Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst
by David Nasaw
704 pages
Houghton Mifflin
Published: June 2000

Although more recent biographies of Hearst are now available, David Nasaw’s “The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst” remains the standard biography of this idiosyncratic media tycoon. Nasaw is a biographer and Professor of History at City University of New York. His most popular books are biographies of Joseph P. Kennedy (which I liked) and Andrew Carnegie (which I loved).

William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) is a remarkably fascinating, but often infuriating, biographical subject. He was born with a silver spoon nearby…if not quite in his mouth. But he learned the art of hard work and perseverance from his father – a self-made mining millionaire. Handed a golden goose (the San Francisco Examiner) at the age of twenty-four, he built an enormous media empire which survives to this day.

The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
by David Nasaw
868 pages
The Penguin Press
Published: November 2012

David Nasaw’s “The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy” was published in 2012 and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee in 2013. Nasaw is an author and a professor of American history at City University of New York. Among his most widely-read books are biographies of William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Carnegie (which was a 2007 Pulitzer Prize nominee).

Nasaw began this authorized biography after Kennedy’s two youngest children (Jean and Edward) approached him to assess his interest in the project. Once he was assured unrestricted access to Kennedy’s papers and complete editorial control he spent six years researching his subject’s life – documenting his personal and professional lives and investigating a variety of alleged misdeeds.

It is unusual for a biography…

From the Emperor’s Desk: I will not do a complete biography of Queen Mary on the anniversary of her birth, instead I will focus on how she came to marry King Felipe II of Spain.

Mary was born on February 18, 1516 at the Palace of Placentia in Greenwich, England. She was the only child of King Henry VIII and his first wife, Infanta Catherine of Aragon, to survive infancy. Her mother had suffered many miscarriages and stillbirths. Before Mary’s birth, four previous pregnancies had resulted in a stillborn daughter and three short-lived or stillborn sons, including Henry, Duke of Cornwall.

Throughout Mary’s childhood, Henry negotiated potential future marriages for her. When she was only two years old, Mary was promised to François, Dauphin of France, the infant son of King François I, but the contract was repudiated after three years.

In 1522, at the age of six, she…

Freighter passing a sandbank on the Rhine river [image credit: worldcargonews.com]
Mixed messages from climate research here. In between evidence-free waffle about ‘potential’ human influence, they report that severe drought spells are nothing new in Europe, implying climate cycles of some sort. This means attribution of such drought to human causes is debatable, as the article admits.
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The 2015–2018 summer droughts have been exceptional in large parts of Western and Central Europe over the last 400 years, in terms of the magnitude of drought conditions.

This indicates an influence of man-made global warming, claims Phys.org.

However, multi-year droughts have occurred frequently in the 17th and 18th century, although not as severe.

This is the result of a new study in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.