Tim Barrus is my co-writer.  He has been running a school for boys at risk who have HIV-AIDS, fewer of them die now.  But Tim himself is dying.  Besides the AIDS he has Avascular Necrosis (bone death) and lung damage from repeated pneumonia.  He stays alive with a complex system of drugs plus rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light or anything else that gets...

If you mixed together thoroughly Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, you’d get Catherine Cookson and don’t think she didn’t know it.  A hundred books she wrote, all drawing on her own life in the British midlands in the days when industrialization was turning the class structure and the land itself upside down.  The tussle between what had always been against what...

Hundreds of doom and gloom news stories are becoming like a “perfect storm” of both cynicism and denial.  Corporate lobbyists outnumbering elected officials by ten to one, health care corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars to defeat a national health care plan – or collectively investing more than a billion dollars in McDonald’s stock – an investment...