Leonard Kriegel

History does not usually breed rashness in those who feel obliged to study it. One learns a certain modesty from the record of the past, even as one learns how curiously personal that record is. And while the footprints that circle old hopes and olde [...]

I am an ordinary man, and like most of my kind take neither pleasure nor its pursuit lightly. On the contrary ordinary men would rather earn pleasure as they have earned their success. Heirs of the Puritans Mencken claimed were as repressed as they [...]

"There are no winners in this world," my Uncle Moe would protest whenever I pestered him about the secrets of handicapping horses and men and politicians, "only little losers." I was a boy of ten at the time—and even then I knew that my uncle's t [...]

Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, Wherein he puts alms for oblivion. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida In a city where life grates against nerves already edgy from the unwanted intimacy of boom boxes and blaring car radios, one lear [...]

Or, How Newt and Rush Helped One New York Liberal See the Light and Keep the Faith Among the curses of possessing a mind filled with the detritus of old books and movies is the discovery that one hungers for a life stripped down to its bare essent [...]

We know our dreams as we come to know our weaknesses, with the soft familiarity of acceptance. But the acceptance of one's own weaknesses should not be confused with self-indulgence. That, I suspect, explains as well as anything else why I no longe [...]

In an ethnic Bronx neighborhood where men and women were known by what it was they did for a living, my best friend's mother worked as an abortionist for the invisible powers we adolescents casually referred to as "the mob." In the years that stre [...]