Cormac McCarthy, The Road, and Carrying the F...

With the Old Breed is widely considered one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Penned by Eugene Sledge, a Marine who fought with the 1st Division — the old breed — in the Pacific campaigns of Peleliu and Okinawa, the book is unflinching, deeply human, and so vividly writte ...  Show more

Back in 2019, David Epstein joined me to talk about his book Range and why generalists often thrive in a specialized world. Now he’s back with a new book that explores a seemingly opposite idea: the power of constraints. In Inside the Box, David argues that limits — deadlines, bo ...  Show more

‏In this episode I share with you some of the good books I have read a while ago. This time it’s all nom fiction probably except for one book because it’s a ‘fable’. I hope you enjoy those titles. The books I mentioned did in fact help me in different aspects of my life. And I ho ...  Show more

The General and Julia is a wonderful novel, delving deeply into the final days of Ulysses S. Grant. Not many know this, but at the end of his life, Grant was financially destitute and in a race to write his memoirs before his death. He knew that if he wrote his memoirs and did it ...  Show more

"The Stranger" by Ambrose Bierce: A group of men traveling in the old west meet a strange man at their campfire- a man who has an even stranger story. We also include a background on the incredible life of Ambrose Bierce, from his Civil War experience to his exploits with Hearst ...  Show more

August 2, 1915. The poem appears in print for the first time this week, from Kentucky to Pennsylvania to Vermont. Every reader is transported to that same leafy path: “two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost becomes an immediate hit and will go on ...  Show more