They looked more like day laborers than seamen.
I went to Harvard for examination with two men not as well prepared as I. Both passed easily, and I flunked, having sat through two or three examinations without being able to write a word, Burnham sa...
My between-books strategy was reading voraciously and on a whim.
One question that often comes up is why, in this age of blogs and tweets and instant digital communication of all kinds, it still takes so long to publish a book.
No one ever remembered a nice day. But no one ever forget the feel of paralyzed fish, the thud of walnut-sized hail against a horse's flank, or the way a superheated wind could turn your eyes to burla...
It's all right to drill your crew, but why not drill the passengers.
German U-boats were sinking ships at such a high rate that Admiralty officials secretly predicted Britain would be forced to capitulate by November 1, 1917. During the worst month, April, any ship lea...
Sun shines, wrote Christopher Isherwood in his Berlin Stories, and Hitler is the master of this city. The sun shines, and dozens of my friends … are in prison, possibly dead. The
Riders on the Ferris Wheel got the clearest, most horrific view of what happened next.
He had become the living representation of how men liked to think of themselves: one man doing an awful duty and doing it well, against the odds.
But one thing was quite clear… he wrote. [B]eing broke didn’t disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much bet...
But one thing was quite clear.... [Sol Bloom, chief of the Midway] wrote. [B]eing broke didn't disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at lea...
I felt like a child, ebullient and careless, the intoxication of the new regime working like wine in me.
As I look back on those days, most people in Chicago felt that way. Chicago was host to the world at that time and we were part of it all.
In his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So per...
The reference to the Lusitania was obvious enough, he recalled later, but personally it never entered my mind for a moment that the Germans would actually perpetrate an attack upon her. The culpabilit...
The club also had the custom of sending robed members to kidnap visiting celebrities and steal them away in a black coach with covered windows, all without saying a word.
For the first time he began to wonder whether he should jettison his transatlantic dream and settle for something more quotidian, perhaps focus his company on ship-to-shore communication. There was
He was known for throwing elaborate parties, known as freak dinners—perhaps most notably the Gondola Party he hosted in 1905 at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he filled the hotel’s courtyard with wa...
Within Room 40 itself, however, management of day-to-day operations fell largely, if informally, to Cdr. Herbert Hope, recruited in November 1914 to bring naval expertise to the interpretation of inte...