazine
June 26, 2006
link
The Truth about Elections
Montesquieu’s Enduring Lessons
Time Magazine
Jan. 23, 2005
pdf
Mitt Romney: The Second Coming of James K. Polk
Atlantic Magazine
Oct. 3, 2012
link
Attila the Hunk
Smithsonian
March 2001
pdf
The Shore Dimly Seen
Recovering From Brain Surgery
New York Times Magazine
April 1, 2007
link
Snapshots in Quartz
California Magazine
May 1984
pdf
Witness to a Lost Rite
Painter George Catlin Among The Mandan
National Geographic Adventure
October 2000
pdf
Tree Climbers Are Happy Out on a Limb
Sports Illustrated
Oct. 10, 1988
pdf
OP-EDS
Sing It Again for Us, Ol’ Blue Eyes
Sinatra at 80
Newsday
Dec. 12, 1995
pdf
Still Blowin’ in Wind
Bob Dylan At 60
Philadelphia Inquirer
Jan. 24, 2001
pdf
Wild Horses Couldn’t Drive Them Off Stage
The Persistence of the Rolling Stones
Los Angeles Times
Nov. 6, 2005
link
Of Rebel Raiders and the West
California and the Civil War
Los Angeles Times
Feb. 6, 2006
link
ON THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR
How Douglass Came Around to Lincoln
New York Times on-line
December 7, 2014
link
How Manhattan Drum Taps Led
Walt Whitman, Bohemianism and The Coming of the Civil War
New York Times on-line
Oct. 12, 2011
link
The Southern Mathew Brady
Civil War-era Photography Below the Mason-Dixon
New York Times on-line
Feb. 11, 2011
link
Abe Lincoln and Filibuster Fever
The President and Latin America-bound Clandestine Armies
New York Times on-line,
Jan. 11, 2011
link
The Messianic Schoolmaster
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison
New York Times on-line
Dec. 29, 2011
link
Frederick Douglass’s Irish Liberty
An Abolitionist Abroad
New York Times on-line
Feb. 25, 2011
link
The Secrets of the Shenandoah
Confederate Raiding Ship
New York Times on-line
Oct. 12, 2013
link
BOOK REVIEWS
Pete Hamill’s Why Sinatra Matters
LA Weekly
May 12, 1999
link
Novel Paints Partial Portrait Of City
Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jan. 11, 1999
pdf
What the Explorers Saw
Daniel B. Botkin.’s Our Natural History
Audubon Magazine
Nov.-Dec. 1995.
pdf
