Now and Then Reader publishes original short form nonfiction for Kindle Singles, Apple Quick Reads, Kobo Books Short Reads and Barnes and Noble Nook Books. We concentrate on writings that are historically based but also have relevance for present day events with a focus on American History and European History.
Available for purchase through Amazon Kindle Books, Barnes and Noble Nook Books, Kobo Books and the Apple iBookstore, Now and Then nonfiction titles range from 5,000 to 25,000 words or approximately 15 to 60 pages in length.
Nonfiction Books
"Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball,” wrote Jacques Barzun. He might have added that any U.S. politician with his eye on the White House had better know the difference between a ball ...
Learning to Love the Bomb
“Now we are all sons of bitches,” said one physicist at the sight of the first atomic bomb test at Los Alamos. Yet the team that developed the bomb could scarcely contain their fascination with what they had wrought, as ...
Thoughts on Life and Politics from the Famous Turn-of-the-20th-Century Chicago Saloonkeeper
Mr. Dooley, a fictitious, turn-of-the-20th-century Irish barkeep in Chicago, analyzed world affairs for his friend Mr. Hennessey, and his opinions are current—and funny. Many problems confronting America a hundred years ago remain unsolved today.
The American Indian Movement, the FBI, and Their Fight to Bury the Sins of the Past
At Wounded Knee Creek in 1890 the Lakota Sioux were massacred in a final stand against the U.S. Seventh Cavalry. And here in 1973 the American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee village on the Pine Ridge reservation in a protest ...
Terror and Torture in French Algeria
In 1954 nationalist forces in French Algeria began an effort toward independence that lasted until 1962 and grew into a brutal struggle that ripped apart French society. As France sought to hold on to its colony, both sides escalated the ...
Walker Evans, Ellie Mae Burroughs, and the Great Depression
Images of rural poverty and despair remain the most searing memories of the Great Depression. This is largely due to the small band of photographers who recorded the miseries of the poor, under the auspices of the New Deal’s Farm ...
How a Couple of Bungling Sociopaths Became Bonnie and Clyde
Throughout the Great Depression, most Americans especially admired gangland criminals—especially as portrayed in the new motion pictures—who succeeded by doing business outside the failed system. Among the real-life models for the celluloid images, none are more glamorous than Clyde Barrow ...
How Baseball Escaped Its Violent Past
Violence plays a peculiar, sublimated role in the sport of baseball. In stark contrast to the play of football and other widely appreciated American games like basketball and ice hockey, baseball players are schooled to take their aggressions out on ...
Peanuts, Popcorn & American Presidents
No politician who yearns for the White House would dare turn his back on the National Pastime. Ray Robinson surveys the presidential attitude toward baseball since the early twentieth century, separating the enthusiasts from the pretenders.
Bonnie Parker Writes a Poem
In their time, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker attracted much less attention than star criminals like John Dillinger. Steven Biel plots the strange path by which this pair of ne’er-do-wells became the stuff of myth and legend.
At Los Alamos
The atomic bomb was developed at government laboratories in Los Alamos, New Mexico, by a team of outstanding physicists under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Upon seeing the results of the first detonation of an atomic device, the test director Kenneth Bainbridge is said to have remarked to Oppenheimer, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Yet the physicists could scarcely contain their fascination with what they had wrought, as Jeremy Bernstein finds in this report from ground zero.
High and Tight
When Hank Greenberg challenged Babe Ruth’s home run record he became a hero to American Jews. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, Ray Robinson remembers the man, the player, and the prejudice he overcame.
Rethinking National Security
The distinguished historian John Prados calls for a total rethinking of our expansive concept of national security. If we fail to make hard decisions about existential threats, he concludes, we will find ourselves in a death spiral as a nation.
Too Fantastic to Be True
Despite information about the plight of the European Jews, the major Jewish organizations in Europe and the U.S. either failed to act or failed to persuade governments to act. Even when the “final solution” became apparent, some leading Jewish figures remained unconvinced of the catastrophe.
