Raymond E. Feist

Very clever book.

rather than sort of recycle all the old stuff, he decided to look at Shakespeare's life in the context of where he lived and when he lived.

And he conjectured a lot of things, you know, about his father being a very successful lover who became an alcoholic apparently and lost the family fortune and the missing years likely being when Shakespeare was tutoring secret Catholic nobilities, kids, things like that.

And I just ordered, uh,

Edward Glob's, Professor Princeton's study of James Baldwin, who's another sensational writer.

And in the context of what's happening culturally and socially in the United States, his original writing is even more important than it was when I first read Go Tell All on a Mountain, you know, like 50 years ago.

I'm a product of my environment whether I want to be or not.

You know, it's like my daughter gives me points for having, you know, she jokingly calls me woke.

You either evolve or you die.

And there are beliefs I held growing up that I'm not ashamed of them because that's how I was raised.

but I'm really glad I left them behind me.

You know, my attitude towards women, my attitude towards people of color, my attitude towards the hierarchy of races.

I mean, it took me until I was in my sixties to realize white people do not need to give anything to people of color.

We need to get out of their way.

We're not bestowing

anything on them.

That's terribly patriarchal and very, very racist.

And yet that was a, you know, a thing that I grew up with, with, with what I call a very, very subtle racism with my liberal parents.

My parents were very much in favor of the NAACP and they thought that, you know, Harry Belafonte was a great singer and that kind of thing.

But I never saw a black face in my house, my entire childhood, you know, except a housekeeper.