Blog

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry attend church at Sandringham on Christmas Day, 2017, six months before their May wedding.

Royal flush: When Harry met Meghan

August 19, 2020

The challenge of authorized biography is the balance between accessibility and objectivity. If your subject is still alive or has keepers of the flame like a relative or foundation, you want to be able to tap into that resource. At the same time, you do your subject and yourself no favor by kowtowing. Indeed you make a stronger case for the importance, charisma, strength, greatness and perhaps ultimate goodness of your subject by portraying him with warts and all.

Like Andrew Morton’s “Diana: Her True Story,” Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand’s “Finding Freedom: Harry and Meghan and the Making of a Modern Royal Family” (Dey St./William Morrow, $27.99, 354 pages) — billed as “the definitive biography” — reads like an authorized one.

Sen. Kamala Harris, seen here in 2010 in her official portrait as California attorney general, will have to bring all her prosecutorial gifts to bear on the presidential campaign as Joe Biden’s running mate.

All the president's women

August 12, 2020

So Joe Biden has picked California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate and the plumbing of why he did so has commenced. Biden picked her because she possesses a prosecutorial mind and temperament — she couldn’t have done the jobs of San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general without them — which enables her to give and take a punch. This ability to serve and volley should also make her formidable in any vice presidential debate.. (See her questioning of now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Attorney General William Barr.)

My uncle, a conservative, likes to point out that a vice president isn’t a prosecutor. That may be, but this one may have to be.

My latest novel, “Seamless Sky,” published by JMS Books in January, will be serialized by the Westchester and Fairfield County Business Journals next week and in WAG magazine, their sister publication, in September.

A not so distant mirror of challenging times

July 30, 2020

Challenging times call for creative measures – and so it is that newspapers, purveyors of factual truth, have joined forces with fiction writers, purveyors of psychological truth, in the hope of expanding their readership and providing that readership with an escape from the grim news of the day.

On Sunday, July 12, The New York Times devoted its entire magazine to fiction. And the Boston Globe recently serialized Ben Mezrich’s “The Mechanic,” a novella, the Globe said, “with a strong Boston accent.”

I’m delighted that Dee DelBello — publisher of the Westchester and Fairfield County Business Journals and of WAG magazine, which I edit — has decided to serialize my latest novel, “Seamless Sky,” published in January by JMS Books, in the business journals next week and in WAG in September.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seen here at a Bernie Sanders rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, last year, says that while haters gotta hate, you can still shine on. Amen, sister, amen. Photograph by Matt Johnson. — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seen here at a Bernie Sanders rally in Council Bluffs, Iowa, last year, says that while haters gotta hate, you can still shine on. Amen, sister, amen. *Photograph by Matt Johnson.*

AOC and 'shining on'

July 26, 2020

I was going to do a blog post about the Ibsen-ization of Dr. Anthony Fauci,;how President Donald J. Trump has tried to turn him into Henrik Ibsen’s title character in “An Enemy of the People” for speaking truth to power,; how Trump, jealous that Fauci got to throw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals home opener against the New York Yankees, just had to announce that he, too, would be throwing out the first pitch at the Yanks’ Aug. 14 game against the Boston Red Sox; how fans of teams and individuals who behave contrary to their beliefs are left in a quandary: Do you support your team, as you might your family, no matter what? Or do you stand on principle and part company?

I’ll always love the Yanks, but I cannot for the life of me understand how their former, legendary closer Mariano Rivera — a self-proclaimed Christian and proud Panamanian — can support Trump, whose actions are antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, particularly when it comes to Hispanic immigrants.

As I said, I was going to write about all this, and then Rep. Ted Yoho called colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “f***ing bitch “and the Repubs went after one of their own, Rep. Liz Cheney, for sticking up for Fauci, and I realized I had to write about that.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of “Hamilton.” Photograph by Steve Jurvetson. — Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator and star of “Hamilton.” *Photograph by Steve Jurvetson.*

Guest blogging at JMS Books

July 13, 2020

It’s not often that I promote another blog on this one, but recently, my publisher, JMS Books, put out a call to any of its authors who wanted to guest blog on its website. Being an inveterate blogger, I jumped at the chance, and my post is running Tuesday, July 14, Bastille Day. (Vive la France.)

The post is not about France but about how I came to write “The Games Men Play” series, about power, dominance and rivalry, set mainly in the world of sports, although I’ve expanded the series to include earlier novels that have only recently been published. I won’t recount the post here, so you can discover it for yourself at jms-books.com as well as my books,, including my latest work, the short story “The Glass Door,” about love in the time of corona. (It’s a theme that’s haunting me and other writers of late.) It’s due out Aug. 10.

I will, however, discuss a subject here related to that post since many of my books are about gay or bisexual men and that is cultural appropriation.

Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History, has asked New York City to remove James Earle Fraser’s 1939 bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt from in front of the museum as it shows an African-American and a Native American i… — Ellen V. Futter, president of the American Museum of Natural History, has asked New York City to remove James Earle Fraser’s 1939 bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt from in front of the museum as it shows an African-American and a Native American in an inferior position to the white president.

Black votes matter, too

June 25, 2020

Well, we didn’t have to worry about social distancing at the Trump rally in Tulsa after all. Even Asa Hutchinson, Republican governor of Arkansas, wryly told Judy Woodruff on the “PBS NewsHour” Monday that those Arkansans who crossed the state line to attend the event at the Bank of Oklahoma Center and had seats on the main floor had better get tested on their return. Those, however, who were spread out in the vast blue expanse of the upper tiers? They’re good, Hutchinson said.

Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, Olivia de Havilland as Melanie and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett in a publicity still from “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Neither Clark Gable (Rhett) nor Leslie Howard (Ashley) initially wanted to participate in what they rightly … — Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, Olivia de Havilland as Melanie and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett in a publicity still from “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Neither Clark Gable (Rhett) nor Leslie Howard (Ashley) initially wanted to participate in what they rightly intuited was a women’s picture in which the ladies would take the lead. Even after George Cukor, famous for directing fine actresses, was fired from the movie and replaced by Gable pal Victor Fleming, the female stars continued to receive secret coaching from Cukor.

'Gone With the Wind' indeed

June 13, 2020

As the Black Lives Matter movement galvanizes the nation, there are renewed calls to remove the names and statues of prominent Confederate leaders from the Capital (and the Capitol) as well as from Army bases throughout the South. As I have written in these pages— and as one young African-American woman put it recently on TV — this isn’t even primarily a case of black and white, even though the issue is pretty much black and white. The Confederacy lost, and the losers don’t get to dictate either the terms of their surrender or the trophies of their defeat. There are no statues of Adolf Hitler in Berlin.

Still, as President Abraham Lincoln said, “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.” The monuments and names of the Confederacy should belong to schools and museums — or at least photographs of them should be. We can’t preserve every one. There they can be curated and studied, so that present and future generations can understand how they came to be erected in the post-Reconstruction and civil rights eras as a way to reassert white supremacy.

The issue of works of arts and entertainment is a more complex matter, however.