“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl...

It seems like a bad dream to Phil Hill, coming to Monza as the underdog to win the 1961 drivers' world championship. What had promised...

Johann Sebastien Bach was fooling around on the great organ in the Leipzig Cathedral when he composed the most hair-raising sounds ever...

Thomas Jefferson played violin and was familiar with the music of Vivaldi, Handel and Mozart, but it’s unlikely he ever heard of Johann...

It’s the stuff of fantasy, not unlike the world of Alice in Wonderland, or of Dorothy in the Land of Oz, or of the time traveler in The...

“The Unfair Advantage” is proof-positive that nice guys finish first—if they work hard. To say Mark Donohue was modest about his driving...

When “Inside the Third Reich” by Albert Speer, arrived in bookstores in 1970, the Vietnam war was raging unabated. In an interview with...

It was a glittering array of talent. Vice president Lyndon Johnson was deeply impressed. After attending his first Cabinet meeting he...

George Frederick Handel was German--and a contemporary of Johann Sebastion Bach--who lived most of his adult life in London. Unlike...

"England is a nation of shopkeepers." Thus spake Napoleon. Napoleon Bonaparte wasn't being complimentary. It was a put-down, his way of...

Who knew? While the Beatles (raised on American Rock 'n' Roll) were perfecting their sound in the waterfront clubs of Hamburg, Germany,...

My two sons were surprised. None of their high schools friends had ever heard of the Byrds. They’d heard of the Beatles—of course—and...

When I was 12-years old, my brother brought home from the public library “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie. Judging by the title (and by his reason for reading the book) I thought it was about how to manipulate people to get what you wanted, and therefore somehow sinister. Flash forward 30 years, and now working for a large midwest company with customer problems galore, and a host of front-line employees without a clue in how to deal with them, I f

While making the motion picture "Grand Prix" in 1966, filmmaker John Frankenheimer went to Reims, site of that year's French Grand Prix,...

In an age of political cynicism, name calling, and deep political division (where political opponents are routinely demonized), it's...

Book Review: The Infidel and the Professor, by Dennis C. Rasmussen The “infidel” is David Hume and “the professor” is Adam Smith, two...

Henry Manney, wit, sage, and European Editor for ROAD & TRACK magazine in the 1960s, would stand behind a stone barn outside Burnenville...

Of all the great composers, none had a bigger ego than Richard Wagner (pronounced Ree-card Vawg-ner). Wagner (1813-1883) was famously...

Frank Sinatra was famous for “My Way”— the song and what it said about him. Music was personal for Sinatra. It was the one thing in his...

At the age of eight he was playing piano and composing music that your high-school music teacher could only dream of doing. It was only a...