A selection of some the author’s favorite longform essays and magazine-length pieces from across his decades of writing.
He was a West Virginia coal miner’s son who lost his legs below the knees in a deadly ambush in Vietnam at age 18. What happened next sounds like a movie script. Dave Evans went on to work across the planet, building and fitting prosthetic legs, hands, and arm for thousands of adults and children in conflict zones worldwide. A…
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“Listen to this!” say Tommy. He shifts the Les Paul to his lower back, rock star-like. “Edgar Winter,” he says, almost reverently. “Johnny’s brother ..."
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I had to get out of town. Get lost, evade the race of human beings. Seek out geese and turtles, beavers and blue herons. Gunned the car 50 miles per hour, 70, 80. Slowed to make the left turn. Parked on white gravel near the trail head. The way forward was barred by a long rusted gate, hinged and anchored…
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Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shootings, in which four students were gunned down on May 4, 1970. As a student journalist, I profiled a protest seven years later on the Kent campus, where the memories remained raw and more than a thousand converged to protest.
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What unites us is that we are all immigrants of one kind or another. Here is one family's tale out of the hills of Calabria to the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio and beyond.
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I am standing on Times Square. Just arrived from out of the ground, like some gopher. Probably like most everyone else who is not a jaded New Yorker, my sense organs are in a state of stasis. Of overwhelm. Of a weird mixture of delight and alarm.
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Here are some black-and-white love letters from falling back in love with New York City, after a long time away and lifetimes ago, while still trying to say hello to David Byrne in person.
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The 10-year-old Joe Turner watched, dumbstruck, as the jet fighter raced up the Kanawha River and then UNDER a bridge. Now, that was a job to have.
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The back-to-the-land movement brought hosts of wannabe farmers and dreamers to West Virginia. It also brought a dancer who brought big dreams into the deep hills.
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Robert Singleton had settled on painting clouds. Then, he stopped, hollowed out by too many deaths helping dying friends from his training with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. One day, a German musician stumbled on his site. And everything changed.
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What happens when you embark on a Parental Mission of Mercy to rescue your son's broken-down car 800 miles away and bring it back in the same day without obliterating a schoolbus-load of church kids. NOTE: Don't try this at home.
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In this 1995 profile, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti forecasts "the revenge of the white man" taking place in contemporary politics in 2018 while reflecting on an epochal career as a poet, artist and essential figure in the rise and spread of the Beat movement.
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She called herself Elizabeth and she was a woman of the streets. But Elizabeth was also — or had been — named George. And she had a surprising former life. | PART 1
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George was an up-and-coming singer-songwriter who had connected with Ric Ocasek of The Cars. Then, George was gone like the wind. Ocasek turned to Rolling Stone to find out: "Where's Geo?"
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The long-sought reunion between the three sisters and their long-lost sibling was set to take place after a quarter-century apart. But who would they be meeting: Elizabeth? Or George?
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