Olio: Leaves from an Editor's Notebook

By their very nature most newspaper columns and editorials are ephemeral. They are often written in haste to meet a deadline and what excites interest today may elicit only yawns tomorrow or the next day. This is especially true of community newspapers whose focus is on matters of interest to a smaller parochial readership. This book is a collection of pieces that step outside that mold. The authors broad education (four degrees including a Ph.D. and a J.D.) and wide range of work experiences (college professor probation officer prosecuting attorney professional magician novelist editor publisher and grocery-store sackboy to name a few) have provided him with a unusual perspective from which to observe and comment on the problems and pleasures of being a sentient being on Planet Earth in the twenty-first century-and on how we got to this point in human history. Inspired by the example and encouragement of the newspaper editor who gave him his first job in journalism the author has inflicted upon the readers of several newspapers his reflections on a broad and eclectic range of subjects from religious and racial intolerance to UFO sightings and the beauty of a toads eye. Throughout it all the author has been motivated by one unvarying purpose-to make his readers think. Not just about last weeks school board meeting or next months municipal elections but about ideas and issues with a shelf-life longer than that of ripe tomatoes in your grocers produce department. Here then are half a hundred of those pieces rescued from dusty newspaper morgues and offered to a broader audience than the unsuspecting subscribers to whom they were originally addressed. The author will be pleased if you read them but he will have failed in his purpose unless reading them makes you think.