Even though the blue image was beautiful, I had mixed feelings about the picture of a lone house lit up in the frozen wilderness in Iceland. (CSM Mar 7). Honestly I have no idea where they source their electricity from, but it seemed a long way to go to get away from it all.

Thumbs up to AARP magazine (Feb/Mar 22) for the uplifting article on the Roving Art Teacher, Jennifer Williams, who developed Project Van Go, a mobile art school in Idaho. Wow! More thumbs up for the Real/People Truth Tellers article on an Albanian immigrant couple who each work days jobs. After work, he, Bujar Alimani, writes and directs award-winnings films and features, that she, Tefta Bejko produces. What an inspiring pair.

Our household got the RIT President’s Report 2022. What an impressive read with such a variety of projects on campus and elsewhere. One factoid: Out of about 140,000 living alumni, 40,000 are active in the Rochester alumni chapter. That’s a lot!

I fell sound asleep several times reading the first-ever Newbery Award winner, The Story of Mankind (1922) by Hendrick Willem van Loom. Blame it on a head cold? This is not a hard book to follow but page after page of how badly humans have treated each other is wearing. Yet how hypocritical of me because I have hundreds of pages of history notes that I find fascinating.

On the plus side, van Loom wrote with clarity and honesty that I didn’t associate with Euro-centric histories of the 1920s. About Rome, he said it was a land of rich people, ruled by rich people, for the benefit of rich people that couldn’t last because it was based on slave labor that ruined the livelihood of freemen and peasants. Hit the nail on the head! He also had a helpful 20-chapter review before moving on to the next section. His maps and sketches made it approachable in a way that must have been refreshing in its time.

My latest blog post. https://rokeefehistory.com/blog #amreading; #RochesterNY; #CSM; #aarp;  #RIT;  #newberyaward; #HendrikWvanLoom;