Sunday
Mar. 8, 1998
Responsibility
Today's Reading: "Responsibility" by Stephen Dunn from LOOSESTRIFE: POEMS, published by W.W. Norton.
It's the birthday of writer JOHN McPHEE, born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1931, best known for his New Yorker profiles and nonfiction books like The Survival of the Bark Canoe, In Suspect Terrain ÷ and particularly, Coming into the Country, a collection of three long essays about Alaska. The first is about a canoe trip above the Arctic Circle.
It's the birthday of the Supreme Court justice OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR., who was born in Boston, 1841. Holmes went to Harvard and right after graduation in 1861 joined the Massachusetts Volunteers and saw some of the worst fighting in the Civil War, in Antietam and Fredericksburg, and was wounded three times. He came back to Boston a hero, got his law degree and was appointed to the Massachusetts supreme court where he served for twenty years. In 1902, Teddy Roosevelt appointed him to the U.S. Supreme Court. Holmes was the leader of the liberal wing of the Court, and dissented so many times and so eloquently that he earned the nickname, The Great Dissenter.
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