Free Republic

NOT everyone saw The Shot Heard ‘Round The World. Frank Sinatra was just one of a clutch of celebrities packed inside the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951 to watch his beloved New York Giants clinch baseball’s National League pennant against local rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers. When Bobby Thomson, the Glaswegian batter, struck his three-run home run to send the Giants to the World Series, however, Sinatra was temporarily distracted. His friend, the actor Jackie Gleason, had just been sick all over his lap. “Here is one of the all-time classic games and I don’t see Bobby Thomson hit that...

Working for Barack Obama can be a career maker, but Hebrew readers have been puzzled by the explanation for the path that one former staffer took. The Chicago Sun-Times reports that Michael Slaby, whom the newspaper described as “among the key tech gurus for Barack Obama’s two presidential campaigns,” has founded a startup called Timshel that helps not-for-profits and activist groups use digital tools to increase their analytic capabilities. Sounds good. But where, exactly, does the name Timshel come from? “It’s a reference to [Steinbeck’s] ‘East of Eden’ — the Hebrew word for “Thou mayest” from the Bible [in the...

When he was moving out of his home, he decided to give the pearl to Maggay-Amurao for safekeeping instead of transport it with him — "since it's quite heavy,"... In fact, the pearl weighs in at 34 kilograms, Maggay-Amurao says — or approximately 75 pounds.

It was an angry book. Much of the response was angry too. Some towns banned it, some towns burned it. Every town talked about it. "The Grapes of Wrath" was published 75 years ago this month, a seminal masterpiece of American literature that seems freshly relevant to this era of wealth disparity, rapacious banks and growing poverty. John Steinbeck introduced readers to the Joads, a poor, proud clan of Depression-era Oklahoma farmers who set out for the promised land of California in a rickety truck after their own land dries up and blows away and the bank seizes what little...

I am reading that the film "Grapes of Wrath" will be re made. It’s a Dreamworks/Spielberg plan. I am so heartily sick to death of the Hollywood smarmy and criminally skewed interpretation of American life and American history. I don’t even want to think of the Liberal orgy of ‘I hate America’ this will be. All the while they are cashing in and living like royalty for ritually subverting the historical facts. Capitalism works… the inevitable boom and bust cycles are what hard working people save for and the reason that credit should always be avoided like poison. However,...

John Steinbeck's 1942 novel The Moon is Down is about people of a small  village occupied by Nazi forces somewhere in Northern Europe. They become sullen and their obedience is bought at an increasingly high price. Free people cannot remain conquered.Re-reading The Moon is Down left me with nagging questions about the extent to which the People of the United States remain free. Those questions did not arise when I first read it, many years ago. It now seems obvious that we are less free than we once were; yet perhaps (one can at least hope that) there are still enough to make...

President Barack Obama and his daughters Malia and Sasha started the first day of their Martha's Vineyard vacation this morning with a visit to a bookstore frequented by another Democratic president. They spent about 20 minutes inside the Bunch of Grapes Bookstore in Vineyard Haven as a crowd of about 100 people gathered outside behind yellow security tape waiting for them to come out. In an interview with the Times, bookstore owner Dawn Braasch said the trio were primarily looking for books for the daughters and bought Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" and John Steinbeck's "The Red Pony." Obama...

The Grapes of Wrath, published exactly 70 years ago, can be seen as a prophetic novel - rooted in the tragedies of the Great Depression, but speaking directly to the harsh realities of 2009, writes Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott. Steinbeck's epic novel, which traces the harrowing exodus of Tom Joad and his family from blighted Oklahoma (where they are evicted from their farm), across the rugged American south-west via Highway 66, and on to what they mistakenly hope will be a more promising future in California, is considered by many readers to be the quintessential Depression-era story, and an ironic...

There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good. It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing all are born the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to...

Close the public libraries in John Steinbeck's home town? They couldn't do that? "They" not only could; they almost did. Had it happened on July 1 this year, Salinas, California, would have been the largest city in the nation without a public library. Monterey County's seat, the city has three libraries, the main one having been named after the famous writer who set several of his novels in the fertile Salinas Valley. The near-closing was not a scare tactic. It was the city council's response to a genuine financial crisis. Having engaged in cutting, squeezing, and trimming its budgets (to...

If you think Vancouver libraries took a hit this year, get this: The home town of the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Cannery Row" and "Of Mice and Men" is shutting down its libraries. And it isn't because no one lives there anymore. John Steinbeck's Salinas, Calif., near Monterey, has seen rapid growth and now boasts a population of 150,000. The city is experiencing many of the same budget woes as other city and state governments, including rising health care costs. Budget shortfalls and failed money requests in Salinas have brought $8 million in budget cuts this year and the city...