• Deeper into TC as a person, through Peggy's autobiography and by comparing her recognition and, on one hand, Ayn Rand, and on the other, Joyce Carol Oates.
• Four newsletters that take on the parts of Pillar of Iron: the time of Rome from which few can avert their eyes.
• Inspecting TC's major themes, and the characters who epitomize them.

✺ 08-05-20Melissa: Melissa as an example of how TC handles an ancient theme, families riven by sibling rivalry.

• Comparison with Edna Ferber: The sin of furthering the chain of human misery with the compulsion to exact retribution.
• Comparison with Irwin Shaw: Life as a road written in complicated opportunies that when chosen aimed his protagonists into cul-de-sacs.

✺ 08-08-20YourSinsandMine: What TC read and how I would know?; how did it show TC was a catholic writer, and of what stripe?

• The magazine pipeline between Peggy, TC and me. Heavy on Science Fiction and Murder mysteries.
• TC's choice in philosophy; samples of TC's choices on catholic writers versus mine.

✺ 08-27-20DynastyofDeath: A Tale of Two Trilogies: Among several such sets in TC's 40 novels, two stand out. "The Armaments Family" and "Diatribes on Evil."

• The first, on the Bouchard family, featured one stellar TC talent: her ability to intricately weave plots and characters in a many-decade saga.
• As an introduction to the second, I comment on Pillar of Iron, the subject of later newsletters. Historical examples of good vs evil: Cicero vs Catiline, whom TC uses as mouthpieces for her own political views.

✺ 08-29-20PillarofIron: A review of the 4 newsletters on Pillar of Iron. As TCs most sustained effort, her unique four part novel, this is deserving. It is her first novel informed by her Mediterranean travels while she was still young. It resulted in a series of notebooks which she cannibalized for her novels on the time around Jesus and the astounding Greek and Roman personages of that time.

• A character most dear to TC: the crass, easily manipulated Mob.
• Ancient Rome vs 21st Century America: Taylor Caldwell's Cicero.
• A dramatic retelling of Cicero's legal training and – one of her oft-repeated theme – the introduction of the Unknown God, a surrogate for a Messiah.
• Part III of "Pillar of Iron" and the signing of a contract to turn this novel into a movie. A culminating time of pagan architecture and superstitious minds, with ambitious men still competing with Alexander the Great, just prior to the appearance of Jesus.
• "Pillar of Iron": Not "War and Peace," but damn close: What helps to get a handle on this history? I list reasons that tourists today are still amazed everywhere they go in Europe and Africa at precisely what the Romans of the Emperial age wrought.

✺ 09-04-20Aspasia-GloryLightning: Launch of the first part of a 3-part discussion of TC's Glory and the Lightning, published late in TC's career (1974).

• The legend of Aspasia, one of the few women of antiquity who found favor in the minds of the great thinkers of the Roman and Greek world, and later in the French Bourbon empire.
• Whether it is Aspasia or TC, this interprets that time, before money overran politics, that the Mediterranean world (following Solon) first addressed government outside of empire.

✺ 09-19-20PartI-GloryandtheLightning: Part I of Glory and the Lightning, a part covering a period with no serious historical record of our heroine. Using some fragmented hearsay of Greek and Roman historians, TC purports to create a feasible Aspasia before she arrives in Athens.

• Aspasia speaking within a court of the hetaera, Thargelia (and under her protection) to those privy to the changes back in those early 400 BC years. Later, in a marriage to a powerful, intelligent, Persian Satrap wherein these two have serious conversations despite the heterosexual constraints of the time.
• I have included some of Aspasia's conversation with her brilliant Greek teacher, Aeneas on the nature of slavery.