Muashra

I grew up in a Spanish California house, a style of architecture that was popular in Los Angeles before World War Two: a languid old home with rounded arches, thick stucco walls, a wrought-iron...

Back in my youth, I was a big fan of science fiction: Jules Verne, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov, and company, the early greats. Then something happened. The...

The Sinai Peninsula is one of the most startlingly beautiful places on earth: a land of fantastically shaped gold-brown mountains, utterly treeless, rising up from the Red Sea – in reality, not red at...

A few weeks ago I reviewed A History of God, by Karen Armstrong, a fascinating history of the three major monotheistic religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Karen Armstrong is a former Catholic nun and...

Modern life is stressful, face it, and many of us fantasize doing something quite different to earn a living than what we are stuck with. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to quite my job and...

      Modern life is stressful, face it, and many of us fantasize doing something quite different to earn a living than what we are stuck with. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to quite my job...

Life is not always fair. If you travel in developing countries what we used to call the Third World it s hard not to wonder about the unequal divisions of our planet s wealth,...

Camelot is forever, a myth that transcends centuries of storytelling, from Sir Thomas Malory’s 14th century classic, Le Morte d’Arthur, on through the ages, passed down to us in modern times in music and...

As a writer of mystery novels, I occasionally attend book conferences, events with names like “Bouchercon” and “Left Coast Crime” where big authors such as Sue Grafton and Elmore Leonard hold forth to auditoriums...