Just released: Croswell Bowen: A Writer’s Life, A Daughter’s Portrait
My bio/memoir about my journalist and biographer father, CROSWELL BOWEN: A Writer’s Life, A Daughter’s Portrait has just been released by Potomac Books.

The book tells the story of my father’s life through his eyes as he experiences the great events of the 20th Century, from the Crash of ’29 to WWII through the McCarthy era to VietNam. Continue reading →

Dad’s hardbitten crime reporter stare

“What’s a liberal?” I asked my father. We were in NYC, I was 22, and it was 1966, and I was leaving the luscious sylvan acres of my women’s college to go west of the Hudson for the first time ever, about to enter the “War on Poverty” JFK had inspired and LBJ was carrying out. Continue reading →

I found my fire-breathing liberal journalist father 220 light years away, in the constellation Perseus, on the edge of a black hole with the mass of 17 billion Suns. It didn’t surprise me he’d ended up here, about to be sucked into the biggest black hole ever just so he could check out dark matter. He was like that.

I skipped the preliminaries: happy to see me after forty two years? Want to know how things turned out for the family back on earth? The edge of the black hole was drawing perilously close.

“Dad,” I rushed. “Have you read the recent Genome-Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes? I’ve got a few questions for you.” Continue reading →

“Let’s go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt!”

Is climate change a liberal issue? It appears not.

Dorothea Lange captured the anguish of a migrant mother whose children had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields and birds they killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food.

“Let’s go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt!” satirized this 1936 Peter Arno cartoon in the liberal New Yorker. Continue reading →