Free Republic

... In so many ways, to read Jim Berry was to meet Jim Berry. "Berry's World," the syndicated single-panel feature that he drew for 40 years, beginning in 1963, was a remarkably steady stream of thoughtful observational humor that — like the unfussy art itself — rarely seemed to strain for the laugh. Each gag, as steady as a top golfer's approach shots, just "landed." Precision meets concision ... Mr. Berry died last Friday in Boynton Beach, Fla., at age 83 ...

Audio interview 39:48

Watched the movie over the weekend and it is a very GOOD example of what libs think the world would be if they could have it their way.

I am certain we never heard this in school. The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves. Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white....

Three 40-foot containers packed with 83,723 Spanish-speaking Bibles to be distributed among Baptist churches in both Western and Eastern Cuba will leave South Florida during the week of March 15 and are expected to arrive in Havana March 25. The shipment is the third Southern Baptists have sent to the island nation since 1999, bringing the total number of Bibles sent to nearly half a million, said Kurt Urbanek, IMB strategy leader for Cuba since 1997. However, this represents the first time Bibles were shipped directly from the United States. The extensive process of seeking permission from the Cuban government...

Zane Grey (1872-1939) was to the western novel what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was to detective fiction, churning out 89 novels about the American cowboy and the western frontier. His books were on the bestseller list 13 times between 1910 and 1924 and ranked in sales just behind the Bible and the McGuffey Reader. Zane-GreyAn Easterner by birth, he grew up fishing and hunting in rural Pennsylvania. He was fascinated with the deserts of the Southwest and became well known as a world traveler and adventurer. He went on extensive hunting trips, packing in supplies by mule train and camping...

My wife knows I love Santana's music so when we saw his autobiography at Sam's one day, I knew that was in my stocking for Christmas. So I've been reading it, nearly all the way through 544 pages, and I have a few comments, see below.

In 1949, George Orwell received a curious letter from his former high school French teacher. Orwell had just published his groundbreaking book Nineteen Eighty-Four, which received glowing reviews from just about every corner of the English-speaking world. His French teacher, as it happens, was none other than Aldous Huxley who taught at Eton for a spell before writing Brave New World (1931), the other great 20th century dystopian novel.

One of Chesterton’s most penetrating insights into America concerned what he called “the great American experiment” of multi-racialism, “the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot”. Chesterton asserted that the experiment required a strong sense of national identity, which was the unifying force that allowed the many races to meld into the one nation. The metaphor of the melting pot “implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt.”[5] The paradox, therefore, is that the very diversity necessitates unity....

I will be in South Bend at Notre Dame University to screen "Rockin' the Wall", our documentary about rock music's part in the fall of the Berlin Wall, on Sunday, March 29, 3:00 p.m. at the DeBartolo Auditorium. Admission is free. I will be around to sign books afterward as well. See you there!

Hillary Can’t Delete This As Secretary of State, Clinton says she stopped at nothing to get a blind dissident out of China. That’s not what he remembers. By DAVID FEITH March 15, 2015 This book won’t help Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. Its author, Chen Guangcheng, is the blind Chinese human-rights lawyer who in April 2012 escaped rural house arrest and sought refuge at the U.S. embassy in Beijing. The ensuing diplomatic tussle over his fate was a high drama that Mrs. Clinton touts as an accomplishment of her tenure as secretary of state. It reminded her of the “responsibility...

This is what most of us know about the death of Julius Caesar, half-remembered from movies and plays: Some soothsayer said, "Beware the Ides of March." A few idealistic Romans decided to win back Rome for the people.Caesar got stabbed by Brutus with a big sword, said "Et tu, Brute?" and died nobly. All of that is wrong.

In a letter dated May 31, 1960, Flannery O’Connor, the author best known for her classic story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (listen to her read the story here) penned a letter to her friend, the playwright Maryat Lee. It begins rather abruptly, likely because it’s responding to something Maryat said in a previous letter: I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the...

The Life and Death of Julius Caesar ... Soothsayer: Ceasar! CAESAR: Ha! who calls? CASCA: Bid every noise be still: peace yet again! CAESAR: Who is it in the press that calls on me? I hear a tongue, shriller than all the music,Cry 'Caesar!' Speak; Caesar is turn'd to hear. Soothsayer: Beware the ides of March. CAESAR: What man is that? BRUTUS: A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March. CAESAR: Set him before me; let me see his face. CASSIUS: Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar. CAESAR: What say'st thou to me now? speak once again....

Whether at sunrise, sunset or the heart of the day, in the height of summer or engulfed by snow, photographer James Grant is convinced that the Peak District offers some of the most spectacular landscapes Great Britain has to offer. The parochial landscape photographer has a passion for hills and mountains, in particular those surrounding his home town of Matlock on the south eastern edge of the Peak District, although he also has a soft spot for the Lake District, Snowdonia and Scotland. These images of rolling hills bathed in light and mist show the breadth of an already formidable...

Though Middlemarch has a large cast of characters involved in intricately related plots, Dorothea Brooke stands out as the book’s heroine. The narrative begins and ends with her. Book I of the novel’s eight Books is “Miss Brooke.” She is a young woman of simple beauty and surpassing decency. She yearns idealistically to benefit humanity, or subordinate herself as the helpmate of a great man like John Milton in his blindness. Yet she is exceedingly foolish.

Fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett has died aged 66, having had Alzheimer's disease for eight years. "The world has lost one of its brightest, sharpest minds," said Larry Finlay of his publishing company, Transworld. Best known for the Discworld series, Sir Terry wrote more than 70 books over his lengthy career. He was first diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2007, but continued writing, completing his final book last summer. The author died at home "with his cat sleeping on his bed, surrounded by his family," Mr Finlay said.

On Monday I finished reading George Eliot’s great Victorian novel Middlemarch for the first time. I have tried and failed to finish it several times; it’s not easy reading. At a few points it is, briefly, a slog. Although it remains a subject of debate, I believe the novel lacks a happy ending. Nevertheless, for me, the ending was happy. I finished the book. What did it take? I sought permission to audit an undergraduate class in the Victorian novel at a local college and paid for the privilege. I needed a structure within which to read the book. Like...

It has sold more than 20 million copies since it was written two centuries ago and has had generations of schoolgirls swooning over the ultimate romantic hero. But the great unspoken background of Jane Austen's world is that both Mr Darcy and Mr Bingley in Pride and Prejudice got rich from the slave trade, says author Joanna Trollope. The novelist, speaking at the Festival of Literature in Dubai, dispelled the myth about Mr Darcy and Mr Bingley being the perfect men and described the 'very dark underbelly' to Austen's books. She said: 'Why does Mr Bingley in Pride and Prejudice...

1629 Charles I of England dissolves Parliament and rules alone for 11 years.