Booksellers like books that sell well, and I am prepared to like Sarah Palin's Going Rogue very much. Amazon and Wal-Mart have complicated things a bit because they are price warring and selling the book below cost. Regardless, I intend to stroke manfully on and remain hopeful that I will...

I can clearly see my house, or the beginnings of my house, in the far background of a 1903 postcard of the First Christian Church in Berryville, Arkansas. In those days my house was a small white box sitting on a bit of treeless ground. The ground looks like an...

I received the offer of a scooter today in the mail. I'm not talking about a Vespa-like conveyance that I might use to buzz around Venice and pick up hot Italian Babes with offers of a ride and cappuccino (as a prelude to bigger and better things). No, the scooter...

Deaf and near-deaf people such as myself operate in a world I think was best captured by classical Chinese painters. Their pictures have no middle distance: we see figures in the foreground, and we see mountains in the far ground, but what we see in the middle is left to...

I am sitting in the airport in Johannesburg waiting for a flight to Atlanta. The wait is interminable, as is all waiting these days. I feel like beating myself about the head and shoulders with my briefcase. Maybe I'll knock myself unconscious and stay knocked out until I land in...

My day job involves interaction with lawyers and groups of lawyers. Sometimes I instruct them; sometimes they instruct me; sometimes we just muddle through and no one is instructed. Over the years a few of these lawyers have become friends. They are as far as it goes decent human beings...

Radine Trees Nehring, author of the popular Something To Die For mystery series, has a new book out titled A River To Die For, the fifth in a series that is simultaneously a love affair with the Arkansas Ozarks and a tour through our hills and hollers, one crime...

When I was 19 years old I went to England. I arrived at Heathrow with $11 American in my pocket and great expectations. Obviously, I needed to find a girlfriend with money. As a recent graduate of the Richard M. Nixon School of Charm I was confident of abilities to...

John Heartbreak, famous in the small world of booksellers and perhaps my oldest friend, attended the Arkansas Booksellers Show in Little Rock last week at my encouragement. John is famous because he is known to know more about books than most human beings. We are oldest friends because we've...

There is no right or wrong way to buy books if the aim is the simple pleasure of reading. And since fewer than half of all Americans read a book once they graduate from high school, God bless that exceptional person for being a reader. But collecting books versus just...

A man looks at himself by looking at what he looks at.
- William Least Heat Moon

Dale McCurry is a writer, an editor and an ex-con. He was incarcerated in 1999 for non-violent, yet serious, white-collar crimes.

For four of the nearly...

I know a guy who's got some money. He has come by it more or less honestly and he's worked hard for it, although telling him that would bewilder him. He doesn't think he works hard because work is mostly play for him -- he plays seven days a week,...

The artist Sharon Sloan, who lives within spitting distance of the Kings River Bridge--where Woodstock meets Livestock, some wag suggested--dropped off a box of books the other day and considerably complicated my life as a bookseller. In the box was half a dozen books on German philosophy (in German), twenty...

My good friend Hillary Rettig, a Boston based writer and consultant, has introduced me to the term "manscaping," and I think she may also be promoting its usage.

In broadly stated terms, manscaping is landscaping, but confined to the poky geographic territory located between the soles of a man's...

I am almost entirely deaf. I read lips well, and most folks don't know that my ears work as flaps but are otherwise pretty useless. I can hear some types of music, but can't hear what's going on on most television programs. I don't mind very much. I've heard just...