Often listed as one of the top ten best short stories ever written in America,  The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,  by Ambrose Bierce remains, even today, a particularly haunting  story for everyone who has ever read it, or seen the Twilight Zone episode based on the story which Rod Serling aired in 1961.  

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Excerpts from the extraordinarily poignant book by Nobel Prize winning Spanish author, Juan Ramón Jiménez.  I call it a children´s book for adults, but children can certainly enjoy it, too.   Like all great literature, it works on many levels. 

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Jack London's To Build a Fire is often listed among the top 100 of best short stories ever written.  Now that North America and Europe are in the deep freeze of winter, it seemed to me a great time, given the natural ambiance, to share London's masterpiece. 

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An interview with best-selling author Daniel Brown concerning his book, now a movie, The Boys in the Boat.  This interview is ten years old but has fresh relevance given that the book is once again a best-seller, thanks to Clooney's film. In this interview Daniel shares the story of how this inspiring saga found him and how he was deeply moved by the then old men who told him,  in intimate interviews,  about their magical win at the 1936 Olympics, and the incredible bonds that took them there. 

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Part Two of our conversation with Lindsay Powell, an expert on classical Roman history and co-author of a book about Julius Caesar, as well as a solo author of a book about his successor, Caesar Augustus.  In this episode we talk about the events that led up to the assassination of Caesar and the general incompetence of the assassins in preparing for the power vacuum that would follow.  They did not anticipate the chaos of Rome without Caesar, nor did they realize that the majority of Romans would not see them as liberators, but rather, as traitors 

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A reading and brief analysis of the one of the best short stories of all time, "The Yellow Wall Paper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  

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Interview with Bill Steele,  a man National Geographic has called one of the world's leading speleologists, tells all about his 30 years of exploring the deepest cave in the Western Hemisphere, Huautla, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca.  

To great photos of Huautla check out peshcaving.org

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Adam Shepherd arrived by bus at midnight in Charleston , SC, with only $25.00 in his pocket.  He gave himself one year to pull himself up by his bootstraps.  Relying only on his high school diploma and with no skilled labor background to claim, he had to rise up out of homelessness, get himself an apartment, furnish it, buy a car and put 2500 dollars in savings as a safety net, all  within one year.  This the story of how he tried to do this.  

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A good long informative chat about Julius Caesar with author, Lindsay Powell, who is an expert on Julius Caesar and  who has just released a new book on the life of the great politician and military leader. 

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This is a beautiful very short story for the holidays.  The author is anonymous.  

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