Every composer finds himself doing hack work once in a while; it’s called paying the bills. Tchaikovsky was loathe to write “Dance of...

The last thing I needed was to read another Lincoln biography. But a Lincoln biography given to me by my brother Charles, continued to...

When Frank Sinatra wanted to listen to music---sit down and really listen--he listened to string quartets. This was a side of Sinatra...

Is Classical Music being written today? Yes. Sort of. What is being composed today--and for most of the 20th Century--are less...

This very special Lincoln biography, originally published in 1952, benefits from the 1947 opening of the Robert Todd Lincoln Collection...

What this book does masterfully well is show how the president-elect Abraham Lincoln shored up northern morale in preparation for the...

Orchestral music was in a state of transition when Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) took up his pen and began composing symphonies, the likes of...

“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,...