Introduction: In which I explain what I'm doing here.

Welcome!  This isn't meant to be a traditional blog, which I mainly associate with something regularly added to and focused on a particular topic.

Rather, it will be added to highly irregularly, and will contain my writings on a variety of subjects.  Most will be book reviews, but all will be material that has been published somewhere else on the web (even if its just on Amazon), hence the name "Alec's Archives."

What you won't see on here is anything of a political nature.  In a sense, politics and government is my career, and the related writing is of little interest to anyone other than my employer.

I enjoy writing, however, and like to explore topics such as history and baseball mainly by writing about them.  In a few cases, my writing had to be altered a little bit to fit a publication's format requirements, e.g. length, style, etc.  That's fine.  But what I'll post here is what I either submitted or would have submitted without those restrictions, so what you'll see here may differ slightly from the final published version.

For instance, Amazon in particular is a site where I try to limit my writing to about works out to one MS Word page.  People reading their reviews are trying to determine whether the book is for them.  They don't want a book summary nor a book essay.  They want to be told what's in the book and whether the person writing the review enjoyed reading it.  So, my Amazon reviews will be shorter and sharply focused on those questions.