Just last week my wife and I returned from a 15-day tour of Italy, accompanied by a group of 14 other travelers and a really outstanding tour director supported by local tour guides in every stop, which included Sorrento, the Amalfi coast, Pompeii, Rome, Vatican City, Orvieto, Perugia, Assisi, San Gimignano, Viareggio, Florence, and Venice. […]
Letter from Europe
My wife and I just returned from a 25-day cruise from Amsterdam to Bucharest through the Rhine, Maine, and Danube rivers, including a variety of stops and onshore excursions in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania. And, while our access to e-mail and Internet was decent along the way, my current feed of […]
“Civilization” Revisited
Recently I revisited the masterful 1970 BBC production, “Civilization: A Personal View by Lord Clark”, a sweeping, approximately 12 hour DVD tour of the historic places, structures, artifacts and legacy of the evolution of Western Civilization in Europe from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the 19th century, as guided and described by the […]
Rethinking Outdated Institutions
My wife and I just returned from a delightful 12-day tour of New England, one of the stops on which was the beautiful old Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, which of course was the site of the international monetary conference in 1944 that established the world monetary system that lasted until 1971 […]
Letter from China
Anyone who is reasonably perceptive on the broad sweep of public affairs would be hard pressed to challenge the case that the massive economic, political, and societal transformation of China and, in particular, the future of its relationship with the United States, is the leading geopolitical issue of the 21st century. The only other issue […]
Letter from Central Europe
My wife and I just returned from a very busy three-week tour of Rome and Central Europe, including stays in Warsaw, Krakow, Budapest, Vienna, and Prague, and other interesting stops between in places like Auschwitz and Birkenau, Czestokova, and the Slovak Republic. Lots of history here, and it was greatly enhanced with several cultural events […]