Citizenship | Literature
Select novels, short stories, and nonfiction on contemporary life.
Ben East’s nonfiction debut recounts how JFK’s bold experiment shaped diplomatic careers and influenced modern American diplomacy.
Read, Listen, Watch
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As I watched Charlton Heston lead the chosen people out of Egypt last night I wondered: in a remake of The Ten Commandments, would Ted Nugent play Moses? Nugent, whose awful music from the 1970s apparently qualifies him to talk down to us about such weighty matters as constitutional law, seems to be the NRA’s…
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Sharing his thoughts on a fresh draft of my novel in progress, the contract illustrator proclaims: This whole thing is, like, so hilarious! Best of all, the 4th grader can barely utter consecutive syllables without breaking into fits of hysterics as he tries to describe the characters. His cheeks stretch too wide for speech at…
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MLB opens today. With the game on my mind, I revisit how a small deformity of mine became an asset in fiction for the narrator—an all star pitcher—of my first published story. My thumb, badly slashed on New Years Eve by the broken neck of a champagne bottle, never healed properly. After surgery to reconnect…
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MLB Opening day tomorrow. In that spirit, and in keeping with my recent series about baseball, sports, and writing, I’m taking this rare measure of re-blogging the announcement of fellow blogger C.S. Boyack. Hope you’ll take him up on his offer of a copy of the Enhanced League on Kindle. Once upon a time, I…
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Writing is physical. Writing is athletic. Writing requires the same discipline of a dedicated athlete in pursuit of peak performance. I note this, not to be repetitive, but as a corollary to my series on Little League and the trajectory of sports in life for me. These things are one and the same: the first…
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Now spring has brought us out to baseball again. I’m coaching my sons. The last four years, I’ve coached my sons at baseball. Baseball always meant a lot to me, though I was neither the fastest nor the strongest nor the most reliable at the bat. Still, I know enough about the game, and enough…
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Team sports weren’t for me. I didn’t compete again for a decade. Inspired by my brother, I picked up triathlon. I biked to work through the winter months in New York, swam at Brooklyn College after teaching, ran with the Roadrunners led by an aging postal worker. I competed in my first event in Tampa/St.…
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I was perusing NRATV—yes, the NRA broadcasts 24 hours a day!—to choose my favorite ‘freedom and firearm-related programming’ for the afternoon. Did I want to hear Dan Bongino crack the code and expose ‘the real agenda‘ behind March for Our Lives? Or would I rather get to know why Dana Loesch* thinks, in her simpleton’s binary,…
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There was nothing like pole vault. Our equipment was flawed: old fiberglass poles with no give. Coach knew nothing about it and left us to our own devices. Half a dozen guys tried. Sprint hard as we might, the pole didn’t budge. We climbed it like pillaging savages. Between stints climbing the pole—8 feet, 9…
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I tried out for high school ball the following year. I hit longer, straighter flies than I had at tryouts the year before. The coach—who slept on a basement bed in the very apartment where I delivered my middle school coach’s newspaper—already knew the story. ‘He’ll hit in tryouts. Goose-egg during the season.’ Rated beneath…
Ben East Books 