TAYLOR CALDWELL was really a quite impossible woman and, as is so often the case, rather charmingly impossible. For many years, she wrote to the editor of this journal, and to this colleague or that, to praise this feature, criticize that editorial, ruminate...

BREWER - Senior center Andy Caldwell enabled the Hampden Academy hockey fans and his teammates to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Despite holding a 35-9 shots-on-goal margin, the top-seeded Broncos were about to end the second period with just a 2-1 lead...

The natural perversity of students can sometimes be turned to good account, as when a student asks (apropos of a discussion about reading habits), "But isn't it necessary to read bad books in order to recognize good ones?" and the teacher replies, "Yes, it is." The attempt to implement this proposition can be unexpectedly rewarding. My own experience grew out of a class in American Literature since the Civil War, which had just concluded a study of The American and "...

Until about three quarters of the way through [Captains and the Kings] I more or less knew what I should be writing about. Now I am not so sure. It seemed to be one of those capacious dramatic tales of the American dollar dream in the tradition of The Magnificent Ambersons, The Great Gatsby or Citizen Kane. 'Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh was thirteen years old when he first saw America through the dirty porthole on the steerage deck of The Irish Queen. It was the early 1850's and he was a penni...

While "The Arm and the Darkness" by Taylor Caldwell is primarily a long narrative of the physical and spiritual struggles of a young nobleman during the conflicts between the Catholic reaction and the Huguenots in France in the time of Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, it is also an adumbration of the emergence of the Common Man into history and his opening battles for liberty, enlightenment and justice. The real villain of this novel is the corrupt hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church and ...