A Powerful Book For Our Time by Doris Kearns Goodwin

The latest book from the pen of Doris Kearns Goodwin is very much a story for the 21st century.

There is so much talk these days of big, important people in America living by one set of rules while the rest of us are forced to live by another, that the history of the early 20th century is truly a timely tale for the modern reader.

This is just the story told by the talented Doris Kearns Goodwin, in her new book with the unwieldy title: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. How she managed to fill this 750 page book with such important details, got it out so relatively soon after her Lincoln book, and still is able to make all those television appearances, is a question for the ages. (I'm going to guess that like Winston Churchill, she gets some help with her research!)

Authors' Intellectual Property Rights in the Age of Google

Authors Guild general counsel, Jan Constantine, stands on a chair at Two Sisters Bar and Books in San Francisco. The New York based attorney just testified before Congress about the challenges authors face in the world of the Internet.

It was a stunning day to visit San Francisco, April 7, 2014: the high was a very unusual (for April) 77°F, and there was not a visible cloud or a finger of fog to be seen. But I wasn't there entirely to enjoy the weather, nor the fascinating street scenes of this place we peninsula residents just call The City. 

Meeting Mickey Rooney: The Larger-Than-Life Talent

Mickey Rooney in his prime was the most successful actor in Hollywood.

I was in the newsroom at WESH-TV, Orlando, Florida, when we got the news that actress Ava Gardner had died. It was January 1990, and I was working then for a man who really understood news: news director Steve Ramsey, whom we fondly called Rambo. One of us--and it might have been me--noted that Ava Gardner had once been married to MGM star Mickey Rooney and that Rooney himself was in town with his hit Broadway show "Sugar Babies."

While I anchored the 5:30 PM newscast, the producer called his hotel to see if he would be available for an interview. Available? Were we bringing a camera? He just happened to have an opening in his schedule.