One of the stories often hidden from public view with tremendous consequences is the astonishing size of our country’s incarcerated population at 2.3 million while another 20 million live with a felony record. That does not include the 555,000 locked up in the U.S. who have not been convicted of a crime. I heard an interview of the author and decided this book would be a good place to dig into this grave reality. Reuben Miller knows the issues from first-hand experience. He was a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and is now a sociologist studying […]
Continue readingMonthly Archives: April 2021
At Home and Abroad by V.S. Pritchett, Reviewed by Mark D. Walker
While perusing my books recently, I recognized this book by V.S. Pritchett, who is a British writer and literary critic and a well-known travel writer. I’d recently written several of my own stories on Latin America, “The Ying & Yang of Travel: Traveling Solo,” and “Tschiffley’s Epic Equestrian Ride,” so I decided to get this author’s take. After all, according to the “WorldCat List,” which is the largest data- base on books for libraries around the world, Pritchett had logged 422 works in 1,896 publications in 5 languages in almost 43,000 library holdings. And he was knighted of Sir Victor […]
Continue readingMillion Mile Walker Dispatch, March, Drama on the Border: No Easy Solutions
Friends and Colleagues from Around the World, As the number of asylum-seeking migrants, including unaccompanied minors, crossing the southwest border of the U.S. soared to 3,500 a day in February, and the number of unaccompanied minors from Central America rose 60%, many of us are asking, “What’s going on in Central America anyway?” I’ll explore this and more in Culture Watch. My Writing & Book Reviews will include several book and movie reviews. We’ll look to inspiration in Voices of the Day and, as always, What Others Are Saying. My latest article, “Tschiffely’s Epic Ride: Part of the Yin & Yang of Travel Series,” was in […]
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