Sparks Commentary

Part history, part politics, and part random other stuff.

Sunday, July 21, 2024

A review of Ken Burns’ “Hemingway” (PBS)

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“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writ...
Saturday, July 20, 2024

A review of Michael Wood’s “In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great”

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“Whilst the Amphictyonic confederacy remained, that of the Achaeans, which comprehended the less important cities only, made little figure o...
Monday, July 15, 2024

A review of “20th Century European Philosophy” (audiobook)

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I already thought that twentieth-century Western philosophy was a vast wasteland, before I ever listened to this audiobook. But I listened t...
Friday, July 12, 2024

A review of Henry David Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience” (audiobook)

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“I heartily accept the motto,—‘That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and system...
Friday, July 5, 2024

A review of PBS’s “The Circus” (American Experience)

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PBS did a four-hour television history of the circus (and they weren’t clowning around) … In 2017,  Hollywood  released a movie that reminde...
Thursday, July 4, 2024

Calvin Coolidge: One of our greatest presidents

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Wikipedia gets the presidency of Calvin Coolidge badly and wildly wrong … Calvin Coolidge may be one of the greatest presidents in America...
Monday, July 1, 2024

A review of “The Spanish-American War” (audiobook)

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The Spanish-American War started out as one of the most popular wars in  American history . It was only long after the fact that it started ...
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Jeffrey Sparks
By training, I am a business major with a concentration in marketing, and a certificate in economics. I originally wanted to do market research for businesses because I enjoyed the social science aspects of marketing, and I have studied psychology a little on my own; but I now wonder if this will ever be my field. I have also taken a fair amount of communications classes, because I thought about grad school in advertising or public relations (or even business & economic journalism), but I'm not sure I will ever do these things. (I'm glad I studied them just the same, though.) By inclination, I learn about a lot of other things in my spare time. For example, I am a history buff, an aspiring polyglot, an amateur linguist, a political philosopher (after a fashion), and a student of the Bible. Most of the things I study on my own these days have something to do with one of these subjects (or sometimes even more than one), and I write about many of them on my blog. So my actual profession is … you guessed it … a math tutor! Not what you'd expect, right? (Not what I would have expected, either … )
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