Many of us have stories about how we landed in Washington DC and surrounds. Betty Fuqua’s is one of the more unusual. The answer lies in the title of an early chapter, How My Birth Mother’s Bad Choice in Maids Changed My Life, in Fuqua’s new memoir. The short version is that the maid got pregnant, and Betty’s father fessed up. As you might expect in rural Missouri in the 1930s, a scandal ensued. The family somehow broke up and Betty and her sister were sent to the nation's capital to live....

In 2012 and again in 2023, poet Kate Lassman traveled to the canyon lands of southern Utah and Colorado, her park ranger husband at her side. Landscapes on which they trod included Rocky Mountain and Canyonlands National Parks, Colorado National Monument, Bryce Canyon, Zion, and Arches National Parks, Natural Bridges National Monument, and Kodachrome Basin State Park. Both journeys took place around annular eclipses of the sun, in which the sun mostly disappears, its edge remining a bright...

What is Carol McCabe Booker working on now? That is the question we've fielded more than once recently about the author of two successful true crime books, The Waterman's Widow and The Farmer's Wife, both dug from deep in southern Maryland history. Booker also wrote Cove Point on the Chesapeake: The Beacon, the Bay and the Dream, published, like her two crime books, by New Bay Books. Her book credits also include Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement,...