Books Archives - Hal Phillips

What Made Grandma Grandma? Graver Fleshes her out, using Family History and Fiction

Hal Phillips — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 20:16:03 +0000

Book Review There is historical fiction. There are the literary cousins of memoir and family history. Then there is the canny, lyric hybrid Elizabeth Graver conjures in Kantika, the 2023 novel that tracks her own family’s 20th-century journey from Constantinople to America, by way of Barcelona and Havana. Don’t worry: Ellis Island and its many […]

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Professor Nat Greene: Come on Down!

Hal Phillips — Sat, 19 Aug 2017 12:37:17 +0000

As yours probably does, my alma mater hits me all too frequently with some manner of e-newsletter cum fund-raising communiqué. One can hardly escape the memories stirred/jarred by all this WesContact, which is surely the way they want it. In any case, a recent MailChimp morsel revealed, among other things, that three Wesleyan faculty had […]

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Welsh golf exceeds the hype, in unexpected ways

Hal Phillips — Thu, 13 Jul 2017 18:36:26 +0000

The British Open is nearly underway, and naturally there are myriad reasons to visit the U.K. with your golf clubs and, well, none of them have much to do with the British Open or any of the courses that host the Open Championship. Look at Wales, which is right next door to Birkdale (to all of […]

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Historical Fact & Fiction: Reviewing a Review from 1994

Hal Phillips — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 20:20:32 +0000

THE HAROLD HERALD BOOK REVIEW Ambition as a Historical Catalyst: Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire, Hollywood, and Washington D.C. by Gore Vidal. Ballantine Press, $5.95 ea. By all rights, Aaron Burr should have been the third president of the United States. If not the third, then certainly the fourth. When he and Thomas Jefferson […]

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Of Hillsborough, Heysel & Stamford Bridge: Backstories amplify documentary of tragedy

Hal Phillips — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 20:14:50 +0000

This post was excerpted and adapted from, Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & The Making of Soccer in America (Dickinson-Moses Press, 2022). In joining the wide chorus of praise for director Daniel Gordon’s superb “30 for 30” documentary on the Hillsborough soccer disaster, we should be reminded of two things: First, the state of […]

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