Danny Heitman

Baton Rouge

Editorial Writer and Columnist at The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA)

Magazine Editor, Columnist and Author at Freelance

Editor of Forum magazine & columnist for The BR Advocate. Author & frequent contributor to nat'l pubs.: https://t.co/2ETwELy8B2. Advocate essays: https://t.co/eXo1uPLbJ5.

Articles

LSU's Friends of the LSU Libraries Book Bazaar sparks hope

3 days ago | theadvocate.com | Danny Heitman

The decline of reading among college students is widely lamented, but Joseph Bottum thinks he might have an answer. Bottum is a gifted writer and scholar, and this fall, he’s launching a course at the University of Colorado, Boulder that will require students to read a novel a week. Bottum is betting that students will meet the challenge and take pride in what they learn, just as students embraced a similar course at Hillsdale College after it began in 2018.
Mark Twain’s legacy is not his tall tales. It’s his larger-than-life persona.

5 days ago | csmonitor.com | Danny Heitman

Ron Chernow is best known for “Alexander Hamilton,” his 2004 biography that inspired the popular hip-hop musical. Chernow, who has also written books about George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant, is especially good as a popular historian, placing his subjects within a sweeping canvas of their times. That sensibility also informs “Mark Twain,” Chernow’s new biography of America’s most famous writer.
I live among neighbors I also count as friends in Louisiana

1 week ago | theadvocate.com | Danny Heitman

While walking in my neighborhood last month, I noticed that Ace and Odie were taking a walk, too. Nothing wrong with that, I reckoned, except that they’re both dogs who were out on their own. Ace and Odie live next door to us, and we treasure them as old friends. I wasn’t surprised that our two favorite hounds had staged an impromptu field trip. Spring is irresistible for a dog.
Flannery O'Connor's belief in redemption as timely as ever

2 weeks ago | theadvocate.com | Danny Heitman

As my wife and I honeymooned in Charleston, South Carolina, three decades ago, I ducked into a local bookstore and bought a copy of Flannery O’Connor’s collected stories. O’Connor’s fiction — wryly comical and sometimes violent — was unusual reading for a man in the first days of wedded bliss. But my bride and I were in the Deep South, and O’Connor, a great Southern writer, struck me as a promising guide.
Flannery O'Connor's belief in redemption as timely as ever

2 weeks ago | nola.com | Danny Heitman

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‘In the Merrimack Valley’ Review: Of Soil and Soul

2 weeks ago | wsj.com | Danny Heitman

Jane Brox’s trilogy knitted together family history with a deeper reflection on the connection between land and the people who farm it. Authors are often told to write what they know—advice that Jane Brox seems to have embraced. Between 1995 and 2004, she published a trio of books about the farm where she grew up in Dracut, Mass., a short drive from Boston. What could be more familiar to a writer than home?
A Louisiana neighborhood's twin lives spark interest

3 weeks ago | theadvocate.com | Danny Heitman

New natural gas lines are coming to my old Louisiana neighborhood, and the advance teams have been busy this spring as they sort out where everything should go. Survey crews combed the streets last month, placing tiny flags in our yards to mark out water lines and other utilities so they can be avoided when the digging starts. Meanwhile, we homeowners have had our own knots to untie.
Graydon Carter's memoir debates the future of magazines

1 month ago | theadvocate.com | Danny Heitman

When The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg arrived in Louisiana last month to speak at the New Orleans Book Festival, he needed no introduction. Even those who don’t read his magazine have come to know about Goldberg, who became part of a national controversy when he was accidentally included on messages shared by members of the Trump administration while they planned military strikes in Yemen. Wiser people have already covered that issue, which I won’t rehash here.
Opinion | MLK’s Wise Words on Trade

1 month ago | wsj.com | Danny Heitman

‘We reach for soap that is created for us by a Frenchman. The towel is provided by a Turk.’As a trade war unfolds across the world, Americans might want to revisit a message about global commerce that Martin Luther King Jr. shared more than six decades ago. King, the legendary champion of American civil rights, was also concerned with the ties that bound him to those living everywhere.
The Columbian Orator Taught Nineteenth-Century Americans How to Speak

1 month ago | neh.gov | Danny Heitman

One day in 1830, Frederick Douglass bought a book that changed his life. Douglass, then known as Frederick Bailey, was a twelve-year-old child enslaved in Baltimore. After hearing a group of white boys recite from The Columbian Orator, a grade-school textbook for teaching rhetoric, Douglass decided to get a copy for himself. Against stiff odds for slaves of the time, he learned to read, and words were his prevailing passion.