Read Beat (...and repeat)

“Why Q Needs U” by Danny Bate

So where did we get all these letters that children learn as their ABC’s? Danny Bate has the answer in his book, “Why Q Needs U.” Born and raised in England and now living in Prague, Bate is a linguist, writer, broadcaster, and podcaster (A Language I Love is…), Bate admits to being obsessed by language and its history. “Nowadays, the alphabet has become so successful that we rarely recognize its achievement,” he noted in his book regarding the alphabet's development over 4,000 years. “Yet over the course of its long development, nothing is fixed, and every letter has a story to tell.” Bate tells each of the 26 letters' stories, starting logically with A. Tracing the letter’s history from Egypt, through the ancient Phoenicians to the Greeks who gave us “alpha” (as in alphabet), Bate explains how language evolves over time. There’s a certain excitement that comes with discovering where our letters come from. In his review of the book for The Times, James McConnachie seems positively elated: “I have been able to tell everyone within earshot that Q has a tail because it was once a picture of a monkey, that O used to have a dot in the middle because it used to be the Egyptian hieroglyph for an eye, and that A — bear with me here — started life as a picture of an ox’s head (because it used to represent the glottal stop that began the ancient Semitic word for ox, ’alp) and then morphed into a vowel over time while also somehow turning itself upside down, the wonderful result being that the two legs on our capital A started life as … horns. And’alp, of course, became alpha.” English has its quirks, Bate admits. We’re talking about the fact that there’s a hard c (coconut) and a soft c (cigar) and don't forget the “magic e,” which Bate explains is a split digraph. But don’t worry, it all becomes clear once you follow the explanations Bate provides.  We can thank the Romans for coming up with cursive handwriting, and we learn that the letter W is a child of the fall of Rome. Want clarification? Listen to the interview with the author.

“A Little Piece of Cuba” by Barbara Caver

At a time when U.S.-Cuban relations have probably never been worse, there’s Barbara Caver’s “A Little Piece of Cuba,” a book that explores her own journey “to become Cubana-Americana.” Caver’s mother was born in Cuba before leaving for the United States with her family at the age of seven in 1959. While the author, who lives in New York, doesn’t speak Spanish and only visited Cuba for five days in 2017, Caver’s story is a family memoir, her effort to forge a relationship with Cuba. “I’ve traveled to many far-flung places, and Cuba is the only one that I can remember with all five senses,” she wrote.  “For my grandparents, Cuba was in the tiles on the kitchen floor and hanging on the walls of their home, but the walls and floor are taken for granted and not often noticed. My grandmother’s story, my mother’s story, my family’s story belong to them. I have my own version of the Cuban American story to tell, and in that story, I embark on a brave adventure to a forbidden place, curious to know more, and discover that Senora Cuba wanted to know me too,” she noted. On the U.S. political scene, Cuba has become the proverbial football. Depending on which political party is in power, so goes U.S. treatment of Cuba. President Barack Obama visited Cuba in 2016, the same year that Fidel Castro died at the age of 90. Obama loosened restrictions with Cuba, but  President Donald Trump reinstated them when he took office in 2017. In 2022, President Joe Biden eased restrictions on the country once again, only for Trump to restore a hard-line policy upon his return to the White House in 2025. Now Raúl Castro, who stepped down as Cuba's leader in 2018, is back in the news. At age 94, he’s just been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department. That indictment of Castro “comes at a tense time for US-Cuban relations [https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/20/politics/live-news/raul-castro-doj-indictment?post-id=cmpdy85s6000i3b6rl7mboh28], with the Trump administration declaring the Cuban government is a threat to US national security. [https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/16/americas/cubans-prepare-for-us-invasion-latam-intl] Cuba is also dealing with a collapse of its energy sector [https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/13/americas/cuba-russia-energy-crisis-intl-hnk] due to an oil blockade following the U.S. attack on Cuba’s oil-rich ally Venezuela,” stated CNN. Meanwhile, The New York Times reports that widespread blackouts are common on the fuel-starved island. The country of some 10 million people (2 million in Havana) is “trapped in the vise of a repressive regime and punishing American sanctions,” the paper reported. “I worry over the political tensions and embargo. The present policy is not fair to the American people, Cuban Americans, or the Cuban people,” said Caver. To better understand the situation, “I think people need to hear more personal stories about Cuba,” she said.  She provides her own personal story in this book. “If one day you decide to visit Cuba, you find yourself on TripAdvisor or some other website, and you stumble across Casa de Maria Mendoza, well, I hope you know what you’re in for. If you’re looking for mojitos on white sand beaches and rides at sunset in Franken cars, you should move on. Casa Maria offers an unparalleled immersion and exploration into Cuban culture for people who always questioned what it meant to be Cuban…Casa de Maria might just change your life.”

"Heartland" by Keith O'Brien

The saga of basketball star Larry Bird invariably culminates in the Bird-Magic Johnson story, two players who met in the most-watched basketball game of all time, the 1979 NCAA championship game between Indiana State and Michigan State, and then went on to "save" the NBA, each winning titles for their respective teams, the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers. But Keith O'Brien saw another story: the rise of Larry Bird from a small town in Indiana whose collegiate career was very nearly derailed before it began. Bird famously walked away from a spot on the Bobby Knight-led Indiana University team and was picking up garbage in his hometown before arriving on the Indiana State campus. O'Brien's exhaustive research uncovers the contributions of people who helped an 18-year-old kid find his way. Friends, fellow players, and coaches -- even an enterprising university president -- recognized the greatness of Larry Bird, perhaps even more than he did. Bird's epic season at Indiana State, when the team went unbeaten until the championship game with Michigan State, is chronicled in full detail by O'Brien, who called the school's success "one of the original Cinderella stories in basketball." Bird's success came despite his becoming increasingly hostile toward the print media as the team drew the country's attention. O'Brien noted that Bird, a man who liked to keep his private life private, was even able to cope with the "great white hope" label the media gave him on his way to the NBA, a league dominated by Black stars. O'Brien noted that while much is made of Bird's reticence with the media, he also never suffered the consequences of altercations with fans that took place on the basketball court. But his accomplishments on that court continue to shine. The magic of Larry Bird lives on, said O'Brien. "Local tourism officials estimate he is worth at least $7 million annually to the economy of Terre Haute," he said, referring to the town where Indiana State University is located. "Almost five decades since his last college game, Bird is still keeping the lights on, putting people in seats, drawing fans downtown, and making Terre Haute relevant," said O'Brien.

“The Navigator’s Letter” by Jan Cress Dondi

A true story, The Navigator’s Letter is a tale of uncanny coincidences: two friends from the same small town in Illinois join the Army Air Corps in World War II.  Both become navigators. Both were assigned to B-24 Liberators. Both flew missions over Europe. Both of their planes were forced down over Ploesti in Romania, a target for Allied bombers that wanted to knock out Nazi Germany’s primary fuel source. Jan Cress Dondi has written an account that captures the sense of the all-involving conflict that WWII became. It was a war that, once it began to rage, reached every small town, every family.  Dondi’s discovery of a footlocker filled with letters in her mother’s cellar said those letters reached out to her. “While the early letters revealed a prewar innocence, as they moved into 1943, reading turned to a curiosity of how war impacted family. As for WWII itself, I found how little I understood about this major event,” she wrote. But the letters led the author on a quest that included interviews with the main characters and the people who knew them. She found and used a POW diary, memoirs from crewmembers, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings. She dug up records from the National Archives, both American and German. “At its heart, The Navigator’s Letter is a personal narrative,” noted Dondi. “It’s a true story about three youths growing up (in Hillsboro, Illinois) at the advent of WWII. The main characters, John B. and Bob (Dondi’s father), drive the story through Polley’s eyes—a journey that took two young men from the heartland of America to a cauldron of Hitler’s crude oil at Ploesti.” Dondi’s description of the bombing runs over Ploesti, the heavily protected Nazi stronghold, reveals the horrifying fate faced by those flying planes at tree-top level into the teeth of German anti-aircraft guns.

"Tigers Between Empires" by Jonathan Slaght

It’s a familiar story: the animals we’ve all known since we were children, the lions, tigers, and elephants, all disappearing from the wilds due to loss of habitat, hunters, or a changing environment. So how gratifying is it to learn that in one part of the world, a wintry forest area between Russia and China, that the Siberian tiger is actually making a comeback? That’s what Jonathan Slaght writes about in Tigers Between Empires: The Improbable Return of Great Cats to the Forests of Russia and China. The proper reference for the Siberian cat is Amur tiger for animals that live in the Amur River basin, which forms part of the border between Russia and China.  By whatever name, they are an endangered species. In the final years of the Cold War, only a few hundred of these great cats remained. And make no mistake, the Siberian tiger is a great cat. It weighs in at almost 700 pounds, and can reach 11 feet in length. A tiger can leap up to 15 feet in the air and drag or carry prey weighing 1,000 pounds. It can devour 60 pounds of meat at one sitting--but seldom does  A meal can take many days to find in the wild, especially with changing political conditions. When the Soviet Union fell, catastrophe arrived, with poaching and logging taking a fast, astonishing toll on an already vulnerable species. Slaght, who now travels the globe for the Wildlife Conservation Society, charts the incredible story of a 35-year program that brought Russian and American scientists together to help save the tigers.  He shows how this coalition laid the foundations of new tiger research across Asia, transforming public opinion around tigers from something to be feared and hunted to creatures we must protect. Today, tigers occupy only 7 percent of the land they did 100 years ago, disappearing from the wild across Bali to Iran. In the ongoing global crisis of species destruction, Slaght brings us hope for the future. Slaght gives credit to the people who worked on the project over the years, Americans like Dale Miquelle and John Goodrich along with several Russian scientists. Slaght’s account of how the tiger project progressed reveals that conservation is not for the weak of heart. Tagging a wild tiger so that it can be tracked for research purposes is no simple matter. Is there enough tranquilizer in the dart to do the job? What about the aim? What about confronting an enraged tiger caught in a trap? There’s also endless waiting for researchers to find their tigers. Dealing with shortages in the field was made even worse with the collapse of the Society Union,  a time when the research project was just coming together. Slaght cited another possible success story is underway with the relocation of Amur tigers to Kazakhstan. Tigers are being reintroduced into the Balkhash Nature Reserve, an environment that closely mirrors where tigers roamed many years ago.  Slaght’s first book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, also documents a conservation story. But the difference between owl and tiger is one of territory. While the owl secures only a small part of the forest, one lone Siberian tiger ranges in an area that might encompass more than 500 square miles. While powerful hunters, tigers are at the mercy of the environment. With the recent outbreak of African Swine Fever striking down Russia’s population of wild boar, a favorite tiger dish, the great cats have had to turn to villages for food. When tigers confront an angry public, it never turns out well for the tiger. Yet Slaght believes progress is being made. If not for the animals' sake, for our own. International collaboration is essential to conservation, he noted.