And I do mean you, because the only reason I can imagine you’re reading this is that you’ve read and enjoyed one (or hopefully more!) of my books over the years.
In fact, if you don’t mind, I wanted to take a minute to look back over the last few busy years — to take stock and, well, thank you for the part you’ve played in all that’s happened to me.
This is my third “battle” book in three years, all from Osprey Books: Never Greater Slaughter: Brunanburh and the Birth of England (2021), Crécy: Battle of Five Kings (2022), and now Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King (2023).
When I committed to writing the first of these books, I didn’t know that I’d be writing all three, but I’ve come to view them as something of a trilogy. They fit together in structure, theme, and intent. They also share a conversational style meant to welcome anyone and everyone into the joy of history — not just the remarkable events themselves but how we know what we know about them. I want the scholarship in these books to stand up to the rigor of my academic colleagues, but I want the words themselves to be accessible to anyone with even a passing interest in the subject.
Unintended this “Battle Trilogy” might have been, but looking back I can see how the three books not only lay bare the ways I approach both history and conflict analysis, but also reveal the ways I’ve grown as a writer.
I don’t mean that there’s anything wrong with my earlier work. I am proud of each of these books. I mean only that most authors get better as they go along, as they build upon what works and find ways to build anew what doesn’t. I’m no different.
I love all my books.
But I do think Agincourt is my best yet.
And part of the thanks for that, I’m sure, is how the strange turns of life have meant that across the three years that these three books appeared, I published five others.
Seriously.
I hadn’t even stopped to think about how many there were until I was updating my CV with this latest publication. Here’s the timeline from 2021 to the present:
During this same stretch of time I also finished another book that’s still to come, which will total nine books in just under 37 months:
I can assure you that having co-authors for three of these books very much helped to keep the line of production moving along (not to mention enabling me to learn from Kelly, Trevor, and Myke). Believe me, I’m not sitting here patting myself on the back. Instead I’m sitting here in bewildered gratitude that I was blessed with so many opportunities … and recognizing that any way you look at it, that list adds up to me writing a lot of words. And since writing, like any skill, gets better with practice, I’d be bitterly disappointed in myself if those hundreds of thousands of words hadn’t taught me how to tell a better story.
The other thing I’m recognizing is how varied those nine stories have been. That list includes the popular histories of my Battle Trilogy and The Killing Ground, but it also has the absolutely specialized academic work of editing a Middle English poem (Of Knyghthode and Battaile). It has Origins, which is part biography, part literary study, and part oh-my-gods-I’m-behind-the-scenes of a beloved fantasy series and its author. Oh, and it has the second and third novels of my Seaborn fantasy trilogy, which were written for audiobook (though they’ll soon be coming out in print!).
I assure you that I didn’t intend to whiplash myself through this mix of genres. I certainly didn’t intend to write so many books in so brief a window! But chances came along that I knew I couldn’t pass up, and this concentrated experience has absolutely honed the way I approach stories and the audiences I share them with.
Which, as I said above, must surely include you. So let me close by thanking you — truly, humbly, from the bottom of my heart — for being here. No matter the stories I might want to tell, I couldn’t be a storyteller without an audience. I’m grateful that you’re willing to listen to me.
And with that, I should probably let you get back to reading Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King.
And I’ll get back to writing the next story: a new history of the Hundred Years War. More news on that as I have it!
]]>First things first, if you’re going to use a drone — at home or abroad — you must follow all laws and regulations at your location. If those rules don’t match my advice, please follow the rules and not me, ok? I’m not a lawyer. I’m an amateur drone user at best!
That out of the way, I’ll tell you that most jurisdictions draw a bold line between heavy drones that require licensing and substantial flight permissions and lighter drones that have far fewer restrictions. The general rule of thumb is that the line between them is drawn at 250 grams.
So the first advice I have if you’re going to use a drone — especially if you’re going to use it abroad — is that you get one that weighs less than 250 grams.
This will mean sacrifices. It won’t have an IMAX camera. More pertinent, a drone of this size will, because of its lightness, have difficulty in high winds. Also, it likely won’t have some of the most advanced bells and whistles, either, like collision avoidance, object tracking, on-board LiDAR, etc. It’s going to be pretty basic, in other words, though these days “basic” covers a lot of awesomeness.
I use a first generation ‘Fly More’ Combo DJI Mavic Mini from DJI. The drone in flight weighs 249 grams — they even make a point of printing this on the drone itself just for good measure. There are cheaper drone makers than DJI, which is one of the biggest brands in the world of drones, but I like that the ubiquity of DJI means a lot of online resources to get help using it, plus a wide pool of parts on the market if something goes wrong.
If you’re just starting out, I do recommend that you look to get a drone used, even if it’s a generation or two back. A lot of drone hobbyists quickly jump on the next generation and are keen to part with their older ones cheap. For instance, mine is the original Mini, but DJI now makes Mini 2, Mini SE, and Mini 3 models. The last of these has some really terrific advances, but it also comes with a much higher price tag. Would I like to have a new Mini 3? Sure, but it’s many hundreds of dollars more money than mine.
I do highly recommend a ‘travel kit’ set up if you can get it. These will have the smallest controller and battery charging stations, and space matters when you’re traveling (especially if you One Bag Travel like I do). I’d recommend at least three batteries. You can crush juice quick if you’re going high and far in search of the perfect angle and shot.
Speaking of space, I don’t use the case that came with my drone. It’s a lovely case, as you can see above, but it makes for a substantial, inflexible mass when packing. Instead, I separate my drone into three pieces: drone, controller, and battery charger.
If you do decide to separate the drone from its designated case, I highly recommend getting a propeller strap that wraps around the drone and holds its propellers in place (get the one that matches your drone, obviously). This is a trick I picked up from a drone operator on a film shoot, and it’s brilliant. The propellers are easily the most breakable thing on the drone, and keeping them hugged in place is the best way to keep them safe while traveling.
To save the propellers while the drone is flying around, you don’t want them to hit anything, and for this reason the drone will likely come with a thin plastic cage that can surround it. This is quite nifty, though I confess I never use mine. It’s too bulky to fit in my bag. I mostly just try not to fly into trees.
A less obvious way to screw up your fragile little propellers, though, is in the course of landing. With a lightweight drone, even coming down in soft grass has a chance of catching a blade and ruining your day. For this reason, I recommend using a fold-up landing mat. I use a discontinued one from Moment that is built for this purpose and packs up real nice, but there are others. You don’t even need to buy one: all you need is something (a piece of cardboard, even) that you can lay out over the brush to keep it down and give you a wide, flat place to land. That said, I do like using something with bright color, which stands out as a marker on the landscape when I’m guiding my drone in for final approach.
Last piece of advice: have fun. Yes, you need to be hyper-vigilant to be safe and follow local regulations, maintaining line of sight to your drone, keeping it clear of people, and so forth. But along the way don’t forget to marvel at what an awesome tool it is, and what a wonder it is for us as earth-bound creatures to know — at least through a screen — what it’s like to fly.
]]>Happily, I made the new flights. More happily still, I made it with all my luggage, which was only possible because I travel with One Bag, carry-on only. If I’d checked a bunch of bags in Bordeaux — or really at any point —lord knows when and where my gear would have caught up to me in Scotland.
More than that, I think I only managed to make that tight sequence of flights because my One Bag is a backpack. There’s just no way to navigate a busy terminal swiftly while trundling along with a rattling roller case.
One Bag Travel. It’s amazing.
Since I continue to get questions about how I travel this way, I’m going to post my current travel kit in case it’s of use to anyone.
First, as a proof-of-concept, here’s a video of me, taken over a month ago, unpacking my kit. This was just before I headed off for a 39-day, 11-flight trip through England, France, Switzerland, Scotland, Germany, Greece, Türkiye, and England (again).
Seriously, that’s the whole kit: 100% what I packed and how I packed it. That’s all I took on a trip that stretched from Scotland’s Isle of Skye to the edge of Asia in Istanbul, that saw me giving speeches in front of 100s of folks at the Chalke Valley History Festival, filming in front of cameras, and hiking in heat and cold.
And you know what?
I could have packed even less.
In fact, if I was making a set of rules for the One Bagging life, this might be the One Rule to Rule Them All:
This applies to pretty much everything in One Bag Travel, because your two great adversaries are space and weight. Too much of either one and you’re screwed: your bag will be too heavy to carry or too large to qualify as a carry-on.
Since the quest to cut space and weight is never-ending, the effort to maximize space and weight can become something of an obsession. It certainly is for me! But if you’d rather not go down the rabbit hole yourself, you can simply read on for my own hard-won conclusions when it comes to kit.
As we move towards that list, I wanted to share a few basic principles that you can keep in mind to help take control of your kit. Here’s the first:
That worst-case scenario of a summer blizzard isn’t likely to happen. Neither is that scenario in which you befriend an international spy and need a tuxedo on the yacht. So don’t bring things for either occasion. Instead, pack for the 90-percent reality.
And I’m not talking only about clothes here. Too many folks haul around a veritable cabinet of “just in case” medications, for instance. But unless you’re traveling to Nowhereville, they’ll have pharmacies aplenty. You’re not a Victorian explorer headed to the Amazon. Where you’re headed they probably take credit cards (speaking of which, see below). So sure, carry a few general medications — like pills for an upset stomach or a head cold — but only carry enough to get to the pharmacy where you can get more of what you specifically need.
On principle, a single piece of gear that can do two jobs adequately is better than two pieces of gear that each do only one job perfectly. Can there be exceptions to this? Sure. You’re making your own kit, not mine. So if you really need both fingernail and toenail clippers, go for it. But I’d urge you to consider compromising perfection if it means saving space and weight. Be honest with yourself and merciless with your kit.
This leads us to the next principle and the reason for this article:
What constitutes the right gear will depend on you, your destination, and the activities you know you will do there (not just-in-case!). My list of gear below is what I just carried, but this was a trip to Europe in summer … if I was going to Edmonton in January it would be different.
But in any case, one of the things I would advise you to consider in choosing your gear — in addition to flexibility being king! — is cost over the long-term, which is inherently a question of relative durability.
I’ll be the first to tell you that some of the gear I use is expensive. You can get travel bags that are a lot cheaper than mine. A good friend of mine certainly does. But on multiple trips together he’s had one or more of his bags fail: a broken wheel, a stripped buckle, a shattered strap, a failed seam, and so on. Replacing multiple “cheap” bags gets expensive in a hurry, not to mention the stress and time lost on the trip itself trying to fix the bag or find a replacement. Me? I’d rather pay a premium upfront to get a bag I can trust.
On the other hand, I’m fine to buy cheap charger cables. Expensive ones might last a little longer, but in my experience no cable is an enduring resource, and getting another is cheap and easy once one inevitably fails.
Boil it all down, and the right gear for One Bag travel is in that sweet spot of lowest cost over the long-term, lowest amount of volume taken, and highest flexibility to your travels.
For me, this is that kit:
(Previous lists: 2022, 2019, 2017, and 2015)
The Main Bag
Big change from previous lists here.
I’m a firm believer in the travel backpack rather than a roller bag (see above), so I’m enormously pleased to be living in a golden age of great backpacks that are sized Just Right to fit the strict restrictions of airlines. I absolutely recommend getting one of these.
Which one might depend on your preferences in form or fashion. There are a lot to choose from, so definitely do your research. For my part, I can speak to the bags I’ve handled myself, which has led me through some big hitters in the market.
My first One Bag was a Maxpedition Fliegerduffel. Available on Amazon for around $175, the Fliegerduffel is a 42L duffel bag that can also be worn as a backpack. It works, and it helped convince me I could One Bag, but I was never very pleased with the bag. The looks were “tacticool,” and the bag wasn’t comfortable to wear or carry in any configuration. It also didn’t look remotely professional. Would not recommend this.
When I could afford it, I moved up to a Minaal Carry-on bag. The difference was night and day. The Minaal was more comfortable to carry, more flexible in use, and absolutely more professional. Mine was the first generation of the bag, and I loved and used it for years. Minaal has since improved the bag considerably: the Minaal Carry-On 3.0 starts at $349. I’ve not handled one of the new ones, but I’ve no doubt that they’re great — and the Vancouver Grey looks amazing in pictures. I recommend them with confidence.
In recent years I ran with one of two bags by Knack: their original Knack Pack Series 1 large ($270) or their newer Series 2 medium ($265) — both of which were sent to me to review with no strings attached. I was very pleased with the bags (see my video review here). The expansion joint they have is a terrific way to get added flexibility (which is king!), and there were a lot of “little” moves they made in design that were spot-on, like the bright inner liner that makes it easier to find things in the bag. If I was getting a Knack Pack today for long-haul travel, I’d be looking at the Knack Series 2 large ($295), which looks to combine everything I love about the two packs of theirs that I own. I’d get it in Alloy Gray. Like the Minaal, this is a bag I’d happily recommend.
To be clear, I was absolutely satisfied with the bags I was running. My first-generation Minaal was showing signs of wear, but it was still trucking. My Knack Packs continued to perform like champs.
Nevertheless, an incredible sale last year convinced me to try out another option that I’d seen folks swear by: Peak Design’s 45L Travel Backpack ($300). I’ve been using it for several trips now — including this massive one from which I’ve just returned — and it has met or exceeded every expectation. It’s absolutely moved to the top of my One Bag Travel selection. Why? For one thing, it’s sexy. I got it in Sage, and it has a vintage character that’s at home on the Underground while remaining clean and professional enough to look just fine in the fanciest of London hotels. It’s stunning enough that I’ve had folks compliment me on it (they ain’t talking about me, I assure you!).
And inside, the design is terrific. One of my favorite things about the Knack Bags is their expansion capabilities, which make them flexible in volume. Since Flexibility Is King, this is awesome. The Peak Design does this, too, but even more. Instead of two sizes, its design offers three. And while the Knack’s expansion opens an additional compartment to the main compartment, the Peak Design’s expansion offers its additional space in the main compartment if you want it. That’s flexibility atop flexibility.
The Peak Design also offers a whole swath of great design features, which you can get a sense of by watching their video introducing the bag.
Do I think Peak Design’s 45L Travel Backpack is perfect? It’s damn close. I’d love to see it lose a little weight, for instance. The Minaal Carry-on 3.0 weighs 1.41 kg empty, to which you need to add 0.15 kg for a padded hip belt (Peak Design, bless them, has a padded hip belt built-in). That’s a total carry weight of 1.56 kg. The Knack runs about the same. For comparison, the Peak Design is 2.05 kg. That difference is not just relatively large, but it also means that carrying the Peak Design means carrying roughly 1 lb more on your back. It’s very much noticeable.
To be fair, a lot of this extra weight comes from efforts to make a bag built like a tank. Peak Design isn’t just maximizing durability in their build, they’re also trying to maximize the protection offered to the bag’s contents: Peak Design is a company built around cameras, and those don’t respond well to being banged around.
There are some niggling alterations I’d make, too … but, honestly, the Peak Design is a brilliant choice for One Bag Travel. Despite the bit of extra weight, it’s truly the bag to beat for me right now. I’m loving it. Highly recommended.
Packing Cubes
I bought my new Peak Design bag during their Black Friday sale, and their matching Packing Cubes were also at a good price. Though I’ve got quite a few packing cubes, I picked these new ones up — and I’m so glad I did. Best cubes on the market. Not only are they well-built compression cubes (absolutely necessary), but they open on top and bottom with a liner in between. When something is dirty, you put it into the bottom of the cube: everything stays compressed in the cube as a whole, but your dirties are separated from your clean clothes. Just terrific.
Footwear
I’ve also switched up my footgear.
As my main shoe/boot I’ve run with Thursday Boots for years and love them. This particular trip, though, I needed something that quite frankly doesn’t exist: an all-day, pavement-to-peak, bog-to-bike shoe that’s durable, breathable, and waterproof … but still looks professional enough to wear giving an academic speech. The closest thing I’ve managed to date is a pair of Salomon XA Pro 3D hiking shoes. Very good shoes and they held up like champs.
I also take a pair of sandals on my trips: they pack flat and provide a lot of added flexibility for sore feet. My long-time standard for this has been XeroShoes Aqua Clouds. They’re amazingly light and thin (3mm). But I decided this trip I wanted something with a bit more padding … while still being light and packable. I love my Bedrock Cairn 3D Pro II sandals for canyoneering, but for One Bag Travel they are too heavy (8.7 oz) and thick (16mm). I also wanted something that had a nice leather look rather than being bright and sporty. Enter Shamma’s Super Browns, which are light (3.5 oz), just-right thick (7mm), gorgeous, and pack very flat.
Jackets
I continue to seek the perfect travel jacket. Last year I traveled with the new ScotteVest Tropiformer, hoping it would end the search. It did not. In truth, their now-extinct fleece (which I ran into the ground after years of use) was a far better travel companion.
So I’m back to my Eddie Bauer travel blazer, which has been a repeated favorite for me. Alas, I don’t know that this helps you: I’ve made customizations to the jacket, and I’m pretty sure Eddie Bauer doesn’t make it anymore. The blazer comes with a puffer vest that you can wear independently or snap into the blazer for a surprisingly sharp look. The documentary I just shot in England has me wearing both at once.
The blazer has water repellency, but since I was headed to Scotland and the Isle of Skye I also took a packable Eddie Bauer Packable Rainfoil. It’s a terrific jacket, and it squishes down nice and small.
Because of the variety of climates across my travels — in this case it was the Mediterranean beaches of Thessaloniki to the Scottish Highlands — I always pack in layers. So slipping under my blazer and puffer, if needed, was a thin but glorious LL Bean Airlight Knit hooded sweatshirt. Superlight but flexible. I also carried a scarf that I picked up at Stonehenge.
Hats
My trail-loved standby is a Tilley MH55. It’s a great hat that’s been through it all and seems to look better and better for it. (I wish I could say the same for myself after the trails!)
This trip, though, I wanted something that could fit under a hood if I was hiking in one of those hits-you-from-all-sides Scottish rains. So I left the Tilley behind in favor of the terrific REI Screeline Cap. It’s the best looking foldable hat I’ve ever seen and worked a charm.
Other Goodies
Previous lists will give you links to a lot of my basics, but I have added a few new pieces of kit mentioned in my video above. So consider this something of a miscellaneous grab-bag:
However you do it, be safe in your travels out there!
]]>Russell, my friend, my mentor … please know that the boundless love that you’re feeling from your beautiful family is just a fraction of what’s pouring out across the world from the countless lives you’ve touched. We teach as we were taught, love as we were loved, because you showed us the way. There are no words to thank you for what you’ve done for this world. Gower drew back his arrow, but you made it fly.
I was fortunate to be able to get that message to him, brief though it was. Too often we don’t get such chances. It was a rare gift atop the rare gift of being able to know him.
But it wasn’t enough.
I knew it then, and I feel it even more keenly now that word has come of the great man’s passing.
So tonight, as I continue to mourn, I want to record more words in memory of Russell Peck — a man was not only a legend, but also one of the most important people in the making of who I am today …
—
When it came time for me to apply to PhD programs, I applied to only one.
This was not, my advisors at the Medieval Institute told me, How Things Are Done.
But I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and I knew why.
Russell.
He wasn’t “Russell” at that point, of course. Not to me. He was Dr Russell Peck, the John Hall Deane Professor of English at the University of Rochester and the founding editor of the Middle English Texts Series. He was a legend in Medieval Studies and in the editing of medieval sources — fields that were then at the very center of my passions.
He was also, as I’d learn soon enough, a legend in life.
Still, as I was readying my application to Rochester, I remember having a second thought about going all-in like this. Getting into a PhD is signing up for years of working closely with someone. I knew Dr Peck’s work, but what if we didn’t get along?
I raised the question with Dr Tom Seiler, a trusted professor of mine at the Medieval Institute. “Oh, you’ll like Russell,” he replied. Then he laughed and corrected himself. “No. You’ll love Russell.”
Still, this was a big step. I decided to visit Rochester and check things out. Dr Seiler sent Dr Peck a message introducing me and telling him that I was coming to visit with my wife and father.
It was a desolate upstate winter when we arrived, but Russell — in retrospect this would be no surprise — had arranged a party. He and his beloved wife Ruth had opened their home to us and invited a handful of current graduate students and some of his fellow professors over so that we could meet and get to know each other.
A silly thing to remember, perhaps, but the wine he brought out was Borsao, a reasonably priced Garnacha that (I would later learn) he bought by the case. As I write this tonight, I’m having a glass of it again, raised to his memory.
It was a whirlwind visit, both that night and the next day when he took me first to Susan B Anthony’s grave and then to the amazing Robbins Library at the University of Rochester. There, with Dana Symons — an amazing graduate student who was unquestionably his Number One at the time — we went over my paleographical responses to a manuscript of a medieval poem called Kingis Quair.
Towards the end of the visit, he took me back into the stacks and pulled out the scans of a manuscript containing The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament, an 18,372-line biblical retelling from which he’d edited a few pieces in his book Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse (1991).
“This is an important poem,” he said, “but it’s never been edited.”
“I think you already did the good parts,” I replied.
He shook his head. His eyes seared into me with an intensity that seemed as if he was trying to channel one of the prophets in that very book. “I don’t think anyone even knows what the good parts are. So you’re going to come here. And you’re going to edit it. For your dissertation.”
I later learned the word vatic. It’s definition, for me, is the look he had in his eyes: a clarity and passionate surety that seems to predict the future — not because Russell could see the future, but because his willpower left the world no choice but to make that future a reality.
I left Rochester with a shocking clarity. Tom Seiler was right. I loved this man.
Rochester let me in — thank God, since like an idiot I had absolutely no backup plan — and I became a student of Dr Peck.
Russell, as he insisted I call him.
Over the next few years the Robbins Library would become my home as his student and as an assistant and then associate editor for the Middle English Texts Series that was housed there. Across those years, if there was a time when he and I passed two days without exchanging emails or pleasantries, I cannot remember it.
And, yes, I edited The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament for my dissertation. My edition of that beast, all 18,372 lines of it, would be the third of my twenty-some published books.
I damn sure wasn’t about to tell him no.
He was, as I said in that last message I sent him, both my mentor and my friend. He was, at every turn, what I aspired to become — as a teacher and a scholar, yes, but also as a human being. He was a fountain of energy, bouncing and beaming through life in childish wonderment at the world’s delights.
On one of our many trips to the Stratford Festival near Toronto, a group of us went to see a performance of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which was a revision of one of Russell’s favorite medieval works, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Shakespeare’s Troilus is rarely performed, so this was can’t-miss theater.
I don’t know if we chose the seating, or if it was just fate, but I was seated next to him. We settled in for a theatrical performance I will never forget.
At the end, a character named Thersites stands center stage to give his final monologue and bring down the curtain. It had already been a truly powerful performance. Russell and I were captivated, I remember. A single spotlight shone down on the actor as he began his speech talking of the diseases that his own passions had wrought.
He was talking of syphilis, though when I teach the play to my own students we talk also of larger things, like the twinned diseases of blind ignorance and blind knowledge. This is the kind of pedagogical move is just one of so many lessons that Russell taught me.
But back there, at Stratford, a beat began to pound from the speakers around the stage.
I recognized the beat, though for a moment I couldn’t place it. The Shakespearean play, meant to take place during the Trojan War, was too disassociated from the music at first. But then, as Thersites intoned his final lines to the shocked audience — “[I] bequeath you my diseases,” he spits — I knew the beat for what it was.
It was a song called “Closer,” by the American rock band Nine Inch Nails. The chorus of the song — lines that rang out loud and unmistakably as the curtain came down — is this:
I wanna f*ck you like an animal
I wanna feel you from the inside
I wanna f*ck you like an animal
My whole existence is flawed
You get me closer to God
Russell leaned toward me as those words hung in the air. “That,” he whispered, “has fascinating connections to Chaucer.”
So it does, Russell. So it f*cking does.
I’m smiling and crying at the memory. He was so brilliant. So unexpected. I used to joke that Russell forgot more yesterday than I’ll ever know in my life.
It was never meant as an exaggeration.
He was a legend.
Now that he’s passed, it’s easy to brush that word off as a hint of fantasy: legend as something separate from what’s true, a memory that’s been purged of the warts and spots of the real world.
But I assure you that this isn’t the case here. Russell Peck was every bit the legend in every moment that I was blessed to share with him.
He was insatiably fascinated with knowing things, knowing people, knowing life. He loved to sing. He loved to laugh. On a few occasions — private times when no one else was around but the two of us — I saw him experience rare and fleeting moments of anger. Quite frankly, these confirmations of his humanity only served to make the rest of him more real and all the more saintly in my mind.
He was a legend in the truest meaning of the word.
I cannot think of anyone who didn’t count themselves the better for having known him.
I know I wouldn’t be who I am today — as a teacher, scholar, friend, or human being — without the patient and unflinching guidance he gave me.
But the thing about the Great Ones, I’ve learned, is how they reach far beyond their own reach. Yes, Russell directly changed me and so many others for the better. He knew and understood that, I hope. But what I don’t think he could have understood — though I know it to be true — is the indirect impact he has had. He touched so many of us, but every life that we touch in kind continues to pass his spirit on.
“We teach as we were taught, love as we were loved,” as I told him in that final note, “because you showed us the way.”
I meant it, Russell. Every word.
You made and continue to make the world a better place, my friend.
I thank you for it.
We all do.
]]>For posterity, here’s a few articles I wrote about various things related to the book:
Since there wasn’t a chance to do a book-tour, I’ve been trying to make as many appearances as I can on fan podcasts and such. I’ve no doubt forgotten some — things have been a little crazy over the past 10 days — but here’s a list of related appearances so far (in no particular order):
A huge thank you to all of these great interviewers! Everyone has been amazing!
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