My mother was a live book reviewer in Cleveland, an activity that seems to have gone the way of the traveling magic lantern lecture tent show. Fortunately for Mom, the traffic lights in our community were exceedingly slow, and she always had a book by her side. We joked that she had completed War and Peace just by judicious use of her time at red lights.

Book reviewers were prime entertainment at women’s organizations until somewhere around the late 1960s, possibly replaced by book clubs where everyone was supposed to actually read the book for themselves. Until then, the job of the book reviewer was to bring the ideas in important books to life for a whole community, to put it into context, to enrich the listener. The expectation that most of the audience would rush out and purchase the book, as Oprah’s audience does today, was not there. With a good book reviewer, you didn’t need to do any stinking page turning yourself. Read more…

I don’t idealize a great many people that I’ve known, but Richard Maddy is an exception. A violin maker, legendary string instrument rebuilder, WWII paratrooper, and son of the founder of Interlochen Center for the Arts, I met Richard when we were both serving on the alumni board of the organization his father had founded. When the board would get bogged down in the minutiae and politics of whatever problem had wound its way around us, Richard was always there to remind us what we supposed to be doing. He would ask, in some form or another, “Is it good for the kids?” Read more…

I don’t know much about Ward Churchill, and from the little I do know, I know I don’t want to know much more. Mr. Churchill’s ex-faculty colleagues at the University of Colorado supported his firing after they had reviewed his “research” regarding the theory that the United States Army had shipped smallpox infected blankets to American Indians at Fort Clark on the Upper Missouri. Churchill asserted, as cited in a New York Times article published March 24, 2009, that he didn’t need to provide references or research for his claims which verge on charging the Army with genocide. Churchill’s rationale for not needing written proof? He claims the history of the atrocity was “common knowledge.”

The faculty committee found that neither tradition nor scholarly texts could support Mr. Churchill’s claim. “Common knowledge” in this instance means no knowledge at all. But does common knowledge ever really mean anything?

What is common knowledge? Or more importantly, how do we know what we know? Read more…