Jeff Calder

Nov 26, 2024 | ajc.com | Jeff Calder |Jeff Vander Meer

“Something terrible is coming,” shouts a frightened biologist who has seen the evil up close. “It’s still uncurling from the long-ago moment. I know it, and it’s going to kill us all every one of us.”But what is this unnamable horror? Perhaps it’s “a foreign entity,” or, maybe a “conspiracy of atoms.” Whatever this doomsday warning might portend, there’s nothing Old Jim can do except investigate, because that’s what a Special Ops-type sleuth specializing in the paranormal must do.

Nov 15, 2024 | arxiv.org | Jeff Calder

Oct 1, 2024 | ajc.com | Jeff Calder |David Greenberg

John Lewis grew up in an Alabama family so poor that he and his young cousins once had to shuttle from room to room, acting as “ballast” to keep their aunt’s house from blowing away in a windstorm. Born in 1940, he came from deep within the country, but he hated farm work and made no secret of it. As a boy, denied a library card because of his race, he still managed to study Booker T. Washington’s “Up from Slavery,” though he liked reading the Bible most of all.

Nov 14, 2023 | ajc.com | Jeff Calder |Elizabeth R. Varon

In her biography, “Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South,” the eminent Civil War historian Elizabeth R. Varon examines the Georgian’s military and civilian career and considers explanations for his startling about-face. Born in 1821 in South Carolina, Longstreet grows up in Gainesville, north of Atlanta.

Oct 10, 2023 | ajc.com | Jeff Calder |Ben Fountain

“Treasure is trouble,” says Matt Amaker, co-owner of ScubaRave, one of Haiti’s few professionally certified diving businesses. Having once worked on a salvage boat, Matt is familiar with the delusions of gold fever big-talk: “a minute into the conversation and you’re suddenly richer than the Walmart guy.”Not that it matters, because, for the moment, Matt is a perfectly content “blan” — a white foreigner — chasing an honest buck.